Human Performance Augmentation in Context: Using Artificial Intelligence to Deal with Variability—An Example from Narrative Influence

Bringing together humans and machines in a performance-improving symbiosis requires giving our digital assistants, robots and other artificial teammates the ability to better understand the states of their human colleagues. In this paper, we discuss how technology can be used to assess human reactions to information, a critical technology development both for enabling the development of influence assessment tools, and for human-machine teaming. Developing technology suites to detect and exert influence is of paramount importance in a world where kinetic and non-kinetic effects interact to produce final outcomes in the national security domain. We discuss development of a comprehensive technology suite to allow the US and its Allies to detect and disrupt radicalization processes in multiple media; the suite is distinguished by its use of human-in-the-loop cognitive testing to allow rapid retailoring of information activity, and could give military personnel entirely new capabilities to understand and influence the information environment.