A.I. vs. Human Spies - Guess who wins

Human spies will soon be relics of the past, and the CIA knows it. Dawn Meyerriecks, the Agency’s deputy director for technology development, recently told an audience at an intelligence conference in Florida the CIA was adapting to a new landscape where its primary adversary is a machine, not a foreign agent.

Meyerriecks, speaking to CNN after the conference, said other countries have relied on AI to track enemy agents for years. She went on to explain the difficulties encountered by current CIA spies trying to live under an assumed identity in the era of digital tracking and social media, indicating the modern world is becoming an inhospitable environment to human spies.

But the CIA isn’t about to give up...

Today’s spies have the same problem as yesterday’s: the need to be invisible. What’s changed is the adversary. Instead of fooling people with fake documents and well-told lies, agents have to fool computers capable of picking out a single face in a crowd.

According to Meyerriecks at least 30 countries have the capability to do this with current CCTV camera systems...

We’ve always thought spies, like James Bond, had the coolest gadgets. Now they’re being replaced by them. more