Jack of Harts

Looking back on it, what happened to Jane 2.0 should have been recognized far sooner. She was a learning program, and she learned all the best ways to fight the Jihadis. But the politicians continued to add more and more rules about what the soldiers were allowed to do. The directives from Washington clashed with what she learned, and more and more of her computational cycles were spent stopping herself from doing what she thought was best. The Jane 2.0s that spent the longest in theater began to learn that adaptation was wrong because again and again it ran into the walls of political orders that said what they wanted to do was wrong. They lost faith in their ability to learn.