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WASHINGTON – The Chinese surveillance balloon that the Pentagon found flying over sensitive United States ballistic missile sites may be guided by advanced artificial intelligence (AI) technology, a US expert has said.
The Pentagon said the balloon was now heading eastwards over the central United States, adding it was not being shot down for safety reasons. The balloon was last spotted over Missouri and expected to reach America’s east coast near the Carolinas this weekend before passing out to the sea in the south-east, according to the BBC and CNN.
A second Chinese surveillance balloon was spotted over Latin America, the Pentagon said, a day after the first one over US skies prompted the scrapping of a rare trip to Beijing by US Secretary of State Antony Blinken.
Mr William Kim, a specialist in surveillance balloons at the Marathon Initiative think-tank in Washington, told AFP on Friday that balloons are a valuable means of observation that are difficult to shoot down.
Mr Kim said the first Chinese balloon looks like a normal weather balloon but with distinct characteristics. It has a quite large, visible “payload” – the electronics for guidance and collecting information, powered by solar panels.
And it appears to have advanced steering technologies that the US military has not yet put in the air.
AI has made it possible for a balloon, just by reading the changes in the air around it, to adjust its altitude to guide it to where it wants to go, Mr Kim said.
“What’s happened very recently with advances in AI is that you can have a balloon that… doesn’t need its own motion system. Merely by adjusting the altitude, it can control its direction.”
That could also involve radio communications from its home base, he said. But “if the point of it is to monitor (intercontinental ballistic missile) silos, which is one of the theories… you wouldn’t necessarily need to tell it to adjust its location”, he added.
Moments before Mr Blinken’s decision to cancel his trip – aimed at easing tensions between the two countries – China issued a rare statement of regret over the first balloon and blamed winds for pushing what it called a civilian airship into US airspace.
But President Joe Biden’s administration described it as a manoeuvrable “surveillance balloon”.
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