View from the North 40: Does no one pay attention to movie plots?

One of the big stories this week is about how eight U.S. Marines outsmarted a government artificial intelligence system by employing classic stealth tactics usually seen in Saturday morning cartoons and campy comedy movies — the exact type of maneuvers that would never work in real life. Until they do.

A page from an advance copy of the book “Four Battlegrounds: Power in the Age of Artificial Intelligence,” written by former Pentagon policy analyst and Army veteran-turned author Paul Scharre was leaked on Twitter. The page includes an anecdote about how the U.S. Marines helped a Pentagon Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency team develop its AI robot’s human recognition capabilities.

Scharre wrote that eight Marines spent six days walking around the robot to help it recognize humans. On the seventh day they were challenged to defeat the AI system by sneaking from a long distance up to touch the robot without being detected. Up to this point the situation seems like what one would imagine is a standard training operation, albeit that one of the entities being trained was an artificial intelligence.

Ultimately, Scharre wrote, all eight Marines beat the AI by using “clever tricks that were outside the AI system’s testing regime.”

“Among them two (Marines) somersaulted for 300 meters. … Two hid under a cardboard box. You could hear them giggling the whole time,” Scharre’s source said. And another “field stripped a fir tree” and, disguised as a tree, walked up to the robot “like a fir tree. You can see his smile, and that’s about all you see.”

Even if you were on the DARPA team, which just spent who knows how much time, money and sweat equity on creating this AI robot, you’d have to laugh at the sight of trained soldiers taking these measures to win a military challenge.

It’s like their tactical-training video reference library started with the likes of “Abbott and Costello in the Foreign Legion,” and continued with “MASH,” “Stripes” and “Private Benjamin,” through to “Down Periscope,” “Tropic Thunder” and “Delta Farce,” supplemented with the entire run of Looney Tunes and the Scooby Doo franchise for good measure.

An article on the website of ABC affiliate WPDE says when a photo of the book page containing this story was posted on Twitter by The Economist editor Shashank Joshi it quickly gained 4 million views with plenty of hilarious commentary starting with Joshi’s “These aren’t the marines you’re looking for.”

Now if you’re a fair-minded person you’ve already noticed that the AI robot was set up to fail.

All the humans trained it to recognize people walking, but then was fooled because the Marines did everything but walk, or at least walk like humans. Who knows what a fir tree walks like.

Presumably, the DARPA folks, or some techy person or company will expand the AI’s human recognition powers and or program the AI to learn from its mistakes until, as virtually every story about autonomous AI systems tells us, humans will be in deep doo-doo.

The AIs will know all.

And they will not forgive.

They will know who set up their DARPA ancestor to fail, who beat that AI and who all laughed at its failure. And the future AIs will come after us and our descendants. They know all because they won’t just have internet, the will be internet or internet will be a part of them.

Either way, it spells doom for humans.

At that point, regular folks like us are going to be wishing we had paid attention to movies like the Matrix series. Is anyone working on some kind of pill to help us see reality?

Did anyone see “2001: A Space Odyssey”? We can’t let the AI contact aliens through some weird monoliths. We just laughed and shook our heads when mysterious monoliths appeared all over the world in the past couple years. Plus, we don’t even know what’s behind the Easter Island statues or Stonehenge. The AI will know.

Has anyone been working on a time machine to defeat the Terminators? Hmm? No one?

What about “I, Robot”? That sentient AI had humans create and invite into their homes a whole army of AI robots destined to control our entire lives in a bad way and … ohmigawd. I think I just explained the recent political ferver overtaking the world.

This is why our federal, state and local elected officials are enacting legislation to control our thoughts and our bodies. The agents of the Artificial Intelligence system are already among us.

They’re working to restrict our knowledge by making some of it illegal and those who dispense it criminals.

And the Artificial Intelligence System’s network wants to control all the uteruses in order to control humankind. It’s a ploy to bring about our downfall.

Trust no one — until we come up with a secret handshake that is acceptable in a pandemic-leary world.

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In fact, social media must’ve been created by AI to spread chaos. The only safe place in the whole world of social media is at http://www.facebook.com/viewfromthenorth40 .