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Understanding Knowledge Eco-Systems – a conversation with Jason Hilker
12 Plays5 days ago
Understanding the intersection between military and civilian technology
Jason Hilker is a veteran of the U.S. Marine Corp who gained a doctorate in strategic leadership.
Reflecting on his military experience and his academic studies he started to identify how the different approaches of military and civilian leaders could be combined for the benefit of both.
In this episode of the Abeceder podcast The Independent Minds Jason discusses with host Michael Millward how his reflections developed to encompass how technology is used by the military and civilian organisations and what each might learn from the other.
In their conversation Jason and Michael discuss
- The reasons for technological advances
- Historical examples of how technological advances have created a wider impact
- The importance of monetarising technology
- The challenges of what happens to military technical knowledge when the fighting stops
- How knowledge can be shared to create an eco-system
- Using technical knowledge to build job networks
This is the podcast for any business person who wants to understand the knowledge eco-system of their own organisation.
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Transcript
Introduction to Zencastr and Podcast Overview
00:00:05
Speaker
Made on Zencastr. The all-in-one podcasting platform that just makes making content so easy. Visit Zencastr.com. All the details are in the description.
00:00:15
Speaker
Hello and welcome to the Independent Minds, a series of conversations between Abbasida and people who think outside the box about how work works with the aim of creating better workplace experiences for everyone.
00:00:31
Speaker
I am your host, Michael Millward, the Managing Director of Abasida.
Guest Introduction: Jason Hilker
00:00:36
Speaker
Today, i am going to be discussing knowledge ecosystems with Jason Hilker, a retired US Marine and strategic innovation and artificial intelligence expert.
00:00:48
Speaker
Jason is joining me today from North Carolina in the United States, somewhere that I have never visited. When I do visit, I will be sure to make my travel arrangements at the Ultimate Travel Club because that is where I can access trade prices on flights, hotels, trains, and holidays, and all sorts of other travel-related purchases.
00:01:09
Speaker
You can as well if you are a member. There is a link in the description. Now that I have paid the heating bill, It is time to make an episode of The Independent Minds that will be well worth listening to, liking, downloading and subscribing to.
00:01:26
Speaker
As with every episode of The Independent Minds, we won't be telling you what to think, but we are hoping to make you think. Hello, Jason. Hello, Michael. Good to hear from you again.
00:01:37
Speaker
Thank you very much for joining me.
Transition from Military to AI and Robotics
00:01:39
Speaker
What have you been doing since you left the military? I retired from the military about two years ago now. I finished out my doctorate in strategic leadership and I took some of the learning that I had taken later in my career working with modeling and simulations and artificial intelligence design and how that interfaced with the training programs in the military and the benefits if we could operationalize that concept. Studied, worked,
00:02:04
Speaker
leveraged all of my training in the military and now ah we're working on commercial and military applications of artificial intelligence, robotics, and then really the ecosystem that we need to make it safe and drive getting it into every facet society where it can do good without being so scary to some of the people who just see headlines. Wow.
00:02:28
Speaker
I think the only response to that is wow, because it seems very easy sort of things to say, but when you start to think about what you've just said, there's an awful lot of like change that would happen in the world when all of this comes off, when it all works. You you are talking about not just change, but radical change in the way in which people could potentially live their lives.
Integrating Military AI into Civilian Life
00:02:52
Speaker
It is, and I think it was rapidly thrust upon us by the war between Ukraine and Russia, and we see it in the headlines so much, what we've seen in war for the past 20 years with anti-terrorism operations. And then overnight, we see a major conflict, and we see that the major tool of war is drones and autonomy.
00:03:12
Speaker
And at the same time, we're trying to develop AI tools to use in the commercial space and everything else, and it can be confusing as to What is the actual nature and what is it going to do to society when we start integrating all these AI tools that are currently being viewed as weapons of war?
00:03:31
Speaker
Yes, it's an interesting idea. If you have a piece of technology that you've used for a military purpose when you no longer have a use for it militarily or even perhaps alongside it, you could use the same technology for a civilian purpose as well. Well, I think it's important that we go a step beyond looking at integrating old military technology into the commercial market and that the two work hand in hand.
00:03:57
Speaker
So military technology, which could also have civilian technology, and that also creates a knowledge ecosystem. But I get the impression that you may be people developing things in a civilian situation and in parallel people developing using the same technology in a military situation and perhaps they should perhaps be working more together, more collaboratively.
00:04:25
Speaker
Yeah, I believe collaboration is a big thing in the space because military technology cannot live in silos of innovation and be competitive with the demands put on the commercial market for technology.
00:04:40
Speaker
And it's also as former military I hate seeing military grade used almost as a joke or for outdated technology or things like that.
00:04:51
Speaker
I think that we need to take another look at what strategic technology looks like because we don't talk about the other aspects of strategy outside the military application of these technology.
00:05:07
Speaker
Within the military, we talk at strategy level with diplomatic information, military and economic powers. So military is only one branch of those diplomatic And information goes with what we're seeing
Economic and Social Impact of AI
00:05:20
Speaker
coming out. But the economic boom that we can experience by leveraging these same technologies in the same ecosystem of learning allows us to take out from the example that we've both seen in our lives of the automated robot that claims a store or the ah the
00:05:40
Speaker
robot that cleans the floor in your houses and you start getting into multi-purpose robots, you start merging the live virtual and constructive worlds in a way that we can overlay the simulations technology in the real world and just as you would play any number of video games that people play as far as farming simulators or any of those, we can leverage that same technology to train drones and robots to be more efficient in the commercial space and have a huge economic impact on society. But I think the one thing strategically that is holding us back is our information that's coming out on this.
00:06:21
Speaker
um Because as society, we should be looking at that real fear factor. Are we going to lose jobs? What is what does jobs look like when we start entering robotics?
00:06:32
Speaker
And forgive me if I'm rambling, but my dad was a railroader when the United States went through a shift from having brakemen on the trains to automating the railways in order to work with the unions to get that change implemented, there had to be a path to changing that employment from a very hard job. Being a brakeman on a train was a very hard job, but then they became professionals who drove the trains and we increased the number of trains on the rails
00:07:07
Speaker
So we were able to take that change in technology and we were able to leverage it in a positive direction by incorporating community colleges and new training paths and everything for a better economic situation out of what was at first a very fearful situation, a small farm town that ran off of the trains that transported the grain out of our town in the cold back into our town.
00:07:32
Speaker
for power. It's um something which happens in various different stages in history, where you've got, for example, the mechanization of the agricultural industry around the world.
00:07:43
Speaker
It was labor intensive, and then you've got tractors and combine harvesters and all sorts of things came along. And like you say, the investment that went into community colleges to make sure that people could then move from agricultural work into more industrial work or office work. As a result of the mechanization, you saw an increase in living standards because people were moving from manual work into more office, more professional type roles as well, like moving from the brakeman to being the driver of the train. Incomes increased and economic prosperity for for everyone in many ways.
00:08:21
Speaker
I agree and I think it's a difficult thing for some people to really look at as we monetize the technology on the business side. So i I reside mostly on the academic side, but I interface with businesses to try to monetize the technology and to get it out there and create cooperations and collaborations and I've worked up with NATO Science and Technology Organization presenting and getting my papers peer reviewed.
00:08:49
Speaker
As we work through this process, and it is a collaboration, we have to look at where we're going because I think you cite a great example with the agricultural revolution is we really made food available to everybody by industrializing the process. But it does put farmers out of work. So we need to look at where we're putting that displaced job force and that we're not just displacing them from one job into another. Because when I left the military at 38 years old and I tried to move into this industry, an industry challenge later in life can be very, very difficult.
00:09:24
Speaker
So we need to support and create these support networks and these ready jobs as we transition the technology across into the same space where we need that technology. So maybe with the global inflation we have, as we automate and we try to tamp down that inflation through automation, that we're also uplifting the wages and the families at the same time to create more stable where people don't have two, three or four jobs where we don't have both parents working. We have an opportunity to do that, but it's all in how we address the problem.
Enhancing Human Life through Technology
00:09:59
Speaker
Yes. And one of the things that's really interesting from my perspective as an ah HR professional, well, you're talking about how the technology has great potential, but actually if the if the potential doesn't fulfill or facilitate a human need, there is no point in even investigating the potential of the of the technology.
00:10:21
Speaker
I agree with that. I agree with that a lot. and With a military background, i see war as an extension of politics. It's a thing that happens in the world and it's unfortunate and it's terrible.
00:10:33
Speaker
And the faster we can get out of the wars that have been started, the better. And so technology can be leveraged to start wars or it can be leveraged to end wars. It can also be leveraged to avoid wars.
00:10:46
Speaker
We're already stuck in wars. Now it's time to leverage the technology to get out. But I think industry, it's really on us to come up with a plan because if we're only building drones and we're only building this ecosystem for a wartime environment, we have to look. NATO is going to exist after the wars are over. And how are we using all the technology that we're dumping all this money into right now and convert it to commercial and civilian use for the greater good.
00:11:18
Speaker
That is a really interesting point and a very important one as as well, I think. We have people who are trying to use technology in order to win wars. and You're quite right. We hear about drones that now can replace airplanes. So you don't actually need the pilot and to carry the bomb. It's all done by a drone.
00:11:40
Speaker
Drones that can do all sorts of various different things and all different sorts of different types of weapons. Right. And I think i think you're you're really onto something with that statement as we start looking at the drones and the capability of the drones and the things that we're doing with drones right now.
00:11:58
Speaker
to remove people from the battle space. And I don't mean as in killing people, I mean removing the people from the battle space, which I think as humans, we all look at that as a good thing. We don't want people on the front line shooting each other, but that doesn't displace the nature of war, which is to leverage will from one country to another.
00:12:20
Speaker
But When we remove the humans from the battle space, which has historically been what ends wars as massive human tolls, now we're looking at wars that will end because of massive economic tolls.
00:12:34
Speaker
And these drones are incredibly expensive. The tanks that are being destroyed by drones are incredibly expensive. And that's not even mentioning the shift in strategic competition for resourcing because tanks run on oil, drones run on lithium batteries. And we have to look at where those strategic lithium reserves are.
00:12:57
Speaker
We have to start looking at the rare earth minerals and the precious metals that are in all of these processors and controllers and components that are being destroyed when we can't even buy a cell phone without turning ours in because there's too many rare earth minerals in my cell phone, but we're okay with blowing up up in combat. So I think that we have to realize that even if there's no longer human toll on the front lines, there's a massive economic toll that's being waged on all of us with these ongoing wars.
00:13:29
Speaker
A massive ecological one as well, if you think they have to come from somewhere. If they're then being used in a destructive way, they're lost. Yeah, it is like the technology that is being used for a military purpose, we have to find a civilian, non-military, non-aggressive purpose for as well. and But how do we do that? how do we How do we take something that has been developed for a military purpose and convert it, find the economic motivation to use it commercially rather than militarily?
00:14:06
Speaker
That is that's the question I think a lot of industry is trying to answer right now, and I'd ah'd be happy to take a stab at it, at least but I think that it is a combination of our homeland defense and our industry coming together to build this network. So the technology specifically what I'm working on is moving the simulated world using the same type of geolocation that we use in video games, and we can directly overlay that in the real world. We can then use um a multitude of sensors and systems to create a real-time three-dimensional landscape
00:14:47
Speaker
of the actual world for these combat drones to operate in. What we're starting to see in the U.S. is a civilian concern about the number of drones that are out there, and we don't know. And most likely, all of them are nuisance.
00:15:05
Speaker
We wouldn't assume they have hostile intent. We don't want to jump to classified programs, UFOs, any of the stuff that hasn't been proven. But we do know that there's nuisance drones out there that are being flown without the proper proper licenses.
00:15:18
Speaker
DJI just removed geofencing. And so there's a major concern. we just had the wildfires out in California and somebody flew a drone into one of the airplanes that was fighting these massive fires that are burning people's houses.
00:15:31
Speaker
So there's a concern on self-regulation where we need the commercial industry. We need these sensitive sites. We need these to have a cost-effective way of building this network of radar systems, being able to recognize these drones, using transponders, using all the things that are out there. We already have all these tools available. It's just building a system to house them.
00:15:55
Speaker
And then at the same time, if I can build a drone with a weapon system on it, I can build a drone with just about any tool on it using the same
Adaptable Robotics and Environmental Impact
00:16:04
Speaker
interfaces. So we just start replacing weapon systems with tools. so The way i I like to frame this is if you went out and bought a robot that can clean your house right now, and this thing will drive around your floor and it will vacuum your floor. But if you have a floor that needs mopped, that's a different robot.
00:16:23
Speaker
What if this robot can go back to its charging station, pick up a new set of code and switch out its tool instead of replacing the entire robot? You just switch out the tool. Now it can mop the floor. It goes back, recharges, switches out its tool, and then it looks more like R2D2 and it can reach up and clean countertops.
00:16:43
Speaker
we talk about multi-purpose robots, we talk about commercial warehouse floors where if a robot breaks down, it still has to be recovered by a human, but we're watching in the battle space of Ukraine where robots are recovering robots.
00:16:57
Speaker
So if we can automate the process and we can drop in the live virtual constructive world where we can put all of this together using a simulation to drive it, very readily right now this is it actually very very easily adaptable technology we can start getting to that in our world and i think one of the big things that holds us back on the industry side is how it's perceived by the public population and and that's really just a failure in messaging and marketing to get out there and let people understand what we're doing because we're so scared that our competitor is going to beat us to the punch When you talk about the robot that cleans the floor, the robot almost has to identify why the floor needs cleaning, whether it's liquid or powder or whatever on the floor, and decide which tool it is going to use in order to clean it and how long it might take. So does it need to go back and recharge before it starts the cleaning? I think there's always been this case that I bought a bode car and I was telling my great uncle about all the toys that it had on in this car.
00:18:06
Speaker
And you know the lights come on when it goes dark and the the windscreen wipers operate when it rains and all sorts of various different things. I said, the more toys that it has, the more things it has to break down. And I said, yeah. They could end up spending a lot of time in the in the workshop with all of these toys if they all break down. I said, don't worry, it won't. it won't But the great thing is that the car will tell you what is broken.
00:18:30
Speaker
um It knows that it isn't working, so it tells you that this needs to be needs to be checked, the tire pressure is is wrong, you need to inflate a tire, all these sorts of things. But the argument has always been that every machine needs a human being to set it up and to repair it. What you're saying is that with the right technology and the right application and organizations from across industry working together, we could have the machine that does the job, a machine that does the maintenance and the repair of it and tells you when it needs or needs to be replaced and potentially even selects the right replacement based upon how the previous tool has been used.
00:19:11
Speaker
That is really what I'm saying. and I don't advocate for that particular model, although it is a capability. I don't advocate for that particular model because I, especially coming from the military background, i do not want to see a Drone program or a robotics program without a human in the loop, a human controller at least observing what they're doing and really giving this decision maker to the humans, because as we see with scrape based AI and and the the big AI that we see out there is scrape based and the way that it works is it goes out and it takes a scrape across the top of the Internet.
00:19:52
Speaker
We're getting better about data quality and we're getting better about making sure that we're not pulling as much information from social media and we're pulling more information from reputable sources like your college libraries and and all of these other places where we have credible sources peer reviewed documentation and we're training the Ai.
00:20:14
Speaker
Well, that's scrape AI more towards your agent AI, where we have specifically trained AI to do specific tasks.
Human Oversight in AI Development
00:20:24
Speaker
But the intermediary between those agents, we want to keep a human in a loop there because it's important that we have a filter or a final check and balance before the system says this is fact.
00:20:38
Speaker
uh we prefer to use it as a decision aid or a tool to suggest this is the codes that are coming from the robot this is the maintenance that may need to be done and whether that that actual maintenance is done by a human or another robot at some echelon at some point we can break these things so bad there has to be a human in the loop we also wouldn't want a warehouse to run with all these robots with lithium batteries that might catch on fire without a human in the loop in case you know that one of 100 chance that one of these robots actually goes through a catastrophic failure where it catches on fire we don't lose a whole warehouse and do we trust the robot without a human monitor to do that and i would say no so i think
00:21:29
Speaker
I think that alleviates a lot of the fear is that I have not met anybody in the industry who's advocating from removing completely human interaction from what the robots are doing, but instead elevating the human to a more technical role in the manufacturing process and therefore raising wages.
00:21:52
Speaker
By nature, we are going to decrease the workforce when we do that, but we're going to increase the pay of the remaining workforce The net loss, net gain, it's going to be a zero-sum game, but I like to think my kids are not going to grow up in cornfields, you know, detasseling corn every summer to buy their first car like we used to when I was a kid because that was hard work. My eight-year-old already knows robotics programming. I want him to work in a solid 40-hour-a-week job, but I like him being on technical instead of being out in a field getting sunburnt like I grew up.
00:22:30
Speaker
Yes, from what you're saying, the big question is how do we use this technology for the benefit of people rather than the controlling of people or the destruction of
Educating the Next Generation in Tech
00:22:43
Speaker
people? How do we use technology in a way that is positive to human life and then how do we prepare our children to actually use this technology in a constructive way and then what's going to be your role in this Wow, that's that's a lot to unpack. so
00:23:06
Speaker
yeah I think we've kind of gotten after that with developing our our core team that's working with several industries. We're getting really close to getting some teams that, some teaming and partnership agreements that I'm looking forward to announcing, but the core team that we've built is based PhDs and community outreach. So getting into the universities and developing as much of the technology as we can using research and development agreements with universities and colleges and preserving the intellectual property rights of the students who work in there while building their profile so that whenever they leave these universities and colleges and they go out on the job hunt, they can say that they collaborate on this project, they can talk about, they can leverage those things that they learned in the program instead of compartmentalizing them to where it's harder to advance.
00:24:03
Speaker
I can't wait to make some big announcements with these people because they have been phenomenal and community focused, jobs focused, getting jobs back into smaller communities. It has been an overall effort where the team is steering. So I'll give one example. There's a great man, James Doe. He's working out in the Hampton Roads area and he is contributing significantly to our efforts and his entire drive is to bring jobs back to his community.
00:24:38
Speaker
And I think when we go at it with that mentality that we're doing it for the right reasons, and we're not just doing it for that dollar at the end of the day, that we start building something for our future.
00:24:51
Speaker
It's the mentality with which it's done, not necessarily the technology that we're going to leverage to get to that place.
The Tech Industrial Revolution
00:24:58
Speaker
And I think that right now, based on that, we are in the tech tech industrial revolution, as it's already being termed in America.
00:25:07
Speaker
where instead of having a defense industrial base of who can produce more tanks, who can produce more of that in the tech industrial revolution, we look at the quality of technology and how fast we can propagate that through society.
00:25:25
Speaker
And um so now we're talking about your kids, my kids are going to look as at a drone as a tool, not a weapon system, not a toy, but as a tool to do the jobs that they are trying to do more efficiently.
00:25:43
Speaker
And just, I don't think it has to be a, a negative outlook on so many sci-fi movies. We're worried about rogue ai As long as we are taking care and self-regulating as an industry, which right now the self-regulation is pretty strong because nobody wants to be the one responsible for even letting the smallest accident or incident happen with this technology.
00:26:09
Speaker
The future is going to be agentic, which agentic means very task specific artificial intelligence and platforms.
00:26:20
Speaker
And it's going to be distributed, which I believe is a good thing because we see these massive data centers popping up that require nuclear power to consolidate all of our information, which also consolidates the risk to our information.
00:26:38
Speaker
When we start distributing that information, letting households run their own artificial intelligence on their own home computers.
Future of Distributed AI Systems
00:26:47
Speaker
And that's bolstered by all of these drones and everything else that have and some level of autonomy and computing power built into them. We create the neural networks that you hear of in artificial intelligence.
00:27:02
Speaker
Distributing the neural network is more efficient, more heat efficient, more energy efficient, there's a lot of good things. So I see the distribution of AI being more prolific than these giant data centers, given the current capabilities of the industry and the current direction of innovation. So I really think that's where the future is going.
00:27:26
Speaker
Yeah, you certainly give me an awful lot to think about, Jason. It's it's been very interesting. Thank you very much for helping me make such an interesting episode of The Independent Minds.
Conclusion and Listener Engagement
00:27:37
Speaker
Thank you, Michael. I am Michael Millward, the Managing Director of Abusida, and I have been having a conversation with the independent mind, Jason Hilker, who I think is quite a futurist, but is a retired US Marine and strategic innovation and artificial intelligence expert. You can find out more about both of us at abusida.co.uk.
00:28:00
Speaker
There's a link in the description. If you're listening to the independent minds on your smartphone, you may like to know that 3.0 has the UK's fastest 5G network with unlimited data.
00:28:11
Speaker
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00:28:26
Speaker
which means that description is well worth reading. I'm sure you've enjoyed this episode of The Independent Minds, so please give it a like and download it so that you can listen anytime, anywhere. To make sure you don't miss out on future episodes, please subscribe.
00:28:41
Speaker
Remember, the aim of all the podcasts produced by Abbasida is not to tell you what to think, but we do hope to have made you think. Until the next episode of The Independent Minds, thank you for listening and goodbye.