Burn-In: A Novel of the Real Robotic Revolution

by P.W. Singer

that was the thing about anger—once you got organized around it, it could never be satisfied.

This was the part Keegan wasn’t too comfortable with—the idea that they deserved more not just because they were owed it, but because they were better than those who owed them, and whose rules they no longer had to follow.

Security researchers had discovered that for all the digital sleight of hand a Trudy might try, they could detect something was amiss in a network by using nontraditional measures like the heat coming off their servers or the speed of the basic Raspberry Pi processors on which so many Internet-connected devices still ran.

earlier.52 Each tiny shift Trudy caused at that one sensor, in one place, in one network, at one point in time, made sense on its own. At a privately owned water treatment plant in West Virginia, a conductivity measure reported back that it was detecting higher levels of selenium, which was often caused by runoff from nearby coal mines.53 The system automatically responded, as it was supposed to do, by adding in a pulse of ferric oxide to balance the chemistry.54 At a county-owned plant in Northern Virginia, slight differences in pipe pressures were reported, while at a small town-run plant in western Maryland, it was a stormwater drainage disparity—all typical findings for sensors to detect.

company’s open-source intelligence network—though they never called it that—allowed its workers to have a real-time picture of everything from demand for services to breaking news, anything that could influence whether somebody needed to be ready to engage with a customer. It was also usually better than anything she could pull from the FBI network on an event like this because it was faster, had cleaner data, and was easier to query.

Sagan was perhaps the most eloquent harbinger because his concern came from a place of deep understanding: ‘I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time—when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.’”15

From the Demon Haunted World

There is this saying by a German general back in World War II that we were taught in the Corps: ‘When faced with the same situation in combat, never do the same thing.’”22

Overhead, a bright yellow FEMA drone loitered in a lazy circle, while a micro-cam drone from one of the newsfeeds landed on the statue of Admiral Farragut to get a better shot.

TAMS interrupted. “Agent Keegan, I have received updates from emergency management systems. FAA reports all unmanned aerial systems in the area have either been destroyed in crashes or cleared from the airspace.”

The hardened electronics of the armored truck had protected its systems from Todd’s pulse blast, but the universe of people its radios could call would be limited.

lens?” Keegan asked. “It appeared that you required an exit from the conversation,” TAMS said.

wrestles with real issues that will have to be faced in the coming years. Automation, robotics, and ever more capable artificial intelligence are no longer just science fiction. Their ongoing advancement and application, across nearly every segment of society, will create amazing new possibilities and efficiencies. As we go through what is best understood as a new industrial revolution, however, there will also be political, economic, social, and cultural disruptions and debates, as well as security threats, of a scale not experienced for generations, if not ever before. What is worrisome is how poorly understood this all is, both by the public and policymakers. It is not just that too many lack a sense of the scale of change that is to come, but also the ability to visualize it.