Like the authors’ previous book, “Ghost Fleet: A Novel of the Next World War,” “Burn-In” is a blend of fiction and facts that explore how technology will shape the future. The science fiction thriller showcases over 300 technological trends that the authors believe will push the United States into a new industrial revolution. The story revolves around an FBI agent and its robot partner working to stop a cyber-terrorist who has taken control over the nation’s capital.

Singer, a strategist and senior fellow at the non-partisan think tank New America, spoke with Chiara Vercellone about what inspired the book, the response from officials how the duo researched it.

This interview has been edited for brevity.

C4ISRNET: This novel blends fictional characters with extensive research on what technology might be like in the future. You show how AI might have an effect on everything, from politics and economy to our society. Why is this realistic in such a short amount of time?

SINGER: We conducted research on everything from compiling the reports on which jobs will be automated, to Amazon patent applications, to interviews with AI scientists, but also people who worked on the water system of Washington D.C. We even did site visits to inside the White House.

We used that to essentially project forward not just how AI and robotics are going to be used in your city, your business and your home, but also some of the, frankly, scary new vulnerabilities and trends that they are going to introduce. What are some of the security threats that we’re going to be wrestling with, whether it’s in your home or how you think about it for an entire city?

C4ISRNET: The book is set 20 years from now. Is that the right time frame for the development of all encompassing AI ?

SINGER: We had a “no vaporware” rule. Every single technology, every single trend, every single scene in the book had to be pulled from a technology project that is already in motion right now: A technology that already exists or a research project that is already happening, a cyberattack that may not have happened in the U.S. but has happened somewhere else, or has been something that researchers have proved is possible. And, honestly, that kind of grounding, frankly, makes it even more compelling and scarier.

C4ISRNET: As artificial intelligence can be used for good to help defend against cyberattacks, it can also be used to carry out these attacks. As the book shows, the FBI uses AI to solve cases more efficiently but D.C. has been taken hostage by a cyberterrorist using the same technology. Are there any risks that officials are taking today in funding the development of this technology?

SINGER: I think of when we got computers and they’ve move to a point where we don’t even kind of notice them around us anymore. When you go into your kitchen, there are tons of little red lights of different things that are computerized, but we don’t think of them as computers anymore.

Relative to AI, so much of the attention has been on this revolt of the robots. But one of the things that we play with in the book is that we’re seeing all these applications, but we’re also not preparing our economy and our society for these changes that will come. Industrial revolutions are really traumatic: We’re going to see everything from job displacement to new political ideologies, even extremist ones, and we’re not preparing for that. Even more directly related to the development of AI, we’re recreating almost all the mistakes that we made with the regular Internet a generation ago. Even if the internet brought a lot of incredible things, we didn’t think about security and the development of it, and that created a lot of consequences. And we’re doing the very same thing right now, as we wire up our cities, our homes, into what is now an Internet of Things and an increasingly AI-fueled Internet of Things.

C4ISRNET: You and August Cole have been invited to brief the book’s lessons to officials at the White House, Congress, CIA and at the Pentagon. What were those conversations like?

SINGER: For our past book, “Ghost Fleet,” we got to do everything from White House briefings to go to the Joint Chiefs conference room inside the Pentagon, and the Navy now has a $3 billion shipbuilding program that’s called Ghost Fleet. And the same thing has happened with “Burn-In.” Even before it was published, we were able to brief some of its lessons to groups like the Joint Special Operations Command to the NSA and Cyber Command and as you and I are speaking right now, there’s a new government report called the Cyber Solarium Commission. It’s a bipartisan commission, and they issued a major report of ways to reset U.S. cybersecurity strategy for the future. And it actually begins with a scene written by August Cole and I. So, in many ways, Congress has taken the world of “Burn-In” and moved it into official government reports. They wanted a way to share real cyberthreats, and what they didn’t want to happen is what happened to the various reports before 9/11 that warned about the attack but that nobody listened to until after the fact. So, they asked us to help with visualizing that world with the idea that it might emotionally compel them to not make the same mistake.

C4ISRNET: What was the process of deciding which technology was developed enough to think it could become a threat in the future?

SINGER: We would first build up a baseline of understanding and try and draw upon the wisdom of the crowd. For example, when we were looking at the question of which jobs are likely to be automated, we actually built, as far as I’m aware, the first data set that brought together every job prediction report, around 13 different predictions in total. It included everything from what the World Bank says to what consulting companies say. That gives you that factual grounding, and then you have to put your fiction hat on and you say, “okay, of all of these, which ones are not just the most important to talk about, but are the most interesting and compelling to talk about.” So the husband of the main character is a way that we use to illustrate that many people when they think about automation, they think about a factory worker or losing their job or maybe a truck driver, something blue collar but the data shows that it cuts across not just blue collar, but also white collar. So, we chose to make the character, a contract lawyer who’s been automated, and that’s not just to show that white collar jobs are at risk here, but it allows you to have that character hit some more compelling human themes.

t’s really interesting what happens when you read the reports and plans but also talk to not just the Silicon Valley engineers, but all the way up to the billionaires, is there’s this incredible and rightful excitement at the world that they’re creating. But there’s also sometimes a failure to appreciate that their Utopian visions can sometimes seem very dystopian to other parts of society. And you can see this for example, with facial recognition, where they’ll talk excitingly about how you’re going to use it in a restaurant and use it in a train station, and all the money that’s going to be made. And then you pull back and think through everything, from how will the government use this? How do people with a different point of view that the police think about mass scale of face recognition? How does this change on our personal relationships? You think it’s great that the greeter to the store will have automated face recognition, and that they’ll be able to call me by name as I enter. But how am I going to think about that person? Am I going to think of them as friendlier or is it just the fact that I know the computer gave them my name? The visions of the future can be Utopian, but it can also feel really creepy in other ways.

C4ISRNET: How long has this book been in the works?

SINGER: The timeline from when you provide the final version of the book to the publisher, and then when it actually comes out in the stores is about nine months. So, we turned in “Burn-In” in fall of 2019 and it’s coming out in summer 2020, and that’s just the way the book business works.

The challenge of this blend is that there are so many things that that were happening, that are actually a scene or a moment from the book. We would start tweeting them out, calling him a #BurnInbookmoment. And sometimes they were something that was cool and exciting maybe a robot that we write about in the book actually being deployed. But sometimes it was something rather scary, a certain kind of attack that had been researched now actually starting to happen.

In the longer term, there might be a problem with the technology in the book. I’ll give you a an example: In one of the scenes, there is a drone, and it’s pretty clear it’s an Amazon drone that flies overhead but we don’t name if by company, but we describe it and it has a footnote it’s Amazon’s patent for the drone. We didn’t dream up that it had this number of rotors, but this is Amazon’s literal plan for it. Now, five to ten years from now, Amazon might change that plan, and they may plan for it to be a six-rotor trial and it turns out it’s a four-rotor trial or something. That’s where the technology could be thrown off in time, but we were pretty careful.

Consider France, which along with the United Kingdom and Germany, has become one of Europe’s AI hubs. According to a report by France Digitale, a company that advocates for the rights of start-ups in France, French startups were using AI 38 percent more than they did a year earlier.

But the advancement of AI in the defense sector has not been as prominent in some European countries. That’s in part because the systems need a large amount of data to be reliable, according to Nicolas Arpagian, vice president of strategy and public affairs at Orange Cyberdefense, a French-based company working with Europol and other cybersecurity companies to build strategic and technological counter-measures to face cybersecurity attacks.

“It’s very difficult to know what the data can be used for, and if you let the computer or if you let the algorithm take decisions [to prevent cyberattacks,] and that’s a false positive, you won’t be able to intervene early enough to stop decisions that were taken on the basis of this [erroneous] data detected by the algorithm,” he said.

Orange Cyberdefense’s approach is training human analysts to detect the behavioral patterns hackers reveal. The company also relies on artificial intelligence to act as an assistant and to keep humans in the lead role.

“You need the analyst, the human being, the human brain and the human experience to deal with and to understand a changing situation,” Arpagian said.

At the same time, pressure from Russia, China and other adversaries in the AI market has pushed the United States to designate more resources for the development of the technology in the defense sector, according to a 2019 Congressional Research Service report. In recent years, China has focused on the development of advanced AI to make faster and well-informed decisions about attacks, the report found. Russia has focused on robotics, although it’s also active in the use of AI in the defense sector.

Moving to use AI in U.S. cybersecurity ops

In February, the Department of Defense adopted five principles to ensure the ethical use of the technology. Secretary of Defense Mark Esper said the United States and its allies must accelerate the adoption of AI and “lead in its national security applications to maintain our strategic position, prevail on future battlefields, and safeguard the rules-based international order.”

In September, Lt. Gen. Jack Shanahan, the director of the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center, said the center’s mission was to accelerate the Pentagon’s adoption and integration of AI in cybersecurity and battlefield operations.

“We are seeing initial momentum across the department in terms of fielding AI-enabled capabilities,” he said on a call with reporters. “It is difficult work, yet it is critically important work. It demands the right combination of tactical urgency and strategic patience.¨

The Pentagon has taken the first step to increase the use of AI and machine learning during its operations as implementing AI in cybersecurity operations “is essential for protecting the security of our nation,” according to the department’s formal artificial intelligence strategy released in 2019. The technology will be incorporated to reduce inefficiencies from manual, data-focused tasks, and shift human resources to higher-level reasoning cybersecurity operations, the strategy laid out.

Artificial intelligence can play a key role identifying unknown attacks, as human analysts normally know enough about recurring threats to accurately detect cyber risks such as evasion techniques and malware behaviors, said Shimon Oren, head of cybersecurity and threat research at Deep Instinct, an American company that uses AI and deep learning technology to prevent and detect malware used in cyberattacks.

Oren said the use of artificial intelligence and deep learning technology is crucial to train and teach the systems to make decisions and draw conclusions on new threat scenarios that will be presented to it post-training. The technology will free human analysts to do the type of work computers “absolutely cannot do,” he said.

For example, the U.S. intelligence community is looking to fully automate well-defined AI processes, as AI systems can perform tasks “significantly beyond what was possible only recently, and in some cases, even beyond what humans can achieve,” according to the 2019 Augmenting Intelligence using Machines Initiative.

“It’s very hard for [humans], even when we’re very experienced and knowledgeable, to extrapolate what might be the next kind of attack, how it might look like, what exactly will the next kind of malware do and how will it go about doing what it’s meant to do. And for that reason, exactly we need to rely on AI,” Oren said.

But relying on only one method to detect cyberattacks is a mistake, Arpagian and Oren agreed. While there is a high possibility of human analysts missing information that hints at an attack, AI systems often are not up to the latest technology to be as successful as they are expected to be, Arpagian said.

Orange Cyberdefense has been focusing on the integration of augmented intelligence rather than AI until this is developed enough to be meaningful, Arpagian said. The company has faced some criticism from others who have embraced AI fully, instead of using the technology as a tool for assistance.

“If you say you are not using artificial intelligence tools [to prevent cyberattacks] you could seem to be a bit old fashioned and outdated,” Arpagian said. “But augmented intelligence is something we need to have and, afterwards, when we have enough data on a specific activity on a very specific domain, then maybe the artificial intelligence will be able to deal with [cyberattacks] on its own.”

Many European countries are not prepared to integrate AI as the intelligence service lacks the readiness to properly begin using the technology within its agencies, according to the French civil servant Nicolas Tenzer, who has authored official reports to the French government and has served as a senior consultant to international organizations.

“When it comes to propaganda, for instance, [the intelligence service] is not really trained — they don’t really know the best way to respond to that,” he said. “The second problem is there must be a true willingness from the government [to use the technology.]”

Tenzer said the lack of readiness and lack of collaboration between agencies will make it difficult to integrate AI in the defense sector to the extent the United States has.

U.S. efforts to implement AI include the American AI Initiative, which President Donald Trump announced in 2019 as an effort to promote the use of the technology in various fields including infrastructure, health and defense.

In 2019, the Department of Defense and the Naval Information Warfare Systems Command posted a challenge to get input from industry partners on how to automate the Security Operations Center by using artificial intelligence and machine learning, specifically how to detect modern malware strains pre-attack. FireEye, an intelligence-led company that provides software to investigate cybersecurity attacks, was awarded $100,000 as it provided the best model to detect attacks and respond in a short time, according to a March 3 release.

Earlier this year, the Center for Security and Emerging Technology at Georgetown University launched the Cybersecurity and Artificial Intelligence Project to study the overlap between cybersecurity, artificial intelligence and national security. The project, directed by Ben Buchanan, is expected to study how artificial intelligence can be used on offensive cyberoperations apart from defensive operations.

“Technology is fundamental to cyber operations on offense and defense,” Buchanan said. “The reason why AI is important is that there’s just so much data that you need a machine to be able to do the first pass through the data [during offensive and defensive operations.]”

Part of the funding, which was discussed during the third U.S.-Ukraine cyber dialogue in Kyiv Tuesday, will go toward the U.S. Agency for International Development’s new cybersecurity project. The plan aims to invest $38 million over four years to build Ukraine’s cybersecurity capabilities, the release said.

In 2017, the U.S. gave $10 million in cybersecurity assistance funds to Ukraine during the first bilateral cyber dialogue.

The funds come two months after Ukraine asked the Federal Bureau of Investigation for help investigating a cyberattack by Russian military hackers to Burisma, the energy company involved in the impeachment trial of President Donald Trump.

Representatives from the Departments of Defense, Energy and Homeland Security, as well as the FBI, discussed recent national cybersecurity policy developments, 5G security concerns and international cyber policy issues, according to the release. Joseph Pennington, acting deputy chief of mission at the U.S. Embassy in Kyiv, lead the U.S. delegation.

The State Department release said the meeting served to “reaffirm our shared commitment to ensure an open, interoperable, reliable, and secure cyberspace in which all states behave responsibly.”

Under the 14-month-long contract, Persistent Systems will provide “a robust, secure, and high-throughput communications network” for robotic and other autonomous systems during Manned-Unmanned Teaming operations (MUM-T), which combine intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance missions with traditional combat support operations.

The contract was worth $5 million. Brian Soles, vice president of business development for Persistent Systems said “it’s very plausible for [the U.S. Army] to have these manned-unmanned teaming relationships in the future.”

Such a network will allow the Army to continue with its next-generation Optionally Manned Fighting Vehicle that can link up with as many as four unmanned remote combat vehicles, according to the release.

Persistent Systems has already developed a computer-like network, the MPU5, able to create secure networks anywhere without relying on a vulnerable central node, while keeping teams connected in real time, according to the company. The Army has been evaluating the MPU5 for over a year while testing it with remote combat vehicles.

Today, leaders often rely on satellites for long-distance communications, which can cause the information to be delayed and, consequently, slow the decisionmaking process in tactical operations, the report found. With 5G technologies, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance systems would process and disseminate information from battlespace sensors and rely the information immediately.

The Department of Defense is expected to test 5G applications at four military bases this year, according to a November solicitation. The bases, located in Georgia, Utah, Washington and California, would experiment with smart warehouses, augmented and virtual reality in training scenarios and the optimization of wireless communication channels.

The military 5G upgrade would also enable drones to autonomously carry out coordinated missions or tasks by increasing the speed of data transfer between operators and self-driving vehicles, according to the report.

The United States’ primary competitors in this space are Chinese companies such as Huawei, which works as a global 5G supplier to many nations, including U.S. allies. The United Kingdom recently allowed Huawei to build part of its 5G network despite U.S. opposition.

In December, the State Department supported a European Union Council plan that highlighted security risks to 5G networks built by Chinese companies, and urged its partners to deny “untrusted vendors” from accessing their future 5G networks, according to a statement from the council.

The Congressional Research Service report highlighted potential issues for Congress with the development of 5G, including national security risks from those allies who are involved with Chinese 5G infrastructure and whether the U.S. should limit intelligence sharing with countries such as the United Kingdom who operate Chinese-supplied 5G equipment to avoid the risks of cyberattacks or military espionage.

The report, an independent assessment mandated by Congress in the 2019 National Defense Authorization Act, proposed the revamping of C4ISR systems as they remain “brittle in the face of Chinese cyberattacks, electronic warfare and long-range strikes.”

The Pentagon’s C4ISR capabilities have fallen behind technologically, as they were developed “in an era when competitors or adversaries could not attack U.S. assets in space or at long ranges,” the report found. At the same time, a 2019 Department of Defense’s report on China’s military and security developments found that country has prioritized military capabilities with disruptive potential, including hypersonic weapons, counterspace capabilities, artificial intelligence and C4ISR advanced robotics.

Thus far, the Department of Defense has been able to develop countermeasures against China’s abilities, said Chris Dougherty, a senior fellow at CNAS and one of the authors of the report.

“As the threat continues to get more sophisticated, these [countermeasures] will likely lose their effectiveness,” Dougherty said. “This necessitates building a new architecture that is designed around resiliency, kill webs, and graceful degradation.”

While under attack, U.S. systems sometimes fail to have any connectivity and have sporadic dial-up speeds. Instead, they should still have some level of communication even while the attack is going on, even if this means at lower bandwidths.

To strengthen its systems, the report recommended, the U.S. military should develop space capabilities resistant to kinetic attacks, synthetic training environments for U.S. forces to practice C4ISR operations, systems that can transmit data via multiple pathways and surveillance systems that can avoid being detected.

A recent project by RAND found that, while the Department of Defense maintains an advantage in airspace penetration capabilities, it remains vulnerable to air base attacks and Chinese anti-surface warfare.

An initial system with these developments could be in place in the next decade if the Department of Defense and armed services create a basic system and improve it over time, Dougherty said.

“If, as we have done in the past, we wait around for a ‘perfect’ set of requirements to develop an ‘objective’ future system, we could see this take 15-20 years, at which point China will likely have far surpassed us in this competition,” he said.

The MQ-4C Triton drones, manufactured by Northrop Grumman, will serve as part of an early operational capability to develop a concept of operations for the high-altitude, long-endurance systems, according to the Navy.

“The inaugural deployment of Triton UAS brings enhanced capabilities and a broad increase in Maritime Domain Awareness to our forward Fleet commanders,” Rear Adm. Peter Garvin, commander of the Patrol and Reconnaissance Group, said in the release.

Northrop Grumman says the Triton can detect, track, classify and identify naval vessels, and can fly nonstop for more than 24 hours.

The drones will operate under Commander Task Force 72 in 7th Fleet, which will use the aircraft for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance missions to complement the P-8A Poseidon, a military aircraft that provides anti-submarine and anti-surface warfare capabilities.

In December 2017, Northrop Grumman received a $255 million contract modification to build three MQ-4C Tritons along with ground stations, tooling and related support equipment.

Germany recently canceled plans to buy Tritons for about $2.5 billion, as officials believed the aircraft wouldn’t meet a deadline to adopt Europe’s airspace safety standards.

This year, over 120 technical experts, Special Forces and military operators worked to test the skills needed to execute a cyber operation, including the testing of offensive cyber capabilities. Six countries were part of the Cyber Command element at the event, known as Crossed Swords and organized by the NATO Cooperative Cyber Defence Center of Excellence, an independent research, training and exercise hub.

For the event, held from Jan. 21 to Jan. 23, Crossed Swords hosted 26 nations, up from 15 countries that attended in 2018, according to a Jan. 27 press release.

“Training tasks, such as attribution and the collaboration of units from very different fields and nations with integrating sub-teams, are meant to push participants out of their comfort zone,” said Bernhards Blumbergs, a cybersecurity expert from CERT.LV, Latvia’s Information Technology Security Incident Response Institution, which helped organize the exercise. “This is when learning happens.”

Crossed Swords focuses on the coordination and cooperation between civilian and military professionals through “highly experimental, yet authentic and challenging” cyber enabled joint operations, according to a release.

For many participants, Crossed Swords is a preparation for Locked Shields, another exercise organized by the NATO-accredited military organization Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence. There, cybersecurity experts practice protecting critical infrastructure during a severe cyberattack.

Under an indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity contract, which runs through 2023, Viasat will provide its Battlefield Awareness Targeting System-Dismounted (BATS-D) handheld Link 16 radios, which give warfighters access to real-time, secure and reliable communication for enhanced close air support communications. Viasat will also provide operator training and maintenance. The contract came from the U.S. Air Force Life Cycle Management Center.

“We continue to see strong demand for [the radios’] use across multiple military branches, and among coalition partners as it has the proven ability to significantly enhance situational awareness, improve mission coordination and accelerate decision timelines in a multi-domain battlespace,” said Ken Peterman, president of government systems at Viasat.

Link 16 is a tactical data exchange network that provides a picture of where friendly and enemy forces are located, allowing the military to share a common understanding of the battlefield. Military leaders rely on Link 16 as a critical tool in identifying friend from foe in the heat of a battle.

The radio features direct voice communications with other Link 16 users, which “dramatically shortens the kill chain and decreases the risk of fratricide,” according to Viasat.

In 2019, Viasat announced it had shipped its 1,000th BATS-D radio. To date, Over 2,000 BATS-D radios have been shipped to U.S. warfighters worldwide, according to the release.

In 2018, the National Security Agency authorized Viasat to immediately open the use of the radios to members of Five Eyes, an intelligence alliance comprising Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States.

The training and maintenance will take place in Carlsbad, California through December 31, 2023, according to the Department of Defense.

Ross will be transitioning to the systems security engineering (SSE) project to “focus on DevSecOps and building security into the [system development life cycle],” he wrote. The project looks to influence and affect trustworthiness and cyber resilience of the services used in day-to-day activities, he said.

“The long-term objective is to work with government, industry and academia to build a world-class set of best practices in this area that can be voluntarily embraced by the public and private sector,” Ross said.

Victoria Pillitteri, who has worked alongside Ross for four years as a senior researcher, will take over FISMA. However, Ross will continue to work on FISMA publications while expanding the SSE project, Pillitteri said.

Ross said his “finale” will be the Security and Privacy Controls for Information Systems and Organizations Fifth Revision (SP 800-53 Rev. 5), which provides the government with new security controls to follow based on threat intelligence.

In August, Ross said many NIST publications with cybersecurity controls depend on the release of SP 800-53, which has been delayed by an Office of Management and Budget review. SP 800-171B, which offers federal agencies security requirements to protect the confidentiality of controlled unclassified information, is waiting final release as it contains provisions linked to provisions in SP 800-53 Rev. 5.

Ross will lead the FISMA project until SP 800-53 is published in its final form. He has been leading the SSE project he is transitioning to since 2012.

“This transition will allow a full-time focus on the SSE work and to explore new and emerging approaches in methodologies such as DevSecOps,” said Ross.