Mission to Mars
(This is not Defence-related, but does represent a huge, complex project in a
hostile environment)
The astronaut has been conditioned over a very long period, since birth, to
the Earth’s gravity, its atmosphere, its circadian cycle, its seasons. The
astronaut is going somewhere where all of that is wrong, and making a mistake
in unconscious processing is potentially fatal. It would help to have a
workmate who is fully trained in all the differences Mars represents, and
doesn’t get tired, bored, distracted, and doesn’t have the human’s Four Pieces
Limit in times of stress.
Active Structure can provide such a workmate. Just as the human astronaut will
be running unconscious processing on threats, Active Structure can run
continuous threat processing against new threats no-one had thought of to put
in the Operating Manual.
The deep conditioning of being born and raised on Earth is impossible to
undo.
So why can’t we use ANNs (Artificial Neural Networks) or LLMs (Large Language
Models) to achieve the same result?
ANNs are a static piece of kit that has been programmed months or years
before. Some attempt can be made to avoid future threats, but only in a static
way. It has no mechanism to track a rapidly evolving threat. A flying bird
tracks other objects, and notes any whose angle from the bird’s flight doesn’t
change, indicating a collision course, and generating avoidance behaviour. A
bird has dynamic memory (from real neurons, not ersatz ones) being updated
every few seconds, and which it can use to compare what was, and what is – an
ANN has nothing like that. A bird is a dynamic actor – an ANN is a static
actor.
LLMs hold many thousands or millions of pieces of text, and can summon a piece
of relevant text relatively easily, and can cobble together several pieces of
text with much less accuracy. An LLM doesn’t understand the meaning of a
single word, so what it constructs is very unreliable, and is predicated on
the piece of text already existing. In a new and challenging environment, it
is not likely to serve well as critical life support.
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