Abstract
The “Design for Maritime Singularity” was a crowdsourcing effort focused on two looming concerns that the U.S. Navy will have to address in the coming decades. The first concern deals with the concept of the technological singularity, where the premise is that Artificial Intelligence (AI) could rapidly expand in capability past human intelligence. This has been hypothesized by some to mean that the AI would leave humanity behind, possibly making humankind irrelevant. The second concern deals with organizational complexity, building off the argument made by Dr. Yaneer Bar-Yam that hierarchical organizations are limited in their ability to handle complexity by the carrying capacity of the small number of individuals who make decisions at the top. As the environment becomes more complex, hierarchical organizations like the U.S. Navy will find themselves in a state where their traditional construct could hinder their ability to process this complexity, thus limiting their effectiveness.
The authors, sponsored by the U.S. Office of Naval Research, created a study to explore these concerns using the collective intelligence platform mmowgli (Massively Multiplayer Online War Game Leveraging the Internet). Over a one-week timeframe players from all over the world collaborated, developing concepts that explored how the U.S. Navy could address the concerns. The themes that emerged from that event paint a picture of how the Navy might adjust so that it could ride the wave of technological change and increasing complexity instead of being swamped. This paper describes the mmowgli game, the themes that emerged from the game, and three more detailed concepts fleshed out in a follow-on workshop.
Sponsor: Work performed supporting the Office of Naval Research, Director of Disruptive Technologies, Dr. Eric Gulovsen, Under Funding Documents: N0001414WX01557, N0001414WX01558, and N0001416WX01726.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Schwartz, P.: The art of the long view: planning for the future in an uncertain world. Currency Doubleday Business (1991, 1996)
Jensen, G., Tester, J.: Government for the 100%, Using Games to Democratize Innovation and Innovate Democracy. http://www.iftf.org/fileadmin/user_upload/downloads/mmowgli_Government_SR-1539.pdf. Accessed 14 Apr 2018
Senge, P.M.: The Fifth Discipline: the Art and Practice of the Learning Organization. Doubleday/Currency, New York (1990)
A Design for Maintaining Maritime Superiority. http://www.navy.mil/cno/docs/cno_stg.pdf. Accessed 14 Apr 2018
Maritime Singularity Call to Action. https://youtu.be/Oc2zV6hffsY. Accessed 14 Apr 2018
Kurzweil, R.: The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology. Penguin (2005)
Kasparov, G.: The Chess Master and the Computer. New York Review of Books, vol. 52, no. 2 (2010) http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2010/02/11/the-chess-master-and-the-computer/. Accessed 14 Apr 2018
Bar-Yam, Y.: General features of complex systems. Encyclopedia of Life Support Systems (EOLSS). UNESCO, EOLSS Publishers, Oxford (2002)
Maritime Singularity Reports page. http://movesinstitute.org/~jmbailey/mmowgliReports/singularity/. Accessed 14 Apr 2018
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2018 This is a U.S. government work and not under copyright protection in the U.S.; foreign copyright protection may apply
About this paper
Cite this paper
Largent, M., Jensen, G., Law, R. (2018). The Design for Maritime Singularity: Exploration of Human/AI Teaming and Organizational Carrying Capacity for the U.S. Navy. In: Morales, A., Gershenson, C., Braha, D., Minai, A., Bar-Yam, Y. (eds) Unifying Themes in Complex Systems IX. ICCS 2018. Springer Proceedings in Complexity. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96661-8_38
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96661-8_38
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-96660-1
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-96661-8
eBook Packages: Physics and AstronomyPhysics and Astronomy (R0)