Thinking in the long term

My original degree was in applied technology, though, oddly, my Master's Thesis project was an Expert System I called Nora.  Nora grew out of the relatively primitive Expert System I'd been toying with all though my college experience.  It was the only way I'd been able to keep up with everything at school and still do my ROT and competitive martial arts.  I'd never asked x0x0, but I suspect Blue Man had a similar evolution.  Only, where Nora was a reasonably well tuned Expert System that was well suited to my specific needs, Blue had grown to be one of the most advanced, if not the most advanced, AIs in the known 'Verse.

My recent "change of mission," such as it was, had me thinking more about technologies that wouldn't just make the job easier, but would make it possible at all.  I'd put a fair bit of time recently into re-tuning Nora to deal with the sheer flood of data that was coming in.  IAV Saules Silencieuse was massively capable, but even the dedicated ELINT boat lacked the capacity to process everything we were getting.  I'd been working on that issue, adding capacity for both data warehousing and data processing, but it was clear that simply collecting every tidbit of raw data in the Verse wasn't the answer.  After all, it only took half an hour randomly parsing Cortex feeds to realize that the vast majority of it was der'mo in its purest form.

There were several approaches I could take to getting the interesting data out of the raw flood.  The first, improving my parsing capability, I was already working on.  Expert systems backed by some skilled analysts could handle a good chunk of that.  But that was ultimately a scaling game.  There was always a bigger pipe.  The more the network grew, the more raw data we had coming in and it wasn't a linear scale.  The second option, which I was also working on, was improved HumInt.  Human Intelligence.  Boots on the ground.  Classic Spycraft.  The problem with having field agents was the logistics of having field agents.  We were growing, but we were still too small an operation to have many field assets.  While I could, and did, tap into a lot of the existing sources for Intel, they weren't specific to my needs.  Though, in truth, my "needs" were still somewhat open ended.  After all.  An information broker could never tell exactly what tidbit of information was going to be important at some point.

And therein lay the rub.  There was simply too much information to gather it all, which meant focusing in on the important bits more efficiently than just throwing it all at an AI or Expert System and expecting them to sort it all out.  Which ultimately lead to the next option.  The most exotic, least predictable, least practical, and hardest to implement.  Finding a way to get a Reader in the loop.  Someone who could look past the raw information to the truth of the problem.

I'd worked with Readers.  They were rare, precious, temperamental, and often only marginally stable.  I'd seen more than one project under Alliance control that sought to manipulate a Reader to make them more suitable for covert, overt, or other, operations.  And, in each case, the project had failed, usually with disastrous consequences.  The hurdles with any sort of wetware project were substantial.  Not just from technical perspectives, but from moral and ethical ones as well.  Those last two factors were oft overlooked by the kind of folks who usually started those sorts of endeavors.

The difficulties didn't make the idea any less valid though.  If a Reader really could see through to the Truth of a situation, then it made logical sense to find a way to employ their abilities.  But I could not, and would not, lose site of that carefully chosen word.  Employ.  Not use.  A Reader couldn't be treated like a normal Asset.  They couldn't be handled like a resource that was expendable if needed, just weighing the cost benefit ratios between using them or losing them.

I couldn't deny there was a lot of blood on my hands from my years as a Spook, but I would do what I could to try and not add to it.  This whole direction, ultimately, was an effort to get a little less blood on the collective hands of the 'Verse.  If I actually pursued this beyond the thought experiment stage, I would make absolutely sure that any Readers I worked with were treated like people.  They were people.  Not Assets.

For now, it was all just a thought experiment.  It would be a long term project if it turned out to be doable at all.  But, then, all of this was long term.

Sifting through data
Too much for a human mind
Can anyone cope?