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March 24, 2004
Richard Clarke Robot Fools Bush Administration Secret Program to Create Artificial Officials Revealed Carnegie Melon University said last night that the Richard Clarke who worked as a counter terrorism advisor for the Bush Administration and then wrote a highly critical book is not Richard Clarke at all, but an advanced robot developed as part of a government funded artificial intelligence project. "We can confirm that the Richard Clarke who worked for the Bush Administration and wrote the book 'Against All Enemies: Inside America's War on Terror' is a robot," Dr. Waylon Zebarowski, professor of computer science, announced last night at a hastily called news conference in Pittsburgh. "The Clarke robot, which we know by its laboratory name of Z-80 Crypto-07, is obviously an astonishing success and shows just how far we have come with artificial intelligence," Dr. Zebarowski said. "Z-80 Crypto-07 held a very responsible position at the highest levels of the government, functioned at a high level of cognitive and emotional stability and even left its job, wrote a sensitive and evocative book and went on the talk show circuit, all without anyone realizing they were dealing with a machine." Dr. Zebarowski said that a "secret government agency" that funds his work, and which he refused to name, ordered him late yesterday to break almost a decade of secrecy and reveal the existence of the Automated Government Official Project, or AGOP. He said he argued vehemently against going public, because he wanted to see "just how far an artificial intelligence program could carry a robot on an increasingly complex task." "Regrettably, I had to bow to their wishes. They are the masters," he said. White House officials, who spoke last night on the condition they not be identified, said the Administration had been vaguely aware of the AGOP program, run by one of the "black box" agencies, meaning a spy agency like the Central Intelligence Agency or the National Security Agency. The officials said they had no idea the AGOP program had become so advanced. "Many of us felt from day one that something wasn't quite right with Clarke," a senior Bush Administration official said. "When you look back, you can think of times he seemed a bit mechanical. He could sound rather disembodied when he spoke. But then he resigned after two years and we forgot about him." Clarke's book published this week created a firestorm within the White House. It is highly critical of how the Bush Administration conducted the war on terror, both leading up to the September, 2001 terrorist attacks and the aftermath. White House staff members scoured Clarke's past, looking for means to discredit him. Numerous members of the Administration hit the talk show circuit to rebut the book's claims. The White House official interviewed last night refused to reveal how the Administration discovered that the Richard Clarke who worked for it was a robot. The assumption is that intense pressure was brought on the intelligence community to reveal the secret robot program. Dr. Zebarowski refused to say whether the Richard Clarke who has been defending his book in the last few days and dodging the Bush Administration firestorm is the robot, or the real Richard Clarke. "I leave that for you to decide," he said. "Surely the news media can get to the bottom of that." Dr. Zebarowski also refused to explain what had happened to the real Richard Clarke if, in fact, a robot has been masquerading as him for the last three years. "Surely, the news media can get to the bottom of that one, too," he said. Dr. Zebarowski said that Bush Administration suggestions made late last night that former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill was also an AGOP robot were untrue. "Our robots are much more lifelike and mentally agile than that," he said. Carnegie Melon officials said that the AGOP program began a decade ago to create automated tax return auditors for the Internal Revenue Service. That project was abandoned when it proved to computationally complex for computers running artificial intelligence programs. A simpler project, creating a robot that could hold senior official positions at the White House, was then begun. Copyright William Stockton & Smithtown Creek Productions |
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