The UpTake: Google's chairman thinks future terrorist fighters will more clearly divide duties with computers, and he's putting his money where his mouth is.
Upstart Business Journal Technology & Innovation Editor
Michael del Castillo
Tuesday, March 11, 2014
Eric Schmidt’s New Digital Age grant today selected C4ADS, a startup that fights Somali pirate networks, Russian arms-smuggling rings and other illicit actors, to take home part of a $1 million prize.
“Five billion people will encounter the Internet for the first time in the next decade,” the Google chairman said in a statement. “With this surge in the use of technology around the world—much of which we in the West take for granted—I felt it was important to encourage organizations that are using it to solve some of our most pressing problems.”
The Washinton D.C.-based C4ADS (Center for Advanced Defense Studies) is a 501 (c) (3) nonprofit that uses big data derived from public records and “traditional” investigative techniques to fight arms traffickers, prevent conflicts in emerging markets, fight “transnational” crime, and find peaceful resolutions to conflicts to facilitate state-building, according to their site.
C4ADS' services are remarkably familiar to Palantir, a very for-profit endeavor that blurs the lines between private and public sector. Interestingly, the non-profit lists Palantir among its partners.
"Our organizational structure, culture, projects, methodology, tools, and personnel are deliberately selected to fill a need that production cycle-driven government bureaucracies and profit-driven corporations do not fill," wrote David Johnson, C4ADS's executive director, in an email to Upstart Business Journal. The grant will be used to support projects in the Illicit Networks and Enablers of Conflict Program fighting shell companies that deal in illicit goods and services.
The New Digital Age program was established to highlight organizations that use technology to counter the global challenges Schmidt and Google Ideas director Jared Cohen write about in their book with the same name, including government-sponsored censorship, disaster relief and crime fighting.
In the book, Schmidt concludes:
In the future, computers and humans will increasingly split duties according to what each does well. We will use human intelligence for judgement, intuition, nuance, and uniquely human interactions; we will use computer power for infinite memory, infinitely fast processing and actions limited by human biology. We’ll use computers to run predictive correlations from huge volumes of data to track and catch terrorists, but how they are interrogated and handled thereafter will remain the purview of humans and their laws.
C4ADS and the nine other companies that won the prize—from the United States and abroad—all seem to be attacking this problem of preparing for a future where technology helps better fight for justice and people better implement it.
The New Digital Age grants are funded through a private donation by Eric and Wendy