6 ms·

When we'll look back 20 years from now, we'll we see Google in the same light as we did IBM after helping the Nazi with their computers? Will Google allow its

by mtgx 9y ago

When we'll look back 20 years from now, we'll we see Google in the same light as we did IBM after helping the Nazi with their computers? Will Google allow its DeepMind technology to be used to spy on Chinese citizens and dissidents?

baby 9y ago
You don't like China. So cute
neikos 9y ago
That was exactly my thought, and I do already see them in a similar light.
tanilama 9y ago
Well a fun trivia, a research division of Chinese Policy Department(team named Trimps-Soushen), actually won top3 positions in ImageNet competition. I think they definitely have, at least, the engineering strength to implement what crazy, SkyNet inspired system themselves, without help from Google/DeepMind ... Which is ... pretty sad, on many levels.
kercker 9y ago
I find your argument rather lame. First, Chinese government is not Nazi and Google is not IBM. You can't just say that a government is Nazi just because you hate that government. Second, even if Google openly broke with Chinese government, it still has offices in China. I doubt that Google opens an AI center in China to "allow its DeepMind technology to be used to spy on Chinese citizens and dissidents", and I do think that Google has a big ambition than you can think in China. And I think that ambition is to advance AI with the help of local talents.
- musage 9y ago
  There is a difference between an analogy and a comparison. Just think of it as it working with murderers for commercial gain, and try again, as far as the analogy is concerned. China is plenty totalitarian, too, so even as a comparison it's not that far off (though you won't be able to follow comparisons either if you think things have to be exactly the same thing to be compared). You might even say the Nazis weren't Nazis before they started and lost their war; if they had stuck with, say, attacking Poland and Russia, and had kept their concentration camps secret (i.e. plausibly deniable), they still might be darlings of Western business elites even today, as Hitler was before the stuff we now have 20/20 hindsight on. Last but not least, a big ambition is living a life you then don't have to lie to yourself about. Compared to that, "advancing AI" isn't even an ambition, nevermind a big one.
- cat199 9y ago
  > I find your argument rather lame. not really, he managed to invoke nazis without it actually being godwins law. pretty impressive. additionally, this is not a ridiculous comparison: a) monopolistic, rights abusing dictatorship b) large us corp ignoring this to do business there and assist with 'dual use' tools which could be used for malice against its own citizens. > You can't just say that a government is Nazi just because you hate that government. similarly: you can't just dismiss a government's ills or to derail an argument because you like the people from that country or the stated intent of the action being peformed there by a company you like
- opportune 9y ago
  At its core, the goal of the two regimes (China, Nazi Germany) is the same: control information so that the existing regime is portrayed in a good light that preserves stability. Just because China isn't genocoding Jews doesn't mean they don't have hundreds of thousands of political prisoners, disadvantaged minorities, and a completely authoritarian government. As is, you would never hear of the North Korean concentration camps that China supports, nor the Tibetan and Uighur genocides that are ongoing. Google's move is purely financial. Google's biggest ambition is to control Chinese search, but its greatest ambition is to control all search, and the internet as whole. Google, as all other appreciably large tech companies, wants to hold a dominant position in the Chinse market, and to do so is willing to sacrifice market share in inferuor products. How much China gets involved is TB. The really fun part? Watching corporate entities justify genocide, sexism, racism, etc. in their grabs for dominance over the remaining European provinces.
  - kercker 9y ago
    Can you give some credible sources on "Tibetan and Uighur genocides that are ongoing"?
    - opportune 9y ago
      Tibet: https://www.ncas.rutgers.edu/center-study-genocide-conflict-resolution-and-human-rights/tibet https://www.ncas.rutgers.edu/center-study-genocide-conflict-... >"The Tibetan government in exile in India estimates that the death toll since 1950 due to starvation, outright violence, and other indirect causes amounts to 1.2 million. However, some Tibetologists place the figure closer to half a million. The non-governmental International Commission of Jurists (ICJ) released a report to the United Nations in 1959, and another in 1960, which documented accounts of atrocities and accused the Chinese of religious-based genocide in Tibet. " Could possibly be biased by CIA it says. Uighur: https://uhrp.org/featured-articles/arguing-genocide-xinjiang-east-turkestan https://uhrp.org/featured-articles/arguing-genocide-xinjiang... Ehh this is as biased as it probably gets and it doesn't really make it sound like genocide. I guess I had heard of this (and maybe Tibet too) as cultural genocides before, and got it mixed up.
paradite 9y ago
Spying on citizens and dissidents, even if true, is nothing close to Nazis. For the record, - China was on the opposite side of Nazis in WW2 - China has 56 ethnic groups and has no plan to "cleanse" any of them
- adventured 9y ago
  The fact is Communist China has a very deep history of "cleansing" what they define as undesirables, which continues today in various forms. Today (and for decades now) they're aggressively attempting to "cleanse" homosexuals using state resources, torturing thousands of people. [1][2] China's Communist system also "cleansed" a vast number of people throughout its recent history. Over two decades they murdered (or sent to gulags) hundreds of thousands of intellectuals and similar, who were declared to be class enemies. This in fact likely set China's potential back by decades as Mao's horrific policies severely depleted China's resources. [1] "China urged to stop using electroshock therapy to ‘convert’ LGBT people" https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2017/11/14/china-urged-to-stop-using-electroshock-therapy-to-convert-lgbt-people/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2017/11/14... [2] https://www.hrw.org/news/2017/11/14/china-end-conversion-therapy-medical-settings https://www.hrw.org/news/2017/11/14/china-end-conversion-the...
  - paradite 9y ago
    So assuming what you described is true, why hasn't the rest of the world declared war against the communist China? Because it's not close to what Nazis did. And that's my point. Btw, from the articles that you linked, it is quite clear that treating LGBT as disease is not a government policy. In fact, it is against the law. The government doesn't actively hunt for LGBT people and send them for treatment. In fact I think they are less concerned about homosexuality than the churches are.
    - darepublic 9y ago
      The world doesn't declare war on countries because of their internal wrong doings. Do you actually think ww2 was fought because the world wanted to stop German mistreatment of its undesirables?
cat199 9y ago
Sadly no, in 20 years the whiny relativistic people in charge of whichever authoritarian regime they have legitimized via their own apathy will be complaining that people didn't think that this was a 'cool' effort, much as they are doing here.
Cthulhu_ 9y ago
Was it known the nazis were evil when IBM helped them? Did IBM even know what their stuff was used for? Different times, different situations. The US was full of anti-semites too, and didn't hesitate to put anyone with Japanese heritage into concentration camps after Pearl Harbor - and nobody cared. That stuff has been covered up / hardly mentioned, ever since. And the US and its citizens doesn't seem to have a problem putting "enemy combatants" into concentration / torture camps after 9/11 (Guantanamo Bay). And that's just the stuff we know of. There's also the much more mysterious CIA dark sites, who knows what went on in there. I'm not saying China is any better from a moral standpoint, but the US and the businesses in there - often working together - aren't any better. See also the Snowden leaks, that proved the big tech companies were in cahoots with the NSA, amongst other things to profile for "enemy combatants" in the US.
- johansch 9y ago
  > Was it known the nazis were evil when IBM helped them? Did IBM even know what their stuff was used for? Yes. That was clearly shown in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust Edwin Black made a pretty convincing case that the IBM chairman Thomas J. Watson, Sr was quite aware of what the IBM equipment was used for - and actually quite enthusiastic about it all. So think of that connection next time you use "Watson".

by mtgx 9y ago

baby 9y ago

You don't like China. So cute

neikos 9y ago

That was exactly my thought, and I do already see them in a similar light.

tanilama 9y ago

Well a fun trivia, a research division of Chinese Policy Department(team named Trimps-Soushen), actually won top3 positions in ImageNet competition. I think they definitely have, at least, the engineering strength to implement what crazy, SkyNet inspired system themselves, without help from Google/DeepMind ... Which is ... pretty sad, on many levels.

kercker 9y ago

I find your argument rather lame. First, Chinese government is not Nazi and Google is not IBM. You can't just say that a government is Nazi just because you hate that government. Second, even if Google openly broke with Chinese government, it still has offices in China. I doubt that Google opens an AI center in China to "allow its DeepMind technology to be used to spy on Chinese citizens and dissidents", and I do think that Google has a big ambition than you can think in China. And I think that ambition is to advance AI with the help of local talents.

musage 9y ago
There is a difference between an analogy and a comparison. Just think of it as it working with murderers for commercial gain, and try again, as far as the analogy is concerned. China is plenty totalitarian, too, so even as a comparison it's not that far off (though you won't be able to follow comparisons either if you think things have to be exactly the same thing to be compared). You might even say the Nazis weren't Nazis before they started and lost their war; if they had stuck with, say, attacking Poland and Russia, and had kept their concentration camps secret (i.e. plausibly deniable), they still might be darlings of Western business elites even today, as Hitler was before the stuff we now have 20/20 hindsight on. Last but not least, a big ambition is living a life you then don't have to lie to yourself about. Compared to that, "advancing AI" isn't even an ambition, nevermind a big one.
cat199 9y ago
> I find your argument rather lame. not really, he managed to invoke nazis without it actually being godwins law. pretty impressive. additionally, this is not a ridiculous comparison: a) monopolistic, rights abusing dictatorship b) large us corp ignoring this to do business there and assist with 'dual use' tools which could be used for malice against its own citizens. > You can't just say that a government is Nazi just because you hate that government. similarly: you can't just dismiss a government's ills or to derail an argument because you like the people from that country or the stated intent of the action being peformed there by a company you like
opportune 9y ago
At its core, the goal of the two regimes (China, Nazi Germany) is the same: control information so that the existing regime is portrayed in a good light that preserves stability. Just because China isn't genocoding Jews doesn't mean they don't have hundreds of thousands of political prisoners, disadvantaged minorities, and a completely authoritarian government. As is, you would never hear of the North Korean concentration camps that China supports, nor the Tibetan and Uighur genocides that are ongoing. Google's move is purely financial. Google's biggest ambition is to control Chinese search, but its greatest ambition is to control all search, and the internet as whole. Google, as all other appreciably large tech companies, wants to hold a dominant position in the Chinse market, and to do so is willing to sacrifice market share in inferuor products. How much China gets involved is TB. The really fun part? Watching corporate entities justify genocide, sexism, racism, etc. in their grabs for dominance over the remaining European provinces.
- kercker 9y ago
  Can you give some credible sources on "Tibetan and Uighur genocides that are ongoing"?
  - opportune 9y ago
    Tibet: https://www.ncas.rutgers.edu/center-study-genocide-conflict-resolution-and-human-rights/tibet https://www.ncas.rutgers.edu/center-study-genocide-conflict-... >"The Tibetan government in exile in India estimates that the death toll since 1950 due to starvation, outright violence, and other indirect causes amounts to 1.2 million. However, some Tibetologists place the figure closer to half a million. The non-governmental International Commission of Jurists (ICJ) released a report to the United Nations in 1959, and another in 1960, which documented accounts of atrocities and accused the Chinese of religious-based genocide in Tibet. " Could possibly be biased by CIA it says. Uighur: https://uhrp.org/featured-articles/arguing-genocide-xinjiang-east-turkestan https://uhrp.org/featured-articles/arguing-genocide-xinjiang... Ehh this is as biased as it probably gets and it doesn't really make it sound like genocide. I guess I had heard of this (and maybe Tibet too) as cultural genocides before, and got it mixed up.

paradite 9y ago

Spying on citizens and dissidents, even if true, is nothing close to Nazis. For the record, - China was on the opposite side of Nazis in WW2 - China has 56 ethnic groups and has no plan to "cleanse" any of them

adventured 9y ago
The fact is Communist China has a very deep history of "cleansing" what they define as undesirables, which continues today in various forms. Today (and for decades now) they're aggressively attempting to "cleanse" homosexuals using state resources, torturing thousands of people. [1][2] China's Communist system also "cleansed" a vast number of people throughout its recent history. Over two decades they murdered (or sent to gulags) hundreds of thousands of intellectuals and similar, who were declared to be class enemies. This in fact likely set China's potential back by decades as Mao's horrific policies severely depleted China's resources. [1] "China urged to stop using electroshock therapy to ‘convert’ LGBT people" https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2017/11/14/china-urged-to-stop-using-electroshock-therapy-to-convert-lgbt-people/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2017/11/14... [2] https://www.hrw.org/news/2017/11/14/china-end-conversion-therapy-medical-settings https://www.hrw.org/news/2017/11/14/china-end-conversion-the...
- paradite 9y ago
  So assuming what you described is true, why hasn't the rest of the world declared war against the communist China? Because it's not close to what Nazis did. And that's my point. Btw, from the articles that you linked, it is quite clear that treating LGBT as disease is not a government policy. In fact, it is against the law. The government doesn't actively hunt for LGBT people and send them for treatment. In fact I think they are less concerned about homosexuality than the churches are.
  - darepublic 9y ago
    The world doesn't declare war on countries because of their internal wrong doings. Do you actually think ww2 was fought because the world wanted to stop German mistreatment of its undesirables?

cat199 9y ago

Sadly no, in 20 years the whiny relativistic people in charge of whichever authoritarian regime they have legitimized via their own apathy will be complaining that people didn't think that this was a 'cool' effort, much as they are doing here.

Cthulhu_ 9y ago

Was it known the nazis were evil when IBM helped them? Did IBM even know what their stuff was used for? Different times, different situations. The US was full of anti-semites too, and didn't hesitate to put anyone with Japanese heritage into concentration camps after Pearl Harbor - and nobody cared. That stuff has been covered up / hardly mentioned, ever since. And the US and its citizens doesn't seem to have a problem putting "enemy combatants" into concentration / torture camps after 9/11 (Guantanamo Bay). And that's just the stuff we know of. There's also the much more mysterious CIA dark sites, who knows what went on in there. I'm not saying China is any better from a moral standpoint, but the US and the businesses in there - often working together - aren't any better. See also the Snowden leaks, that proved the big tech companies were in cahoots with the NSA, amongst other things to profile for "enemy combatants" in the US.

johansch 9y ago
> Was it known the nazis were evil when IBM helped them? Did IBM even know what their stuff was used for? Yes. That was clearly shown in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust Edwin Black made a pretty convincing case that the IBM chairman Thomas J. Watson, Sr was quite aware of what the IBM equipment was used for - and actually quite enthusiastic about it all. So think of that connection next time you use "Watson".