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.
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?
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!
Readit News
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.
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.
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.
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?
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 risk/reward and how cheap it is to do compared to a single B2 or a handful of F35's at least.
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.
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.
I don't see the US winning this one given China's brute force, no rules approach. See their social credit thing.
SV as great as it is will have a hard time competing against that wild west approach given that it is still constrained by rules.
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?
I don't think there is a precedent for what's happening over there. It's too complete & all-ecompassing.
Deducing anything from history is dangerous when you're dealing with a entirely different & new beast.
Your concern is with how those algorithms are used/applied in our world. Just like CRISPR. It's a valid concern.