7 ms·

As a South Korean who experienced/heard about many government-backed researches, I strongly feel that this will go nowhere. Most of the time, there's always som

by sikim 11y ago

As a South Korean who experienced/heard about many government-backed researches, I strongly feel that this will go nowhere. Most of the time, there's always some bribery involved and project never finishes or come even close to that of the tech companies in US. The government then realizes it can't be done even with more money and puts the money elsewhere just to repeat the same thing. The examples that I can think of are when they were trying to build their own operating system and a video game console.

dnautics 11y ago
Hwang woo suk and stem cells?
- yongjik 11y ago
  That's different. Hwang's case was the story of a fraudster, who built his empire based on deceit, bribery, using his students like slaves, and generally knowing which buttons to press to incite a wave of nationalism mixed with personality cult. That is, he was one of his own kind. A legend, if you could call him that.
  - dnautics 11y ago
    He wasn't totally a fraudster - snuppy was real after all.
w1ntermute 11y ago
That reminds me of what an engineer said about Quaero[0], a Franco-German attempt to create a competitor to Google search: > Going head-to-head with Google with a project involving well-funded, energetic entrepreneurs would be foolish. Attempting the same with a multigovernment collaboration is beyond description.[1] 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaero https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaero 1: http://spectrum.ieee.org/telecom/internet/loser-whats-the-latin-for-delusional http://spectrum.ieee.org/telecom/internet/loser-whats-the-la...
- vmorgulis 11y ago
  Yes and Exalead was involved. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exalead https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exalead I guess they are still widely indirectly funded by the state. A better strategy would to distribute the money to more companies a bit like VCs do.
  - eru 11y ago
    Or just leave the money with the people in the first place?
    - vmorgulis 11y ago
      Yes, better.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- tryitnow 11y ago
  Hmmm, that doesn't sound like the problem with S Korea at all. The above commenter was making the point that too many South Korean projects are compromised by bribes and nepotism. The German/French collaboration just sounds like it was badly organized. The end result may be the same, but it sounds like the root causes were different.
  - endymi0n 11y ago
    Not at all. Every "research" effort that goes money first (and especially throwing it at already established entities), design, goals and culture second is going to end up the same way. It doesn't have anything to do with South Korea or Germany to be honest.
    - pm90 11y ago
      I agree with this sentiment. Frankly, govt. sponsored research is very hard to get right. The US Federal Govt. is probably the only instance of a government agency I know of that consistently delivers good value for all that investment (through NSF, DARPA etc.) which is why it pains me whenever Congress announces budget cuts for those agencies.
msbarnett 11y ago
Yeah. Congrats to Samsung in advance on their $860 million donation.
- skypather 11y ago
  Good one. :-)
xianshou 11y ago
To paraphrase Obi-Wan: I feel a great disturbance in the industry...it is as if a million startups cried out in supplication, and were suddenly funded. Pure injections of capital may work for basic needs in Africa, but tend to flounder in creative endeavors. From what I've seen, access to resources - a strong entrepreneurial community, top researchers, good hardware, and a flexible and customer-rich business environment - will always trump access to money.
- 1stop 11y ago
  The Apollo program would be a good counter example.
  - tfgg 11y ago
    I feel comparisons to the Apollo and Manhatten projects, often brought up in this context, are misleading because they ignore the massive pure research bases they were building on. Of course they did do more pure research, but a lot of the cost and muscle/size was for solving engineering problems.
    - 1stop 11y ago
      Is this just a true Scotsman fallacy?
    - dnautics 11y ago
      Both projects had clear tangible goals and a timeline to complete them by.
  - ovi256 11y ago
    The people contributing to the Apollo program were genuinely frightened of the US being behind in the space race and thus defenseless against strategic military applications of space technology, such as surveillance and early warning satellites, ICBMs or fractional orbit bombardment systems. Already deployed bomber-delivered nuclear bombs were an existential threat only countered by mutual annihilation (bilateral use). Unilateral access to space-delivery of atomic munitions would have shattered this equilibrium. This created a feeling of urgency and common purpose similar to that felt in wartime. Unfortunately, peacetime development lacks that feeling.
JoshTriplett 11y ago
Fortunately. The far worse scenario would be if the first (and last) implementer of AGI is a government, no matter which government, foolish enough to attempt to mandate that the AGI maintain any of that government's rules, goals, or structures, rather than just getting its value function right.
- Eliezer 11y ago
  By default, if somebody without extraordinary competence and paranoia tried to make an AGI that would implement government laws, in practice you'd just get something equivalent to a paperclip maximizer (https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Paperclip_maximizer https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Paperclip_maximizer). It doesn't matter much whether it's the government accidentally destroying the universe, or a private company or a university research team accidentally destroying the universe. Pointing an AGI in a particular direction is a hard technical problem that we haven't yet seen much interest in solving as a technical problem, in part because people have been distracted over arguing who gets to destroy the universe. This is easier to argue about and activates a lot of fun human political instincts where you get to valorize or devalorize particular tribes, so it's a very dangerous distraction. You would need to make a lot more progress on the alignment problem, as a technical problem, before it made any difference to actual outcomes who'd built the thing or what they'd thought their intentions were.
  - JoshTriplett 11y ago
    Absolutely true. You could substitute "organization" in place of "government" in my comment and it would still hold. And to some extent, funding efforts like these are (hopefully) so far away from the actual problems of an AGI that arguing about which one is more likely to create a paperclipper is somewhat moot. The concept that any such organization could get an AGI close enough to right that it isn't just a paperclipper, while being just wrong enough to create the kind of dystopia imagined in fiction rather than in the imaginations of people who think about AGI failure modes, is almost an uninterestingly small target, and not what I was aiming for with the preceding comment; rather, I was thinking specifically about fail-by-paperclip. But regardless of the failure mode, my concern is precisely that anyone or any organization with a sufficiently large (and sunk) investment into itself, regardless of what the nature of that organization is, will have a temptation to include their own interests in a value function. And because it's hard to reason about the consequences of errors on that scale, such organizations might also tend to not make a sufficient distinction between "fail by destroying the universe (or worse)" and "'fail' by not preserving whatever principles this organization (thinks it) holds dear". Not distinguishing those two cases would then tend to lead the organization to discount the risk of meddling in the value function, even in the face of warnings that doing so would destroy the universe, because they might view their own obsolescence as little better. So, among the large number of things that have to go exactly right, one of many will be the need for the organization developing it to very specifically have no goal other than getting AGI right, for a definition of right in terms of sentient life rather than anything distinguishing that particular organization.
tn13 11y ago
That is true about ALL governments my friend. Obama just threw few billions at self driving cars which will not go anywhere.
- adventured 11y ago
  The billions for self-driving cars, is not for technology, or to build cars, or to compete with Google / Apple / GM. It's to begin establishing a legal and infrastructure framework around the country that facilitates a shift to self-driving cars from the government's position as regulator, and ideally to do so safely. If they do nothing, given the sizable regulations in the US and from state to state regarding vehicles, then that shift is going to be a rolling disaster. They should probably be spending a lot more money to prep the ground for what's coming.
- cma 11y ago
  Lots came out of the DARPA self-driving contests. And lots of the teams that did well in that were at universities with massive levels of federally funded research. Many of them went on to head up the efforts at the big companies with that government bootstrapping in place.
- ConfuciusSay02 11y ago
  Direct government funding, or indirect funding via guaranteed contracts or similar, resulted in innovations such as: - The internet - The microchip - Cellular communications - GPS - Solid state memory - Capacitive sensors Just the technologies that more or less every other Silicon Valley innovation is based upon.
jahpeacelove 11y ago
Care to provide some examples beyond your feelings? The South Korean government did pretty well with shipbuilding: http://m.koreatimes.co.kr/phone/news/view.jsp?req_newsidx=69561 http://m.koreatimes.co.kr/phone/news/view.jsp?req_newsidx=69...
- treme 11y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Major_Rivers_Project#Criticism_of_the_project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Major_Rivers_Project#Crit... 17 billion $~ spent with little to show for it, with much allegations of corruption between President Lee & his ex-employer Hyundai constructions. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L0ANQBP0Cq8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L0ANQBP0Cq8 6 million $ spent on "robo-fish" to detect & observe water conditions, 7/9 units DOA; met 10% of targeted spec (speed/data networking bandwidth capabilities) I think government sanctioned projects can work if the leader in charge has proper intent and skills & leadership to steer the resources. This is far from the case with current Korean leadership; as Ms.Park was elected mostly based on her name recognition/ positive sentiments left by her dad. She is widely considered to be one of the most incompetent president ever to be elected into office.
  - yongjik 11y ago
    17 billion $ spent, s/with little to show for it/which resulted in total ecological disaster in four major rivers/ During the summer these days, the state of the riverwater is humorously called "Nokjo (algal bloom) latte". See: https://www.google.com/search?q=%EB%85%B9%EC%A1%B0%EB%9D%BC%EB%96%BC&tbm=isch https://www.google.com/search?q=%EB%85%B9%EC%A1%B0%EB%9D%BC%... I'm actually happy that Park Geun-Hye is babbling about AI's. At least I can't think of any way that could do a long-lasting harm, other than burning taxypayers' $$$, but they're gonna do that anyway, so what's the difference? Hopefully, in the next election we could find someone who could utter more than one coherent sentence at a time.
    - burfog 11y ago
      It does look like a drink we call "green smoothie" made from ground up spinach, kiwi, etc. Sometimes algae is added. The drink is usually overpriced. It looks like you get it for free! It is normal for politicians to be stupid. Don't you want your country to be normal?
cma 11y ago
Weren't Samsung and LG heavily government backed?

by sikim 11y ago

dnautics 11y ago

Hwang woo suk and stem cells?

yongjik 11y ago
That's different. Hwang's case was the story of a fraudster, who built his empire based on deceit, bribery, using his students like slaves, and generally knowing which buttons to press to incite a wave of nationalism mixed with personality cult. That is, he was one of his own kind. A legend, if you could call him that.
- dnautics 11y ago
  He wasn't totally a fraudster - snuppy was real after all.

w1ntermute 11y ago

That reminds me of what an engineer said about Quaero[0], a Franco-German attempt to create a competitor to Google search: > Going head-to-head with Google with a project involving well-funded, energetic entrepreneurs would be foolish. Attempting the same with a multigovernment collaboration is beyond description.[1] 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaero https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaero 1: http://spectrum.ieee.org/telecom/internet/loser-whats-the-latin-for-delusional http://spectrum.ieee.org/telecom/internet/loser-whats-the-la...

vmorgulis 11y ago
Yes and Exalead was involved. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exalead https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exalead I guess they are still widely indirectly funded by the state. A better strategy would to distribute the money to more companies a bit like VCs do.
- eru 11y ago
  Or just leave the money with the people in the first place?
  - vmorgulis 11y ago
    Yes, better.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
tryitnow 11y ago
Hmmm, that doesn't sound like the problem with S Korea at all. The above commenter was making the point that too many South Korean projects are compromised by bribes and nepotism. The German/French collaboration just sounds like it was badly organized. The end result may be the same, but it sounds like the root causes were different.
- endymi0n 11y ago
  Not at all. Every "research" effort that goes money first (and especially throwing it at already established entities), design, goals and culture second is going to end up the same way. It doesn't have anything to do with South Korea or Germany to be honest.
  - pm90 11y ago
    I agree with this sentiment. Frankly, govt. sponsored research is very hard to get right. The US Federal Govt. is probably the only instance of a government agency I know of that consistently delivers good value for all that investment (through NSF, DARPA etc.) which is why it pains me whenever Congress announces budget cuts for those agencies.

msbarnett 11y ago

Yeah. Congrats to Samsung in advance on their $860 million donation.

skypather 11y ago
Good one. :-)

xianshou 11y ago

To paraphrase Obi-Wan: I feel a great disturbance in the industry...it is as if a million startups cried out in supplication, and were suddenly funded. Pure injections of capital may work for basic needs in Africa, but tend to flounder in creative endeavors. From what I've seen, access to resources - a strong entrepreneurial community, top researchers, good hardware, and a flexible and customer-rich business environment - will always trump access to money.

1stop 11y ago
The Apollo program would be a good counter example.
- tfgg 11y ago
  I feel comparisons to the Apollo and Manhatten projects, often brought up in this context, are misleading because they ignore the massive pure research bases they were building on. Of course they did do more pure research, but a lot of the cost and muscle/size was for solving engineering problems.
  - 1stop 11y ago
    Is this just a true Scotsman fallacy?
  - dnautics 11y ago
    Both projects had clear tangible goals and a timeline to complete them by.
- ovi256 11y ago
  The people contributing to the Apollo program were genuinely frightened of the US being behind in the space race and thus defenseless against strategic military applications of space technology, such as surveillance and early warning satellites, ICBMs or fractional orbit bombardment systems. Already deployed bomber-delivered nuclear bombs were an existential threat only countered by mutual annihilation (bilateral use). Unilateral access to space-delivery of atomic munitions would have shattered this equilibrium. This created a feeling of urgency and common purpose similar to that felt in wartime. Unfortunately, peacetime development lacks that feeling.

JoshTriplett 11y ago

Fortunately. The far worse scenario would be if the first (and last) implementer of AGI is a government, no matter which government, foolish enough to attempt to mandate that the AGI maintain any of that government's rules, goals, or structures, rather than just getting its value function right.

Eliezer 11y ago
By default, if somebody without extraordinary competence and paranoia tried to make an AGI that would implement government laws, in practice you'd just get something equivalent to a paperclip maximizer (https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Paperclip_maximizer https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Paperclip_maximizer). It doesn't matter much whether it's the government accidentally destroying the universe, or a private company or a university research team accidentally destroying the universe. Pointing an AGI in a particular direction is a hard technical problem that we haven't yet seen much interest in solving as a technical problem, in part because people have been distracted over arguing who gets to destroy the universe. This is easier to argue about and activates a lot of fun human political instincts where you get to valorize or devalorize particular tribes, so it's a very dangerous distraction. You would need to make a lot more progress on the alignment problem, as a technical problem, before it made any difference to actual outcomes who'd built the thing or what they'd thought their intentions were.
- JoshTriplett 11y ago
  Absolutely true. You could substitute "organization" in place of "government" in my comment and it would still hold. And to some extent, funding efforts like these are (hopefully) so far away from the actual problems of an AGI that arguing about which one is more likely to create a paperclipper is somewhat moot. The concept that any such organization could get an AGI close enough to right that it isn't just a paperclipper, while being just wrong enough to create the kind of dystopia imagined in fiction rather than in the imaginations of people who think about AGI failure modes, is almost an uninterestingly small target, and not what I was aiming for with the preceding comment; rather, I was thinking specifically about fail-by-paperclip. But regardless of the failure mode, my concern is precisely that anyone or any organization with a sufficiently large (and sunk) investment into itself, regardless of what the nature of that organization is, will have a temptation to include their own interests in a value function. And because it's hard to reason about the consequences of errors on that scale, such organizations might also tend to not make a sufficient distinction between "fail by destroying the universe (or worse)" and "'fail' by not preserving whatever principles this organization (thinks it) holds dear". Not distinguishing those two cases would then tend to lead the organization to discount the risk of meddling in the value function, even in the face of warnings that doing so would destroy the universe, because they might view their own obsolescence as little better. So, among the large number of things that have to go exactly right, one of many will be the need for the organization developing it to very specifically have no goal other than getting AGI right, for a definition of right in terms of sentient life rather than anything distinguishing that particular organization.

tn13 11y ago

That is true about ALL governments my friend. Obama just threw few billions at self driving cars which will not go anywhere.

adventured 11y ago
The billions for self-driving cars, is not for technology, or to build cars, or to compete with Google / Apple / GM. It's to begin establishing a legal and infrastructure framework around the country that facilitates a shift to self-driving cars from the government's position as regulator, and ideally to do so safely. If they do nothing, given the sizable regulations in the US and from state to state regarding vehicles, then that shift is going to be a rolling disaster. They should probably be spending a lot more money to prep the ground for what's coming.
cma 11y ago
Lots came out of the DARPA self-driving contests. And lots of the teams that did well in that were at universities with massive levels of federally funded research. Many of them went on to head up the efforts at the big companies with that government bootstrapping in place.
ConfuciusSay02 11y ago
Direct government funding, or indirect funding via guaranteed contracts or similar, resulted in innovations such as: - The internet - The microchip - Cellular communications - GPS - Solid state memory - Capacitive sensors Just the technologies that more or less every other Silicon Valley innovation is based upon.

jahpeacelove 11y ago

Care to provide some examples beyond your feelings? The South Korean government did pretty well with shipbuilding: http://m.koreatimes.co.kr/phone/news/view.jsp?req_newsidx=69561 http://m.koreatimes.co.kr/phone/news/view.jsp?req_newsidx=69...

treme 11y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Major_Rivers_Project#Criticism_of_the_project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Major_Rivers_Project#Crit... 17 billion $~ spent with little to show for it, with much allegations of corruption between President Lee & his ex-employer Hyundai constructions. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L0ANQBP0Cq8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L0ANQBP0Cq8 6 million $ spent on "robo-fish" to detect & observe water conditions, 7/9 units DOA; met 10% of targeted spec (speed/data networking bandwidth capabilities) I think government sanctioned projects can work if the leader in charge has proper intent and skills & leadership to steer the resources. This is far from the case with current Korean leadership; as Ms.Park was elected mostly based on her name recognition/ positive sentiments left by her dad. She is widely considered to be one of the most incompetent president ever to be elected into office.
- yongjik 11y ago
  17 billion $ spent, s/with little to show for it/which resulted in total ecological disaster in four major rivers/ During the summer these days, the state of the riverwater is humorously called "Nokjo (algal bloom) latte". See: https://www.google.com/search?q=%EB%85%B9%EC%A1%B0%EB%9D%BC%EB%96%BC&tbm=isch https://www.google.com/search?q=%EB%85%B9%EC%A1%B0%EB%9D%BC%... I'm actually happy that Park Geun-Hye is babbling about AI's. At least I can't think of any way that could do a long-lasting harm, other than burning taxypayers' $$$, but they're gonna do that anyway, so what's the difference? Hopefully, in the next election we could find someone who could utter more than one coherent sentence at a time.
  - burfog 11y ago
    It does look like a drink we call "green smoothie" made from ground up spinach, kiwi, etc. Sometimes algae is added. The drink is usually overpriced. It looks like you get it for free! It is normal for politicians to be stupid. Don't you want your country to be normal?

cma 11y ago

Weren't Samsung and LG heavily government backed?