The entire idea of an “AI arms race” that we are losing to China is fear-mongering by those with a vested interest in defense spending, ie military industrial complex.
This is a human rights issue more than an arms race. The fact that SF is banning facial recognition tech while the Chinese state is going all in (as another commenter notes) is a win.
I think furthermore, not only is it fearmongering, it's actually wrong.
What the article calls AI is just machine learning. And America leads the way on this when it comes to cutting edge. Look at self driving cars.
It seems the article hinges on implicitly defining AI as adopting mass surveillance/freedom restricting tech.
In reality if America cares about winning the 'tech development war' (I think a better goal than the nebulous 'ai war') with China, it should be worried about improving it's education system. And working on reducing corruption (both in government spending and in private industry such as banking and health care) - In the end, it was education, freedom and efficiency that allowed the west to beat out totalitarian governments. Not the adoption of totalitarian systems of oppression.
Imagine the US trying to adopt the USSR's system to 'obtaining and classifying information' on dissidents since it was part of 'information technology'. I find the article to have a borderline fascist/anti-western-ideals of freedom undertone. Some people think in a way that seems to be completely lacking in the ability to learn from history.
"In the end, it was education, freedom and efficiency that allowed the west to beat out totalitarian governments."
What about the massive catastrophe that killed off tens of millions in the Soviet Union and devastated the country, while the US was left completely unscathed by comparison?
In many ways education in the Soviet Union was far ahead of the United States, particularly in mathematics.
Women were also far more equal to men in the Soviet Union, so in a way this is an example where there was more freedom in the Soviet Union than in the United States, since the roles for women in the US were far more restrictive and curtailed their potential to a far greater degree. The US was also one of the last countries in the world to outlaw slavery, and the lack of freedom that black people were suffered under segregation in the US had no equal in the Soviet Union at the time (though the USSR also had their own racism and discrimination against Jewish people).
The USSR suffered not just from a lack of freedom, but crucially from the concentration of power in to the hands of a highly paranoid and ruthless elite and secret police who killed tens of millions of their own citizens, along with a callousness towards the deaths of millions more in the redistribution of resources and the overhaul of society in a race towards modernization.
The USSR also had to face the efforts of a far wealthier and equally paranoid adversary that was determined to see it fail.
If there had been cooperation and mutual aid instead, if the USSR had suffered no worse than the US during WW2, and if it hadn't been saddled with bloodthirsty paranoid tyrants for leaders, the outcome might have been quite different.
3 ifs and one might. Let's see: If my grandmother was male and if she was catholic, she might be the pope. I only had to use two ifs to get to that one.
I'm really not sure what your point is.
Are you seriously arguing that overall there was more freedom in the USSR than in America? I just want to be totally sure I get where you are coming from. Because my post was the general freedom as in the literal definition of it: "the power or right to act, speak, or think as one wants without hindrance or restraint"
I said the greater freedom in America helped it win the cold war. Of course it is more nuanced than that. But that can literally be applied to everything and anything ever said - if someone said being outside jail is good or not being addicted to heroin is good... well its more nuanced... maybe someone would benefit from being in jail or from being a heroin addict... sure, but at some point you aren't really increasing understanding. You are just pedantically noting things that are obvious in a way that detracts from meaningful conversation.
It seemed to me you were arguing against my freedom point by trying to say America wasn't much more free than USSR. Since such a position seems so utterly disconnected from reality and history, I asked you to clarify your position, maybe I misunderstood.
I also asked what your point was, since I honestly can't see what you are trying to get at in the context of the conversation: should the US have more anti-freedom ML technology applied to mass surveillance and social control? Do you think that will help? Read the FA and opine, I'd be happy to hear a smart analysis. You seem to be able to do that, you seem quite smart. But picking at the edges of arguments without actually participating is kinda... detracting from the goal of conversation and moving towards ego boosting.
Also, even if you are smart, if I understood correctly that you honestly believe the USSR to be more free than the US in any significant manner based on the definition of freedom, then I'm not going to participate in this line of thought.
I've had a conversation once with someone I had just met. He mentioned 'dinosaur bones were placed there by the devil to trick us'. I asked if he meant it. With a straight face he said yes. You could say I laser focused on that, because after it, I never went beyond 'hows the weather' with him. He has every right to see it that way, I and many others have every right to think of him as slightly less 'there' and therefore avoid getting tangled with what we see as incoherent.
If you apply this logic to nuclear weapons, the inevitable conclusion is unilateral disarmament, followed by being conquered by those who didn't disarm. This kumbaya pacifism doesn't work in the real world and it's incredibly irresponsible to advocate it as a matter of policy. There absolutely is an AI arms race and we're losing it in part because of the naive utopianism of west coast tech activists who think that if we ban "bad" tech, nobody will use it.
From a pure cold war mentality AI is absolutely terrifying to me. We're right in the uncanny valley where AI for weapons systems is starting to get to the point where it can feasibly make human soldiers in some positions obsolete. Why do we want fighter pilots when AI can vastly outperform a human? AI doesn't break a sweat in extremely long mission durations, AI doesn't need a massive heavy cockpit and canopy to fly the plane, AI doesn't pass out at high G loads and can take negative Gs and lateral Gs just fine. AI can push jets right to the brink of what the airframe is capable of.
We already have drones that have dramatically lowered the costs of waging war. We don't need to put boots on the ground in a lot of cases where drone strikes are feasible. What happens when it's not just a reaper and we can put tanks and guns on the ground while only putting actual soldiers inside of some small maintenance and supply base to support the machines that are actually on the front lines? Would the American people care even less than they already do about e.g. Iraq and Afghanistan?
> From a pure cold war mentality AI is absolutely terrifying to me. We're right in the uncanny valley where AI for weapons systems is starting to get to the point where it can feasibly make human soldiers in some positions obsolete. Why do we want fighter pilots when AI can vastly outperform a human? AI doesn't break a sweat in extremely long mission durations, AI doesn't need a massive heavy cockpit and canopy to fly the plane, AI doesn't pass out at high G loads and can take negative Gs and lateral Gs just fine. AI can push jets right to the brink of what the airframe is capable of.
Yeah, that's why our plane systems are being designed as such.
We don't call "AI Fighters" "AI Fighters". We call them surface-to-air missiles, air-to-air missiles, and drones. For the case where a human needs to be close to support our "AIs" (aka: missiles and drones), we're creating F35 as nearby stealth supporter. Thats why the F35 isn't good at dogfights, its assumed that drones / missiles will take care of that sort of stuff in the future.
The dogfight race has been lost to air-to-air missiles. Humans can't take the kinds of Gs that a missile can do, you can't outrun something like that in a "fair" circumstance (outside of Blackbird-style "too high / too fast" situations).
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> We already have drones that have dramatically lowered the costs of waging war. We don't need to put boots on the ground in a lot of cases where drone strikes are feasible. What happens when it's not just a reaper and we can put tanks and guns on the ground while only putting actual soldiers inside of some small maintenance and supply base to support the machines that are actually on the front lines? Would the American people care even less than they already do about e.g. Iraq and Afghanistan?
It seems odd to say that war requires human cost in order to be important. Perhaps the Iraq and Afghanistan wars were considered failures not because of their (relatively low) human costs, but because the politics didn't work out in their favor.
The US has basically 2 geopolitical threats - the EU and China. Destabilising the middle east might have inconvenienced them and denied access to the oil reserves there.
Apart from that silver lining, the US's adventures in that region have been expensive failures that have presumably spawned a generation of hatred and fear, and provided a cover of distraction from issues that might actually matter (like dealing with a debt burden that is on par with the World-War II response, or the dissolution of civil liberties in response to a threat that was extremely mild by-the-numbers). And the sheer futility and pointlessness of all the death, maiming and redrawing of maps is just breathtaking.
Imagine a world where political issues were dealt with starting with the largest and working to smallest. In this world, every debate would be mentioning the fact that entire countries are being persecuted for no particular gain. Mysteriously, this issue is not one of the most hotly debated issues (although it does get attention). Eg, when Trump talked about withdrawing the last few troops from Syria that was considered controversial. Would that more important people had courted more controversy before Afghanistan and Iraq.
All that is the long into to the point: I think GP meant that more American voters need to be exposed to war to generate the appropriate political response. The whole last 20 years of American military action turned out to be no-brainer bad ideas and people are still acting like they were defensible in some sense. The major anti-war voice in the Democrat primaries seems to be a veteran, which suggests that exposure to the situation on the ground helps form anti-war sentiment. If everything is automated, more idiots will think that the last 20 years of military activity are somehow appropriate and not crazy and less sane people will have the needed exposure to argue with them.
Your examples aren't arguing AI, they are arguing software.
> Would the American people care even less than they already do
I don't think that's as much about the advancement of technology so fewer civilians know/think about the war. I think more the psychological component of the military (propaganda/PR, crafting messaging and wording that legislators use, choice to assist movies which glorify the US military or not assist those which are critical, choice not to publish images of US coffins in Dover[1]) and how politicians and media symbiotically weaponize the "us versus them" to drum up support, FUD, and urgency for non-necessary "wars" (in quotes because we haven't declared war since WW2... Korea, Vietnam, Kosovo, Iraq 1, Afghanistan, Iraq 2, et al were "police action"s or military "use of force" actions -- which further proves my point).
I think we need to make parents sign their daughters up for "Selective Service" (again with the propagandized terminology) if the ultimate goal is to get voting civilians to care about ending unnecessary wars.
I'm unsure of if the American government is just extremely discreet in their development of cyber warfare technology or America just isn't investing in technology as much as other countries. But it seems like even Russia is beating us...
Just look at our voting count machines. You think something like that would be treated with extreme priority and would have a lot more security around it than it does.
> Just look at our voting count machines. You think something like that would be treated with extreme priority and would have a lot more security around it than it does.
If the priority was to build a good system. However, powerful government factions think that all government development must be farmed wholesale to private business, because of a twisted ideological belief in the market. Those private businesses are ruled by the ideology that shareholder value is the ultimate and only good, so they slap their products together as cheaply as possible.
The result of that toxic stew is that we can't have nice things.
Given the size of the US military budget and their propensity for black projects (which given they are a democracy they kind of have to do since almost everything in the regular military gets released/leaked) I'd be positively amazed if they didn't have a serious black program for this stuff.
Given the risk/reward and how cheap it is to do compared to a single B2 or a handful of F35's at least.
No people just don't assume very obvious defense spending is the US doing so. SV was built in its very beginning was built for the US army. It still is with startups like Palantír.
For the voting machines you have to remember a large part of the US political class have coinciding interests with Russia here, they want those machines to be hacked.
If there was an actual cyber war I am confident the US can hold it's own if it wants to.
There is not a single piece of technology, not a single 'problem solved' that necessarily requires Deep Learning this very day.
Some Voice and Translation apps are improved by it, but not by that much.
Yes, this will change over time, particularly as things like 'computer vision' are effectively more dependant on it - and -that tech will enable things like driverless cars ... but it's still overstated.
There is an ever growing army of AI researchers putting out stuff, and they will all improve our lives marginally, but I'm doubtful that AI in and of itself will be the thing that really creates change.
I suggest that the 'future robot that cleans your toilet and makes a ham sandwich' will be 10% AI and 90% advances in every other kind of technology. I'll bet that only isolated systems of such robots are primarily AI driven (i.e. vision, motor control for fluid movement etc.) and the rest is just plain old software.
I do t know about the all-in-all situation, but as an anecdote I had to return a mid-range iRobot Roomba because it didn’t work near as well as expected. The Xiaomi I bought for half the price worked excellently though.
The reason? I’m sure the mechanics are mostly the same, but the AI on the Xiaomi seems way better so it actually figures out a good route throughout the house in a way the Roomba never did, and after 30 minutes it is done, as opposed to still trying to find the way out of the kitchen like the Roomba was.
Is there any evidence in all of human history that demonstrates that a "brute force, no rules, unlimited resource" approach ever does anything but eventually collapse upon itself?
IMO the indigenous/native populations of North America being almost wiped off the continent is one example. "Brute force / no rules" worked in that regard for the colonialists / settlers.
It depends on where in the AI lifecycle we are ... I believe we are still barely scratching the surface and mostly using it to solve old problems. This ‘race’ could just help improve the field enough that we can get to some real fun stuff!
the Party has given China’s top four facial recognition firms access to its database of over 1.4 billion citizen photos. One well-informed venture capitalist in this arena estimates that Chinese facial recognition firms have one million times more images than their U.S. counterparts.
That doesn't sound right. 1.4b photos is nothing compared to facebook and google.
Facebook + Instagram has 2.3b + 1b active users and each one uploads tons of photos. Facebook uses these for facial recognition.
Google owns Android (2.5b active users).. and if you've enabled face auth, Android is sending your photo to google to be analyzed. They could also use Google Photos and Youtube videos (although I don't know that they do).
Amazon owns Rekognition.. and if you're using it, they're taking the photos you process with it and using it for training. They're used by law enforcement and a variety of companies, and I'd be willing to bet they have more than 1.4b photos.
These are probably better data sets for training too.. since they show people in the real world vs China's ID photo database of people posing for a photo.
facial recognition is a particularly weird example too. the data is skewed from the onset when your image sources are pretty much all han chinese. This has already been a problem in the west with most photos being of white people, but china would have this issue to a far greater degree.
> So while San Francisco recently banned facial recognition technologies, the Party has given China’s top four facial recognition firms access to its database of over 1.4 billion citizen photos. One well-informed venture capitalist in this arena estimates that Chinese facial recognition firms have one million times more images than their U.S. counterparts.
If Chinese companies have access to billions of images and that's a million times more than their Western counterparts, Western companies are limited to small datasets in the thousands. That doesn't make sense. Microsoft used to hand out the millions of images in their Celeb dataset for free, and Facebook can use every image their users ever posted.
> There’s no off-the-shelf description for China’s political and economic system.
> This system-with-no-name has been extraordinarily successful, with more than 800 million people raised out of absolute poverty since the 1980s.
> There is a strong claim that this scale of growth, sustained for such an unprecedented number of people over such a number of years, is the greatest economic achievement in human history.
> Since Deng Xiaoping instituted the policy of ‘reform and opening’ in the early 1980s, there has been a general view in the West that the gradual encroachment of capitalism in China would lead to a turn towards democratic government. This reflected a deeply held, largely unexamined belief that capitalism and democracy are interlinked.
> The Chinese government favours the doctrine of ‘cyber-sovereignty’, in which countries have control over their own versions of the internet. Kai Strittmatter was for many years the Beijing correspondent for the Süddeutsche Zeitung, and his excellent "We Have Been Harmonised" is an eye-opening account of this issue. (‘Harmonised’ is a euphemism for ‘censored’.)
> > The days when the party eyed the internet with fear and anxiety are long gone. The regime has not only lost its fear; it has learned to love new technologies. The CCP believes it can use big data and artificial intelligence to create steering mechanisms that will catapult its economy into the future and make its apparatus crisis-proof. At the same time, it intends to create the most perfect surveillance state the world has ever seen.
> In 2013, an amazing paper from the highest reaches of the CCP, catchily known as ‘Document Number Nine’, or ‘Communiqué on the Current State of the Ideological Sphere’, came to light. (The journalist who leaked it, Gao Yu, was sentenced to seven years in prison and is currently under house arrest.) Document Number Nine warned of ‘the following false ideological trends, positions and activities’: ‘promoting Western constitutional democracy’; ‘promoting “universal values”’; ‘promoting civil society’; ‘promoting neoliberalism’; ‘promoting the West’s idea of journalism, challenging China’s principle that the media and publishing system should be subject to party discipline’; ‘promoting historical nihilism’ (which means contradicting the party’s view of history); ‘questioning Reform and Opening and the socialist nature of socialism with Chinese characteristics’. The paper, which is cogent and clear, takes direct aim at the core values of Western democracy, and explicitly identifies them as the enemies of the party.1 It sees the internet as a crucial forum for defeating these enemies. The conclusion speaks of the need to ‘conscientiously strengthen management of the ideological battlefield’, and especially to ‘strengthen guidance of public opinion on the internet’ and ‘purify the environment of public opinion on the internet’.
> Document Number Nine is thought to have been either directly written by, or under the auspices of, President Xi Jinping. It marked a new turn in the history of China, and quite possibly the history of the world: the moment at which a powerful nation-state looked at the entire internet’s direction of travel – towards openness, interconnection, globalisation, the free flow of information – and decided to reverse it.
This is a human rights issue more than an arms race. The fact that SF is banning facial recognition tech while the Chinese state is going all in (as another commenter notes) is a win.