7 ms·

Google, Not the Government, Is Building the Future

84 points by Lind5 9y ago

subterfudge 9y ago
Only NYt will be surprised at this but I am surprised they have not pointed out that Google uses roads that were built by Government. Future building always happens through individuals and corporations who challenge status quo. In fact progress is faster when government is "not looking".
- fiatjaf 9y ago
  Someone will now come here and point out that Google is using the internet, which was CREATED by the government, so everything Google does wasn't done by Google, but by government.
notyourwork 9y ago
From simply reading the headline the first question that came to mind is who should be building the future? I personally don't see the government as a key player in building the future, I see it as a supporting body for whatever direction the future goes. However, now I am questioning that perspective and wondering should the government be shaping our future and if so in what ways?
- skybrian 9y ago
  Maybe not build it, but how about funding it? Consider DARPA, NIH, or Space X for that matter, largely funded by government contracts. (On the other hand, Space X versus the usual defense contractors is quite a contrast.)
- cmurf 9y ago
  Rather than being the wagon or the puller of the wagon, the government should be the handle. It's just a tool to provide a means for leaders to lead a society. The role of government, when it comes to minority rights, can act like a big fat rock under the wagon wheel though. As well it should.
- candu 9y ago
  You may be interested in Mariana Mazzucato's TED talk, where she calls into question tropes about the "sluggishness" or "innovation deficit" of government and highlights its central role in making high-risk technological investments. After all, when it's not seized by a spasm of science denialism, the government is a chief backer of basic research, which is then often licensed on extremely generous terms to make a wide range of industries and products viable. One could argue that the government is, in fact, uniquely positioned to fund truly basic research, for which risk is often too high - and payoff too uncertain or delayed - to be fundable in a corporate environment. Put another way: the government is often, contrary to belief, much less risk-averse than private enterprise when it comes to research of this sort. For instance, take this Internet thing we're all communicating over. Without R&D efforts by ARPA in conjunction with several prominent universities, or the willingness of CERN to place key Web protocols in the public domain, we might very well have had non-interoperable AOL-style fiefdoms. But what company would, in the 70s, have funded an unproven telecommunications network just to connect a handful of universities?
  - lomnakkus 9y ago
    Indeed and I find it an absurd false dichotomy to suppose that it's either/or. Why can't both government and private enterprise both be discovering the future at the same time? Granted, some enterprises/initiatives will fail, but that's kind of par for the course since nobody can predict the future.
    - inopinatus 9y ago
      The long view is surely that Government provides an excellent vehicle for planning/regulation of infrastructure and allocation of large-scale funding, and independent institutions and private companies the best vehicles to receive that funding for R&D & build. When a government tries to build infrastructure directly, you often get disastrous outcomes. Australia's so-called National Broadband Network is a recent and woeful example. The sole counterexample is probably roads, and even then there's an argument that the public administration of roads has many systematic issues that could be blamed on governmental factors.
- losteric 9y ago
  To use a metaphor: the federal government should grease the wheels and kickstart the engine on large-scale projects, but state/city/corporations are responsible for building car and steering it. For example, it's great that publicly funded prior research and experts bootstrapped SpaceX's R&D, and then NASA's contracts for low-priority launches helped them iron out the kinks. It was a nice transition from publicly funded risky R&D to a market-driven private industry. On the other hand, NASA's "full-stack" SLS product is an inexcusable clusterfuck. Corporations are way better at diving deep to create practical, economical products... very very lean. The government is good at running lots of small risky/low-ROI projects, unprofitable but foundational to future private sectors. Tax the past to subsidize the future.
- funkyy 9y ago
  The government should do that, but not in the current state. Governments around the globe became so broken and corrupt, they cannot do the tasks given to them. But pro-society government (centrist), with regular people having direct tools to remove officials, with politicians being responsible for their election promises and with no lobbying allowed, with tight anti-corruption laws and yearly referendum in place.
- abandonliberty 9y ago
  The government is very important in creating the environment for the future to be built. Safety, stability, intellectual/skill capital, laws & rewards that support innovation (e.g. 'good' patents). The future must remember the great debt it owes to governments and their citizens, for it would not exist without them. Unfortunately the future tends to hide its money in offshore bank accounts. Government also has a greater role to play in extremely long-term initiatives that don't make sense in a shareholder funded vehicle. Much of our current society is founded on government funded R&D as Candu mentions.
bpodgursky 9y ago
I guess NYTimes op-eds are allowed to praise corporations over government now that the Obama administration is out. Hard to imagine this one slipping through a year ago.
- bogomipz 9y ago
  Is it so unimaginable though when the government has a President that has vowed to bring back coal and an FCC chairman that says net neutrality is holding back innovation?
  - fiatjaf 9y ago
    Net neutrality is a measure lobbied by Netflix. I'm not sure why you think it is a good thing.
    - bogomipz 9y ago
      Net Neutrality predates Netflix as a streaming provider so no that's not correct: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_neutrality_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_neutrality_in_the_United_S... Here are some reasons why someone might espouse it: https://hbr.org/2010/08/why-network-neutrality-is-good https://hbr.org/2010/08/why-network-neutrality-is-good and more specific to the current FCC Chairman: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/04/fcc-wants-eliminate-net-neutrality-protections-we-cant-let-happen https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/04/fcc-wants-eliminate-ne...
    - woodruffw 9y ago
      In its current form, net neutrality has been on the political menu since 2004 in the US. It's possible to argue that it's been around in some form or another since the 1920s, and certainly since the late 1980s. Netflix didn't begin their streaming service until 2006 or 2007, if my memory is correct. They might lobby for it now (of course they do, it's in their best interest), but they have nothing to do with the original idea or policy. I happen to think that net neutrality makes for pretty good policy, but I'm open to arguments that suggest otherwise. "Netflix supports it, and therefore it's bad" is not one of those arguments.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
propman 9y ago
$1B for non military related scientific funding, I wonder how much it is including the military. Remember, DARPA created the Internet and DARPA related grants and research helped lift off surgical robots, self driving cars, and EVs. We're always gloom and doom about everything but I still find it fascinating that our country creates such an effective public private partnerships and how our IPs promote private companies to make use of public research that improves QoL and wealth for everyone. $60B R&D from 5 companies and $67B from the government per year is no small feat
RodericDay 9y ago
Google is an advertising company. They're building superficial stuff, that hopefully the future will have nothing to do with. Their "moonshots" are for branding they rarely have major impact.
- Kholo 9y ago
  Yup they are just doing what big corps do at this stage of their lives - empire defense.
zitterbewegung 9y ago
Apple , Xerox and Microsoft in the 80s and 90s were building the future. We called them Graphical User Interfaces . So what's different now ? SRI and others were the research that those companies built it off of. This time DARPA was funding AI for a long time and now it's Google / Microsoft / Apple taking those to the next leve.
- quickben 9y ago
  >> "So what's different now?" Well, at the end of the month, instead of paying IBM for mainframe time, we are now paying AWS for the cloud time. Similarly with the others.
  - nojvek 9y ago
    Well Google and Facebook are building their insanely large ad empires. Not a great future to be honest
    - quickben 9y ago
      Yes. So in essence, if one zooms out enough, desktop software has to make a comeback in some form. Otherwise the hooks that saas will establish nowdays will be much more nasty for progress, than anything IBM could ever envision doing.
bsder 9y ago
I find this sad. Government should be building the infrastructure of the future. For example, Google Fiber may have been unprofitable, but the government should be laying fiber to every corner of this country. Sadly, with 1/3 of the US stuck in propagandaland, this is the best we're going to do.
- rhino369 9y ago
  Fiber is a waste of money at this point. I just got gigabit and it has essentially no marginal value compared to my only 75mbit connection. Most consumer hardware can't really do jack shit with it. The killer app is DSL reports speed tests. Money is better spent on anything, but something like low carbon energy would be a much better use of it. Really, we should focus on getting any broadband to areas that don't have any. Rather than upgrading people with cable internet to gigabit.
  - bsder 9y ago
    > Fiber is a waste of money at this point. I just got gigabit and it has essentially no marginal value compared to my only 75mbit connection. Most consumer hardware can't really do jack shit with it. 1) The benefit is to businesses first, not necessarily consumers. Solid telepresence would allow specialists in various fields (medicine, engineering, etc.) to be located away from the big cities. It would also allow businesses to locate away from the big cities. 2) Part of the reason we don't have new applications is that so few people have gigabit (especially upload). Why write an application that requires gigabit when nobody will use it? Every order of magnitude jump in communication upload speed spawned something new in technology usage that we couldn't see at the time. 300 baud -> email, BBS 9.6K baud -> graphical Internet 128K baud -> napster, MP3 1.0M baud -> video So, what is waiting at 10M (we're just getting here in the rural areas and it's patchy), 100M, or 1G upload?
    - slilo 9y ago
      > So, what is waiting at 10M (we're just getting here in the rural areas and it's patchy), 100M, or 1G upload? VR!
xname2 9y ago
Government doesn't need to build the infrastructure. Government need to provide institution for business to build infrastructure. Not sure what you mean by 'propagandaland'. I'm glad so many Americans still believe in limited government. This is one of the most important / best features of this country.
- wordupmaking 9y ago
  > I'm glad so many Americans still believe in limited government Who believes in unlimited government? Can you name a person or group that does? I'd like to ask them what that even means.
  - xname2 9y ago
    Thanks for your insight. This term is apparently useless.
  - briantakita 9y ago
    > Who believes in unlimited government? He never said anybody believed in unlimited government. There are plenty of people that believe the government should have more power over individuals. i.e. Socialism, Communism, Socialized Healthcare, etc. At it's core, it the collective imposing it's will upon the individual. If we continue to give power to the collective to impose on the individual, the individual will cease to have freedoms & rights. Note that things are even more nuanced. Some individuals hold inordinate influence over the apparatus of the collective, which is used to impose rules on other individuals.
    - wordupmaking 9y ago
      > He never said anybody believed in unlimited government. That's kind of implied in expressing joy that there are "still" Americans who believe in limited government. There is no in-between, anything that's not limited is unlimited. > Socialism, Communism, Socialized Healthcare, etc. Making murder and kidnapping illegal, and so on? If no, where do you draw the line, what makes socialism, communism and socialized healthcare go together, but not, say, copyright? > At it's core, it the collective imposing it's will upon the individual. If we continue to give power to the collective to impose on the individual, the individual will cease to have freedoms & rights. First off, "the collective" is just a whole bunch of individuals. Secondly, it's also a way to for people to organize things they can't hack on too small scale, and a way to enforce some minimum social responsibility on each other regardless of level of individual development. Would you be okay with the frail, young, or otherwise defenseless who can't afford private security and don't have family being free game? I mean, "the government" is what makes it illegal to just steal from and kill poor or demented people without relatives for example; there is NO money in preventing that, the "free market" will not provide for that. Humans do, in spite of it, on the side. > Some individuals hold inordinate influence over the apparatus of the collective, which is used to impose rules on other individuals. True. I'm not saying it's not broken, but IMO it's better to repair the ship and discuss modifications than just jump off. There's no land there. I'm not even saying we need a government per se, but we need a society, some minimums, some standards of decency in which the profit for fun and profit can be embedded in, rather than pretending fun and profit can provide the necessary amount of glue. Whether the rules are enforced with cops or remembering the eyes of ones father or however is kind of secondary, really. But capital creating more capital, all by itself, is just an eating mechanism, it's like fire. Not even enough to define the difference between a camp fire and a candle or anything, just the raw process of burning material using oxygen. Kind of like a power drunk mob, I'll grant that, and I'm not saying there's not plenty of worrying tendencies in that direction, too. I just don't see one as the antidote of the other, I see both more as scapegoats for each other, and ultimately both as undermining the freedom they espouse. We only are as free as the most defenseless members of society are. Well, I am. So in a way, people who say "fuck you, got mine" are directly imposing on my freedom, that they are unaware of that doesn't make it less real to me. Quite the conundrum huh.
AndrewKemendo 9y ago
This is exactly why I have been advocating for a public Manhattan Project for General AI for a long time. I made the case while I was part of the Defense Intelligence Agency in 2014 but basically nobody cared at that point. I was in the Defense Innovation Board small group session with Mattis, Schmidt etc... about a month ago and it was clear that since then the message was received by some but not all (which is partly why I was invited as a reserve officer). As a result the Deputy Secretary of Defense issued a memo [1] recently which took some of the first steps to get the ball rolling, but frankly it may be too little too late. OpenAI is generally on the right track, but even then it's primarily dominated by the big players and they don't have incentives to push their best research, data, models, resources to that - of course why would they? [1]https://www.scribd.com/document/346681336/Establishment-of-the-AWCFT-Project-Maven#from_embed https://www.scribd.com/document/346681336/Establishment-of-t...
- jorblumesea 9y ago
  The entire idea of the Manhatten Project was that it's such a game changer you would want it classified. It also included luminaries from the public and private sectors. For all we know, the Government is collaborating with tech partners to create such a thing as we speak but will not disclose because of national security. Remember the internet, gps, modern telecom etc all came from government research, or some combination of public and private money but were generally declassified 10-15 years after its invention and use (some exceptions obviously). It stands to reason the next generation of AI is already being built in a similar fashion and we'll look back in time and see the patterns in hindsight. For example, how does the NSA sift through its giant treasure trove of information? Isn't that what AI/ML/Deep Learning is designed to do? In my opinion, the government is very up to date with current trends, maybe more so than people realize.
  - jackpirate 9y ago
    >Remember the internet, gps, modern telecom all came from government research, or some combination of public and private money but was only declassified 10-15 years after its invention and use. It's true that a lot of the funding was from ARPA, but I believe that the vast majority of this research was published in standard academic venues. I know of no results in these fields that were classified at the time of discovery and released only 10-15 years later as you claim (but I'd love to see references if you have them!).
pdkl95 9y ago
If you're interested in the private-vs-public dynamic that is building our future, I strongly suggest watching Xavier Flory's talk at 33c3, "The Transhumanist Paradox"[1]. [1] https://media.ccc.de/v/33c3-8064-the_transhumanist_paradox https://media.ccc.de/v/33c3-8064-the_transhumanist_paradox
redblacktree 9y ago
And AT&T before them. (Bell Labs)
khana 9y ago
For better or worse this truly is true.
em3rgent0rdr 9y ago
Open Source is building the future.

84 points by Lind5 9y ago

Only NYt will be surprised at this but I am surprised they have not pointed out that Google uses roads that were built by Government. Future building always happens through individuals and corporations who challenge status quo. In fact progress is faster when government is "not looking".

fiatjaf 9y ago
Someone will now come here and point out that Google is using the internet, which was CREATED by the government, so everything Google does wasn't done by Google, but by government.

notyourwork 9y ago

From simply reading the headline the first question that came to mind is who should be building the future? I personally don't see the government as a key player in building the future, I see it as a supporting body for whatever direction the future goes. However, now I am questioning that perspective and wondering should the government be shaping our future and if so in what ways?

skybrian 9y ago
Maybe not build it, but how about funding it? Consider DARPA, NIH, or Space X for that matter, largely funded by government contracts. (On the other hand, Space X versus the usual defense contractors is quite a contrast.)
cmurf 9y ago
Rather than being the wagon or the puller of the wagon, the government should be the handle. It's just a tool to provide a means for leaders to lead a society. The role of government, when it comes to minority rights, can act like a big fat rock under the wagon wheel though. As well it should.
candu 9y ago
You may be interested in Mariana Mazzucato's TED talk, where she calls into question tropes about the "sluggishness" or "innovation deficit" of government and highlights its central role in making high-risk technological investments. After all, when it's not seized by a spasm of science denialism, the government is a chief backer of basic research, which is then often licensed on extremely generous terms to make a wide range of industries and products viable. One could argue that the government is, in fact, uniquely positioned to fund truly basic research, for which risk is often too high - and payoff too uncertain or delayed - to be fundable in a corporate environment. Put another way: the government is often, contrary to belief, much less risk-averse than private enterprise when it comes to research of this sort. For instance, take this Internet thing we're all communicating over. Without R&D efforts by ARPA in conjunction with several prominent universities, or the willingness of CERN to place key Web protocols in the public domain, we might very well have had non-interoperable AOL-style fiefdoms. But what company would, in the 70s, have funded an unproven telecommunications network just to connect a handful of universities?
- lomnakkus 9y ago
  Indeed and I find it an absurd false dichotomy to suppose that it's either/or. Why can't both government and private enterprise both be discovering the future at the same time? Granted, some enterprises/initiatives will fail, but that's kind of par for the course since nobody can predict the future.
  - inopinatus 9y ago
    The long view is surely that Government provides an excellent vehicle for planning/regulation of infrastructure and allocation of large-scale funding, and independent institutions and private companies the best vehicles to receive that funding for R&D & build. When a government tries to build infrastructure directly, you often get disastrous outcomes. Australia's so-called National Broadband Network is a recent and woeful example. The sole counterexample is probably roads, and even then there's an argument that the public administration of roads has many systematic issues that could be blamed on governmental factors.
losteric 9y ago
To use a metaphor: the federal government should grease the wheels and kickstart the engine on large-scale projects, but state/city/corporations are responsible for building car and steering it. For example, it's great that publicly funded prior research and experts bootstrapped SpaceX's R&D, and then NASA's contracts for low-priority launches helped them iron out the kinks. It was a nice transition from publicly funded risky R&D to a market-driven private industry. On the other hand, NASA's "full-stack" SLS product is an inexcusable clusterfuck. Corporations are way better at diving deep to create practical, economical products... very very lean. The government is good at running lots of small risky/low-ROI projects, unprofitable but foundational to future private sectors. Tax the past to subsidize the future.
funkyy 9y ago
The government should do that, but not in the current state. Governments around the globe became so broken and corrupt, they cannot do the tasks given to them. But pro-society government (centrist), with regular people having direct tools to remove officials, with politicians being responsible for their election promises and with no lobbying allowed, with tight anti-corruption laws and yearly referendum in place.
abandonliberty 9y ago
The government is very important in creating the environment for the future to be built. Safety, stability, intellectual/skill capital, laws & rewards that support innovation (e.g. 'good' patents). The future must remember the great debt it owes to governments and their citizens, for it would not exist without them. Unfortunately the future tends to hide its money in offshore bank accounts. Government also has a greater role to play in extremely long-term initiatives that don't make sense in a shareholder funded vehicle. Much of our current society is founded on government funded R&D as Candu mentions.

bpodgursky 9y ago

I guess NYTimes op-eds are allowed to praise corporations over government now that the Obama administration is out. Hard to imagine this one slipping through a year ago.

bogomipz 9y ago
Is it so unimaginable though when the government has a President that has vowed to bring back coal and an FCC chairman that says net neutrality is holding back innovation?
- fiatjaf 9y ago
  Net neutrality is a measure lobbied by Netflix. I'm not sure why you think it is a good thing.
  - bogomipz 9y ago
    Net Neutrality predates Netflix as a streaming provider so no that's not correct: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_neutrality_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_neutrality_in_the_United_S... Here are some reasons why someone might espouse it: https://hbr.org/2010/08/why-network-neutrality-is-good https://hbr.org/2010/08/why-network-neutrality-is-good and more specific to the current FCC Chairman: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/04/fcc-wants-eliminate-net-neutrality-protections-we-cant-let-happen https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/04/fcc-wants-eliminate-ne...
  - woodruffw 9y ago
    In its current form, net neutrality has been on the political menu since 2004 in the US. It's possible to argue that it's been around in some form or another since the 1920s, and certainly since the late 1980s. Netflix didn't begin their streaming service until 2006 or 2007, if my memory is correct. They might lobby for it now (of course they do, it's in their best interest), but they have nothing to do with the original idea or policy. I happen to think that net neutrality makes for pretty good policy, but I'm open to arguments that suggest otherwise. "Netflix supports it, and therefore it's bad" is not one of those arguments.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

propman 9y ago

$1B for non military related scientific funding, I wonder how much it is including the military. Remember, DARPA created the Internet and DARPA related grants and research helped lift off surgical robots, self driving cars, and EVs. We're always gloom and doom about everything but I still find it fascinating that our country creates such an effective public private partnerships and how our IPs promote private companies to make use of public research that improves QoL and wealth for everyone. $60B R&D from 5 companies and $67B from the government per year is no small feat

RodericDay 9y ago

Google is an advertising company. They're building superficial stuff, that hopefully the future will have nothing to do with. Their "moonshots" are for branding they rarely have major impact.

Kholo 9y ago
Yup they are just doing what big corps do at this stage of their lives - empire defense.

zitterbewegung 9y ago

Apple , Xerox and Microsoft in the 80s and 90s were building the future. We called them Graphical User Interfaces . So what's different now ? SRI and others were the research that those companies built it off of. This time DARPA was funding AI for a long time and now it's Google / Microsoft / Apple taking those to the next leve.

quickben 9y ago
>> "So what's different now?" Well, at the end of the month, instead of paying IBM for mainframe time, we are now paying AWS for the cloud time. Similarly with the others.
- nojvek 9y ago
  Well Google and Facebook are building their insanely large ad empires. Not a great future to be honest
  - quickben 9y ago
    Yes. So in essence, if one zooms out enough, desktop software has to make a comeback in some form. Otherwise the hooks that saas will establish nowdays will be much more nasty for progress, than anything IBM could ever envision doing.

bsder 9y ago

I find this sad. Government should be building the infrastructure of the future. For example, Google Fiber may have been unprofitable, but the government should be laying fiber to every corner of this country. Sadly, with 1/3 of the US stuck in propagandaland, this is the best we're going to do.

rhino369 9y ago
Fiber is a waste of money at this point. I just got gigabit and it has essentially no marginal value compared to my only 75mbit connection. Most consumer hardware can't really do jack shit with it. The killer app is DSL reports speed tests. Money is better spent on anything, but something like low carbon energy would be a much better use of it. Really, we should focus on getting any broadband to areas that don't have any. Rather than upgrading people with cable internet to gigabit.
- bsder 9y ago
  > Fiber is a waste of money at this point. I just got gigabit and it has essentially no marginal value compared to my only 75mbit connection. Most consumer hardware can't really do jack shit with it. 1) The benefit is to businesses first, not necessarily consumers. Solid telepresence would allow specialists in various fields (medicine, engineering, etc.) to be located away from the big cities. It would also allow businesses to locate away from the big cities. 2) Part of the reason we don't have new applications is that so few people have gigabit (especially upload). Why write an application that requires gigabit when nobody will use it? Every order of magnitude jump in communication upload speed spawned something new in technology usage that we couldn't see at the time. 300 baud -> email, BBS 9.6K baud -> graphical Internet 128K baud -> napster, MP3 1.0M baud -> video So, what is waiting at 10M (we're just getting here in the rural areas and it's patchy), 100M, or 1G upload?
  - slilo 9y ago
    > So, what is waiting at 10M (we're just getting here in the rural areas and it's patchy), 100M, or 1G upload? VR!

xname2 9y ago

Government doesn't need to build the infrastructure. Government need to provide institution for business to build infrastructure. Not sure what you mean by 'propagandaland'. I'm glad so many Americans still believe in limited government. This is one of the most important / best features of this country.

wordupmaking 9y ago
> I'm glad so many Americans still believe in limited government Who believes in unlimited government? Can you name a person or group that does? I'd like to ask them what that even means.
- xname2 9y ago
  Thanks for your insight. This term is apparently useless.
- briantakita 9y ago
  > Who believes in unlimited government? He never said anybody believed in unlimited government. There are plenty of people that believe the government should have more power over individuals. i.e. Socialism, Communism, Socialized Healthcare, etc. At it's core, it the collective imposing it's will upon the individual. If we continue to give power to the collective to impose on the individual, the individual will cease to have freedoms & rights. Note that things are even more nuanced. Some individuals hold inordinate influence over the apparatus of the collective, which is used to impose rules on other individuals.
  - wordupmaking 9y ago
    > He never said anybody believed in unlimited government. That's kind of implied in expressing joy that there are "still" Americans who believe in limited government. There is no in-between, anything that's not limited is unlimited. > Socialism, Communism, Socialized Healthcare, etc. Making murder and kidnapping illegal, and so on? If no, where do you draw the line, what makes socialism, communism and socialized healthcare go together, but not, say, copyright? > At it's core, it the collective imposing it's will upon the individual. If we continue to give power to the collective to impose on the individual, the individual will cease to have freedoms & rights. First off, "the collective" is just a whole bunch of individuals. Secondly, it's also a way to for people to organize things they can't hack on too small scale, and a way to enforce some minimum social responsibility on each other regardless of level of individual development. Would you be okay with the frail, young, or otherwise defenseless who can't afford private security and don't have family being free game? I mean, "the government" is what makes it illegal to just steal from and kill poor or demented people without relatives for example; there is NO money in preventing that, the "free market" will not provide for that. Humans do, in spite of it, on the side. > Some individuals hold inordinate influence over the apparatus of the collective, which is used to impose rules on other individuals. True. I'm not saying it's not broken, but IMO it's better to repair the ship and discuss modifications than just jump off. There's no land there. I'm not even saying we need a government per se, but we need a society, some minimums, some standards of decency in which the profit for fun and profit can be embedded in, rather than pretending fun and profit can provide the necessary amount of glue. Whether the rules are enforced with cops or remembering the eyes of ones father or however is kind of secondary, really. But capital creating more capital, all by itself, is just an eating mechanism, it's like fire. Not even enough to define the difference between a camp fire and a candle or anything, just the raw process of burning material using oxygen. Kind of like a power drunk mob, I'll grant that, and I'm not saying there's not plenty of worrying tendencies in that direction, too. I just don't see one as the antidote of the other, I see both more as scapegoats for each other, and ultimately both as undermining the freedom they espouse. We only are as free as the most defenseless members of society are. Well, I am. So in a way, people who say "fuck you, got mine" are directly imposing on my freedom, that they are unaware of that doesn't make it less real to me. Quite the conundrum huh.

AndrewKemendo 9y ago

This is exactly why I have been advocating for a public Manhattan Project for General AI for a long time. I made the case while I was part of the Defense Intelligence Agency in 2014 but basically nobody cared at that point. I was in the Defense Innovation Board small group session with Mattis, Schmidt etc... about a month ago and it was clear that since then the message was received by some but not all (which is partly why I was invited as a reserve officer). As a result the Deputy Secretary of Defense issued a memo [1] recently which took some of the first steps to get the ball rolling, but frankly it may be too little too late. OpenAI is generally on the right track, but even then it's primarily dominated by the big players and they don't have incentives to push their best research, data, models, resources to that - of course why would they? [1]https://www.scribd.com/document/346681336/Establishment-of-the-AWCFT-Project-Maven#from_embed https://www.scribd.com/document/346681336/Establishment-of-t...

jorblumesea 9y ago
The entire idea of the Manhatten Project was that it's such a game changer you would want it classified. It also included luminaries from the public and private sectors. For all we know, the Government is collaborating with tech partners to create such a thing as we speak but will not disclose because of national security. Remember the internet, gps, modern telecom etc all came from government research, or some combination of public and private money but were generally declassified 10-15 years after its invention and use (some exceptions obviously). It stands to reason the next generation of AI is already being built in a similar fashion and we'll look back in time and see the patterns in hindsight. For example, how does the NSA sift through its giant treasure trove of information? Isn't that what AI/ML/Deep Learning is designed to do? In my opinion, the government is very up to date with current trends, maybe more so than people realize.
- jackpirate 9y ago
  >Remember the internet, gps, modern telecom all came from government research, or some combination of public and private money but was only declassified 10-15 years after its invention and use. It's true that a lot of the funding was from ARPA, but I believe that the vast majority of this research was published in standard academic venues. I know of no results in these fields that were classified at the time of discovery and released only 10-15 years later as you claim (but I'd love to see references if you have them!).

pdkl95 9y ago

If you're interested in the private-vs-public dynamic that is building our future, I strongly suggest watching Xavier Flory's talk at 33c3, "The Transhumanist Paradox"[1]. [1] https://media.ccc.de/v/33c3-8064-the_transhumanist_paradox https://media.ccc.de/v/33c3-8064-the_transhumanist_paradox

redblacktree 9y ago

And AT&T before them. (Bell Labs)

khana 9y ago

For better or worse this truly is true.

em3rgent0rdr 9y ago

Open Source is building the future.