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Asia Times
10-06-2025
- Politics
- Asia Times
Time to put Elon Musk back to work
In 1943, Sidney Hook published The Hero in History: A Study in Limitation and Possibility , a book that remains controversial but fascinating. Hook wanted to know just how vital a hero is to a nation's history. There is no simple answer. In the US, we have had many heroes including George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. But Washington could have lost the Revolutionary War had he failed at Trenton and Monmouth, after he was defeated in New York and Harlem Heights. And Lincoln's generals could have seized Washington and put Lincoln in jail, splitting the US in half. Even short of a coup, Lincoln could have lost the 1864 election to General George McClellan, who would have cut a deal with Confederate President Jefferson Davis and his former colleague, Robert E. Lee. Great scientists can also be heroes but are not always well-treated. The cryptographic genius Alan Turing, whose work decoding Nazi encrypted messages helped win World War II, should have been honored. Instead, he was convicted of homosexuality in 1952 and sentenced to harsh chemical treatments to 'cure' him of his 'disease.' The brutality of the so-called cure aside, his self-esteem was crushed. Alan Turing building the first computer called the Turing Machine. He took cyanide and died in 1954. J. Robert Oppenheimer, testifying. J. Robert Oppenheimer, another top scientist, assembled one of the greatest scientific and industrial teams at Los Alamos. But he was persecuted by the Atomic Energy Commission on grounds that he had communist associations (which he did) which rendered him unreliable (never proven). The fact that his work gave the US the atomic bomb, which saved tens of thousands of American lives, was disregarded. Oppenheimer lost his security clearances and was humiliated and his service to his country ended. The truth is that Oppenheimer was an opponent of building a hydrogen bomb, which Edward Teller called the Super. Pulling Oppenheimer's clearances got him out of the way. Heroes with social and political problems are nothing new. Werner von Braun, the brilliant German rocket scientist, ran the Nazi V-1 and V-2 operations at Peenemunde during World War II. As the Tom Lehrer song laments, 'The widows and orphans in old London town owe their large pensions to Werner von Braun.' Von Braun was a Nazi, and he ruthlessly employed slave labor at Peenemunde and elsewhere to build his weapons. Von Braun at Peenemunde. He was recruited as part of the notorious Paperclip program to the United States and became the key Army rocket scientist at the US Army Redstone Arsenal. Later he headed NASA's Saturn V rocket development. He thus was a hero for the Nazis and a hero for the Americans. Sidney Hook (1902-1989). This brings us to Elon Musk, today America's greatest industrialist. He is in a bitter quarrel with President Trump, and his future relationship to the Trump administration is uncertain. While Musk, like other heroes, has his good and bad points, he is needed to help protect American national security, or to put it another way, Elon Musk is a national security asset and probably meets the criteria laid down by Sydney Hook: that is, we need him to save our defense manufacturing system, which is unacceptably costly, slow, inefficient and can't keep up with demand in times of crisis. So far Musk has done some incredible things that are changing the security landscape. Space-X, for example, has changed the space launch industry by redefining how rockets are launched and recovered. Prior to Musk, a multimillion-dollar rocket launch was a onetime affair. Again, quoting Tom Lehrer on Von Braun, 'Once the rockets go up, who cares where they come down? That's not my department, says Werner von Braun.' NASA has long taken the same approach. Launch the rockets and let them, once used, crash into the sea. But Musk thought rockets should be reusable. He devised ways for booster rockets to successfully land either on ships (one of them is named 'Just Read the Instructions') or on land. The recovered boosters could be refurbished and used again – one of them (so far) as many as nine times. This capability, along with devising a mass-manufacturing system for rockets, enabled Musk to put up the Starlink constellation, a highly innovative broadband communications platform. He already has launched 8,877 satellites into orbit (6,715 currently operating) and plans to put as many as 42,000 in orbit. There is no space manufacturing and launch company anywhere in the world that can launch that many spacecraft. A Falcon 9 rocket liftoff off from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California on June 4, 2025, carrying 27 Starlink satellites. It was the 500th orbital launch of a rocket in SpaceX's Falcon family. Image: SpaceX. Starlink has already proven vital to warfighting. Without Starlink, Ukraine would be without effective battlefield communications and would be limited in the range of its drones and other weapons. Because there are so many satellites, jamming Starlink is difficult, maybe ultimately impossible. The slow-moving Pentagon is beginning to figure this out. Space-X is also of great importance if the Defense Department actually develops and deploys a space-based missile defense system. Thousands of spacecraft will be needed for Golden Dome, which may be the only way to counter hypersonic long-range missiles. Space defense has been talked about since the early 1980s, but one of the reasons projects such as Brilliant Pebbles never got off the ground (literally and figuratively) is because the lift capability to do it was missing. Musk has solved that problem. SpaceX's drone ship 'A Shortfall of Gravitas' returns to port on Aug. 31, 2021, after its first successful Falcon 9 rocket landing. Phoro: Amy Thompson / While Space-X and Starlink establish Musk's bona fides as a national security asset, that is far from everything. Remember that Musk's inventions started out as civilian projects. Starlink was to bring broadband Internet to users around the world inexpensively, without any clumsy and costly local infrastructure. Space-X was to launch Starlink and other commercial spacecraft. The planned Mars mission, if he is ultimately successful, is not a defense project. But the place to look toward the future is another commercial project, and that is Tesla. Tesla is a car (and truck) company featuring electric vehicles and battery power packs. Musk manufactures his cars, trucks and batteries in what he called Gigafactories. A Gigafactory is a highly integrated manufacturing site, using lots of robots and advanced processes, capable of producing electric vehicles and batteries. Tesla, which invented the Gigafactory idea, has six active Gigafactories. They're in Fremont, California; Sparks, Nevada; Austin, Texas; and Buffalo, New York as well as Berlin and Shanghai. The idea of Gigafactories, at least for batteries, is spreading around the world rapidly: Today there are some 240 of them worldwide making batteries. It is noteworthy that, while electric battery and automobile manufacturing is focused on Gigafactories, this industrial idea has not gained a real foothold in defense manufacturing. Today, defense companies may have state-of-the-art technology, but their industrial methods don't measure up even to the standards of production achieved in World War II. Marietta, Georgia, bomber plant boss James V. Carmichael (C, with cane) poses with a B29. Photo: Kenan History Center at the Atlanta History Center The missing factor is consolidating certain types of defense manufacturing in efficient factories that can produce a variety of components commonly needed for equipping our armed forces. For example, tactical rockets (small, medium, and large) could be consolidated in a Gigafactory with defense companies owning a share in the business. The advantages would be profound, including a lower cost of production, the ability to switch from one model to another, a consolidated and reliable supply chain (much of it brought in-house) and design commonality, making manufacturing easier and more efficient. There are many categories where a Gigafactory would make sense. Some examples: armored vehicles, ammunition production, guns of all calibers, drones, 'black boxes' (electronics), sensors. The best man to figure all this out is Elon Musk, because he has been immensely successful doing it at Tesla and Space-X and because the current defense industrial establishment cannot do it on its own. We have already learned from the costly and prolonged Ukraine war that our industrial base is not able to keep up with demand. We also have learned that our efforts are feeding an expensive and inefficient defense industrial system operating deep in the industrial past. We cannot afford to keep shelling out vast amounts of taxpayer money (this year more than $1 trillion) to buy fewer and fewer weapons, often delivered late and with serious flaws. Because of the uncertainties in defense procurement and the general lack of automation (some munitions factories are 100 years old), retaining workers is a challenge and there are severe skill shortages across the defense landscape. When you see a sign behind home plate at Yankee's stadium that reads, 'Build Submarines,' you understand there is an employment crisis in the industry. It would make sense for President Trump to bring Elon Musk back to government, make sure he has the right access and security clearances and put him to work reinventing America's defense industry. Stephen Bryen is a special correspondent to Asia Times and former US deputy undersecretary of defense for policy. This article, which originally appeared on his Substack newsletter Weapons and Strategy, is republished with permission.
Hans India
08-05-2025
- Science
- Hans India
Integrating human cognition & learning skills catalyst for the future of Artificial Intelligence
Artificial Intelligence is often considered the highlight of technological advancements in the 21st century. The impact of this particular technology is being compared with watershed moments in human history, like the Turing Machine of Bletchley Park, or inventions in the scale of the first steam engine, electricity or even the discovery of the wheel. The public release of AI has caused much innovation in recent years, however, the glaring limitations of Generative AI (GenAI) have caused widespread discussions. It is imperative to understand that while we may think that the pinnacle of success regarding AI development is upon us, the truth is that AI development is at a very nascent stage. However, with the limited capability that AI has now, it has been made clear the unprecedented development it can go through, opening up new horizons irrespective of functionality. GenAI can make complex calculations in a matter of seconds, interact with humans in a predetermined capacity, recognize trends & images, automate tasks, and learn and adapt to new data — however, it remains incapable of critical thinking, autonomous actions and general proactivity. These latter capabilities remain the cornerstone of AI development efforts across the world, as these capabilities lead to integrating human cognition and learning skills that are considered the catalyst of the future of AI in general. Is GenAI lacking? There is a fundamental definition of what GenAI can and cannot do. For the uninitiated, the objective of Generative AI's functionality entails drafting automated content such as text, images, audio, and video. Large Language Models (LLMs), an extension of GenAI's capability, are aimed at understanding and generating human-like linguistic decisions. The AI models that are available in the public domains are a balanced mixture of GenAI and LLMs, such as OpenAI's ChatGPT, Google's Gemini and many more. They excel at creating content, interact with operators for diverse queries, and are trained using massive amounts of data that have been sourced through the internet. While these AI models have their own functionality, their operationality remains limited, especially for complex operations that require critical thinking, human cognition & learning skills. This highlights the veracity of the question of whether GenAI is lacking in regards to what it was intended to do. The simpler answer to this would be both yes and no, considering AI development remains a continuous process and the complex processes that require human cognition and critical thinking, are not part of GenAI's intended usage. If we go deeper, we would understand that AI development remains a multidimensional aspect, with Agentic AI being the solution to completing cognitive tasks. The ongoing development process focuses on the development of Agentic AI, as the global emphasis is to automate tasks to cognitive technology that is able to make decisions autonomously and proactively. Why Agentic AI? While many perceive it as a complex question, it is the opposite in reality. As the world comes to understand the impact AI could have on human civilization, it has also understood that it cannot take place at the current capacity of GenAI. Artificial Intelligence, as the name suggests, requires to mimic or replicate at levels, the intricacy of human intelligence, creativity, originality and proactiveness. What happens when we are in charge of shopping for groceries? We purchase different grocery items based on what is required, what is cheap, nutritious and tasty. This is done by making human intelligence the foundation of cognitive actions, which helps us to understand what is required at the moment's financial and health capacity. With the development of Agentic AI, the world is looking to integrate this cognitive capability that makes us inherently intelligent, and capable of making autonomous decisions. World governments and the private sector have identified this gap between the capabilities of GenAI and Agentic AI proactively and have been working tirelessly to continue this development process. It is imperative to create AI technologies that are sufficiently equipped with human cognitive and learning skills to be able to make inroads in complex tasks. The horizon of usage of Agentic AI remains limitless — from space travel or medical innovation to household chores, agentic AI could become the driving force for task automation, leaving humankind to engage in more strategic work that enables humankind to drive growth where it matters. In the meanwhile, as we learn from our experiences, agentic AI could, theoretically, update itself to become more aligned with human requirements that change daily, positioning it as one of the enablers of our growth story as a species. Future Outlook Agentic AI is no longer a theoretical possibility, but a reality that we come across every day in some form. From customer service to coding, initial models of Agentic AI are already being used across the world, with significant developmental work going on in the back to make it more susceptible to human cognition. However, the primary goal is to make it stand out among humans by using sophisticated reasoning and iterative planning, aspects that will enable it to address multi-step challenges and tasks, while solving them through proactive measures. In the coming years, it is expected to become one of the driving forces of technological success stories, becoming a core part of human functionalities that go beyond basic tasks like content creation and interaction — leading to a new avenue of unprecedented progress. (The author is Founder & CEO of GUVI Geek Networks)
