Artificial Intelligence Enlisted in Peace Process
Bonnie Fraser and Buzz Featherman met several months ago at the urging of a friend. Out of that meeting came THE IDEA.
Featherman, a local attorney, law professor and founder of the San Diego-based Peace Through Law Institute, agreed with his friend that Fraser has a special talent that might be used as an instrument for peace.
Fraser’s field is artificial intelligence, the high-tech, often arcane, computer-based milieu of expert systems. She can program machines to absorb, arrange and regurgitate information in ways the human mind--on its own--could never duplicate.
She makes use of such knowledge for the Navy, as a research psychologist for the Naval Ocean Systems Center. And now, at Featherman’s behest, her efforts are being aimed toward peace.
SALT Negotiator
Her acumen for using technology as an instrument for negotiation has attracted the attention of Ralph Earle II, chief U. S. negotiator at SALT II and national policy director of the Lawyers’ Alliance for Nuclear Arms Control. Earle has had one lengthy meeting with Fraser and Featherman, and more meetings are planned.
Fraser said Earle seemed skeptical at first but later conceded that expert systems could aid negotiations in ways that might represent a breakthrough. He pointed out, for instance, that knowing the history of a country is crucial in starting negotiations. Expert systems could help in accessing historical information--and insight--immediately, Earle said.
“Artificial intelligence involves the process of analyzing what people think,” Featherman said. “AI is kind of a broad phrase encompassing anything that allows a computer to work through and record a logical progression. Ultimately, it’s nothing more than thought and experience distilled and stored in a computer as data.
Possible Uses
“So why not use it for peace instead of war? Rather than using it to tell us how many missiles would work best here, why not use it to implement and verify treaties, to get people to talk with better information at their fingertips?”
Fraser said that, during the early ‘60s, the United States and Soviet Union reached a stalemate over on-site inspections of nuclear-test facilities. The United States wanted 12 to 20 on-site inspections in the U.S.S.R. The Soviet Union would accept only three.
Neither side conceded, negotiations ceased, and massive testing resumed.
“But the precise definition of what 12 to 20 inspections or alternatively three inspections meant was never broached by the negotiators after the initial disagreement,” Fraser said.
“For instance, did an inspection mean that one person would visit 12 places one time, or one place 12 times, or 30 people would visit three times. . . . Pursuing definition as a negotiating tactic may have kept the two sides talking, forestalling, or eventually avoiding, termination of the talks and resumptions of the tests. The principle might be represented in the computer as a rule that says, ‘If talks are stalemated, consider pursuing questions of definition in order to sustain them.’ ”
Fraser lives in a small, elegant La Jolla home full of Old World charm. Her music is classical. The pictures on the wall carry a faded, antique quality. Even the baronial-looking cat seems imported from another era.
She grew up in Lemon Grove and graduated from UC San Diego. She has worked for NOSC for three years and says she loves her job. But she considers peace an issue in her life--in everyone’s life--and said she yearns to use her expertise in bringing it about.
“We want to use expert systems as a model for conflict resolution,” she said. “Maybe we could understand what happens in gang wars, management-labor disputes or how best to handle arguments over water between Northern and Southern California. AI is the use of a computer to draw inferences based on the information you program into it. It uses words and symbols rather than numbers to produce information.
“In negotiations, a person is limited because, generally, they’re working by themselves. Humans can hold about seven things in their consciousness at any given time. Expert systems could be a memory jog. Such systems could never--would never--subvert or replace a person. After all, we’re the ones who put the information inside them.
“They’re intended as a tool--a powerful tool that mitigates the bias of human beings. . . . We think they could work for peace.”
