Data Scientists Say They’ve Developed Algorithms to Predict the Next Coup Attempt

Data scientists who have already been tracking political violence around the world are retooling their efforts to predict American insurrection, but the same tech could also be used for bad ends.

According to The Washington Post, a cottage industry has sprung up around predicting political violence on American soil ever since supporters of then-outgoing President Donald Trump invaded the US Capitol on January 6, 2021.

The Post notes that the machine learning behind this type of modeling has existed for a while, but has been focused on countries like the Ukraine or Turkey, where coup attempts and general political unrest are more commonplace.

This type of modeling relies on the idea that warning signs will present themselves, and that if artificial intelligence can be trained to recognize them, researchers may be able to act as canaries.

The University of Central Florida-based CoupCast and the armed conflict location and event data project have had a good track record, with the latter warning in October 2020 that there was an increased risk.

The Pentagon, the CIA, and the State Department are already using artificial intelligence to predict political upheaval overseas, according to a report. The Department of Homeland Security and the FBI are two of the most important agencies tasked with monitoring domestic terrorism.

Any kind of political monitoring that is being done by governments is going to raise ethical concerns. Jonathan Bellish, the executive director of CoupCast, told the WaPo that he was concerned that these kinds of tools could be used to quash peaceful protest. Jonathan Powell, an assistant professor who works on the project at its current home, told the paper that such possibilities present a real and scary concern.

There is a nagging fact that human behavior cannot be predicted by computers.

It is compelling to consider the applications for artificial intelligence that could guess where and when the next coup attempt might happen, be it in countries with higher rates of political violence or in countries that are more stable.

Data scientists and governments are failing to learn the lessons of sci-fi classics like "Minority Report" and overestimating how smart their AIs really are, which isn't cause to celebrate.

The battle to prevent another January 6 features a new weapon.

There is more on the subject of machine learning.

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