8 ms·

While there are good intentions here, what happens if China and Russia military get ahead of US military in this technology due to us limiting ourselves

ajross 8y ago
That's where I am too. I mean, war stuff is bad, it kills people, and the US certainly isn't 100% trustworthy. At the same time... there's a real don't-rock-the-boat problem here. The last 3/4 of a century of US military dominance has been notable for a decrease in military/para-military violence on an order that humanity literally has never seen. It's not zero for sure, it's not always just, we may not always be the good guys, but seriously: if you are a random person anywhere in the world, you are vastly less likely to be killed by someone's bullet than you were pre-WW2. And that's important. A world without a dominant US military is a world with fewer US-driven injustices. That doesn't seem like a good bet to be a "better world", though.
- cryptoz 8y ago
  > the US certainly isn't 100% trustworthy. The US is the most wildly insane, two-faced and upside-down country in the world right now in terms of military. The commander-in-chief routinely makes nuclear threats, actively hurts his own citizens in times of need, and seeks to decrease military stability by accelerating climate change and isolating his country from the world. The commander-in-chief lies about every single thing in his day-to-day life, as well as his political life; he is mentally unstable and not fit to serve. The US military is 100% untrustworthy as its direct leader has shown himself to be literally insane. > there's a real don't-rock-the-boat problem here The US is the one rocking the boat. It has already happened and it happens daily. > A world without a dominant US military is a world with fewer US-driven injustices. That doesn't seem like a good bet to be a "better world", though. I disagree. That seems like a very incredibly great bet, to me. The time of US military leadership is over. That happened the day our Military Commander In Chief stood on his inauguration day and lied about the number of people in front of him. Perhaps the US will return to a positive leading role one day, but it is not there now and it has not been for years. All this aside, I do not agree that Google is the right place to develop US Military technology. Edit: Additionally, the commander-in-chief of the US military also stated point blank that we may not have presidential elections any more in the future. This is not a time to champion US democracy, military might, etc.
  - irq 8y ago
    Instead of downvoting cryptoz, I encourage people to counter what he said with their own replies. The majority of his statements in this post are verifiable facts. (I do not know this person, fwiw).
    - Rexxar 8y ago
      I don't down vote him but I understand that some people want to keep political discussions out of this forum, especially when this is not directly related to the original submission.
    - jds375 8y ago
      I agree. I’d guess that the downvoters are thinking along the lines of: - Sure it’s bad now, but the US military is made up of far more than just the president... many of which may be good, rational actors. - Just because it’s bad now doesn’t mean it won’t get better quickly (there has been a lot of pushback on the president’s agenda) - The US may still be comparatively better/benevolent than any other dominant superpower Note that these aren’t necessarily my views (I’d need more time to think and consider). But I think they point out some decent possible counter arguments to OP
      - ajross 8y ago
        > Sure it’s bad now, That's the thing though: it's not bad now!. Not by any historical standard, at least. For most of our history and prehistory, right up to the past 70 years, stupid warfare has been the rule. Petty tribal disputes, armed insurrections, ethnic cleansing and suppression and random gang violence were absolutely routine for almost everyone even as recently as our great grandparent's lifetimes. Virtually everyone saw violence like this at some point. Now, in most of the world (no, not all of it, but yes: most), pretty much no one does. And that's important. What we've been doing is working. Don't rock the boat.
        jds375 8y ago
        I actually completely agree with you (Enlightenment Now by Pinker provides excellent data backing all of this up). Our collective pessimism is actually a major problem I think. But to clarify, when I said “sure it’s bad now” I meant that in the context of the current military leadership. Unfortunately I can’t really defend that argument much further given that I don’t necessarily agree with it (it was just speculation on potential counter-arguments).
- mikeash 8y ago
  For most of that time, the US had an adversary that was roughly on par militarily, ahead in some areas and behind in others. The post WWII peace isn’t built on American dominance, it’s built on MAD.
  - esrauch 8y ago
    What is the post-Soviet era peace built on?
    - mikeash 8y ago
      Still MAD, I think. The nukes are still there and still ready to go.
- sitkack 8y ago
  > if you are a random person anywhere in the world, you are vastly less likely to be killed by someone's bullet than you were pre-WW2. You are spouting unsubstantiated nonsense.
  - ajross 8y ago
    Just google it. This isn't even a controversial position, LOTS of folks in academic history love to point this out. Here's a quick slide show about exactly this effect: https://ourworldindata.org/slides/war-and-violence/#/title-slide https://ourworldindata.org/slides/war-and-violence/#/title-s... See page 6 for a charge that shows exactly the fact I was citing, though the data as a whole is much broader and worth reading. So now I'm "substantiated", I guess. You have numbers showing the opposite effect?
    - sitkack 8y ago
      Interesting. I over reacted in the way I perceived how your statement was framed.
tomohawk 8y ago
Likely, the cabal of employees will continue to feel smug that they took the moral high ground by refusing to contribute to the national defense.
- vkou 8y ago
  If the Department of Defense primarily concerned itself with national defense, as opposed to political games on the other side of the world, that 'cabal' would probably have fewer members. Two oceans, a navy, and thousands of nuclear weapons are the national defense of the United States. The rest is empire-building.
  - mindcrime 8y ago
    Two oceans, a navy, and thousands of nuclear weapons are the national defense of the United States Don't forget "a rifle behind every blade of grass". [1] Even if the quote is apocryphal, the overall point is valid. [1]: https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Isoroku_Yamamoto https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Isoroku_Yamamoto
YeGoblynQueenne 8y ago
I don't think there's much of a problem with that. The thing is, the danger from AI weapons is that they will be dumb as bricks and cause unprecedented levels of collateral damage- not that they will somehow take over the world for their evil overlord owners.
staticautomatic 8y ago
Then we'll have fewer weapons at our disposal for fighting our many fruitless and stupid proxy wars around the world.
droopyEyelids 8y ago
Then we catch up. Or we don't, because autonomous killing machines are a big enough risk to all life they're not worth it. For example, you don't see an arms race to develop nastier strains of the flu or ebola, because that would be stupid for everyone.
ocdtrekkie 8y ago
It's very likely if there were a legitimate threat or need for the technology, employee opinion on helping the military would likely change. China and Russia are regularly highlighted as the bogeymen in these scenarios, but how many people realistically would suggest either is likely to say... invade or fire on the United States?
- it_learnses 8y ago
  False Dilemma. Direct invasion is not the only option available to a sufficiently advanced, large scale AI attack. Think of how many ways you can mess with elections, opinions, security, etc. of a target nation without being detected.
  - ocdtrekkie 8y ago
    You don't retaliate against election tampering with missile strikes.
  - Chaebixi 8y ago
    FYI, it_learnses, you've been shadowbanned for 7 months: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15570335 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15570335 All your comments start out hidden, but I vouched for this one so it's visible.
- tomohawk 8y ago
  So, unless the US is faced with imminent invasion, they should stick their heads in the sand? China is in the process of forcibly taking over an enormous chunk of geography in the south china sea. They have fired on and intimidated their neighbors such as Vietnam and Philippines in connection with this. They continue to undermine and isolate Taiwan. They are a big part of why N Korea has nuclear weapons and ICBMs. Russia is illegally occupying a big chunk of Ukraine, is involved in shooting down civilian airliners, and assassinating people they don't like with chemical weapons. At what point would it be advisable to see a trend and try to do something about it?
  - 8y ago
squarefoot 8y ago
If we reduce everything to being ahead of a potential enemy, then we soon get to a point where the solution of all problems is a single deadly upfront attack. Those technologies aren't for defense; every nation in the world throws loads of money to military expenses -including those countries who have zero chances of being ahead of any other- for a single reason: war is a very profitable business. Everything else is propaganda.
- kinsomo 8y ago
  > If we reduce everything to being ahead of a potential enemy, then we soon get to a point where the solution of all problems is a single deadly upfront attack. > Those technologies aren't for defense; Have you ever heard of Mutually Assured Destruction? Basically the idea is having "credible deterrent" actually prevents the use of the weapons, because the side that makes a "single deadly upfront attack" will lose along with their opponent. The only winning move is not to play. The problems happen when one side has capabilities the others lack, or when there are options for a "single deadly upfront attack" that aren't suicide. In short, "offensive" technologies can be defensive. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_assured_destruction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_assured_destruction
  - squarefoot 8y ago
    Does this apply only to superpowers over a certain level of military strength? Otherwise one could wonder why Mexico or Canada which have no comparable military power to the US hasn't been invaded yet. I agree in principle that mutual assure destruction can be indeed a valid deterrent, though I hardly believe there aren't others in a civilized world. To me also there's not that much difference between mutual assured destruction and severe damage. Let's say the US has 100 nukes and Russia only 20 (random numbers just to make an example), all of same power, and let's assume that most of them will be neutralized before hitting the targets so that in case of mutual attack Russia would be hit by say 30 nukes and the US by just 4. History 100 years from now would surely regard it as an epic victory for the US, but today anyone ruling over there would have to explain their citizens how on earth they couldn't take a step back and spare millions of lives. It's probably much simpler than that. The US, Russia, China, North Korea, etc. have zero intentions to go at war with each other, but is in everyone's interest to keep fueling the weapons industry, so they keep playing the plot: citizens are hooked using nationalist arguments to make them supporting their rulers etc. Weapons keep being amassed until the day they become obsolete and can be sold to less rich countries for their smaller wars, new more advanced weapons take their spot and the business continues. It's a win-win scenario for everyone but common people.
simion314 8y ago
1 Do you think China will send drones and attack US citizens? 2 Google was claiming they were doing open source work, so China would have access to it anyway 3 If there are enough money in this there will be people going to work on the project, so I am sure the US will have good droning software 4 US brought this on itself with the way they used the drones , like you have the verb "droning"
- kinsomo 8y ago
  > 1 Do you think China will send drones and attack US citizens? It's not unthinkable, especially if they feel confident that they have a technological advantage that would shield them from detection or in-kind retaliation. They also have somewhat different notions of citizenship/nationality than Western countries, and they have a few diasporas they'd like to control. > 3 If there are enough money in this there will be people going to work on the project, so I am sure the US will have good droning software What makes you so sure of this, or that those people will have the necessary talent? Lower quality software could lead to more collateral deaths. > 4 US brought this on itself with the way they used the drones , like you have the verb "droning" Contemporary drone-strikes are literally just regular airstrikes: for instance, the weapons the drones use were actually developed for other military aircraft [1] [2] and adapted to drones. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AGM-114_Hellfire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AGM-114_Hellfire [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_Direct_Attack_Munition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_Direct_Attack_Munition The only real difference is that there's no pilot in the plane, so less risk he dies in a crash. And I say crash because most of the drone-strikes happened in places where there were few hostile anti-aircraft weapons to actually shoot anything down. Most of the pilot risk would have been from mechanical problems and human error.
  - ocdtrekkie 8y ago
    No, the primary difference is that we deploy drones in areas we are not engaged in warfare, and to assassinate various individuals in foreign countries where we are not at war. We could not and would not deploy manned aircraft to do these jobs. We do not deploy F-35s to assassinate people in Pakistan. But we've been deploying drones there since 2004. Note that a key issue here is that the drone strikes aren't even military actions: They're controlled by the CIA. There is no technical difference with drones, the issue is entirely in how they are used. This is what makes your arguments about the weaponry being the same mostly irrelevant.
whack 8y ago
The inverse of this: if USA gets far ahead in this technology, China and Russia will be forced to double down on AI weapons as well, just to keep up. The only country that can cool down an arms race, is the one that's currently leading the pack.
rixrax 8y ago
I wonder if Google will conduct a thorough internal investigation on the leak and on the internal opposition to this project? I would hate not to know if it indeed was fueled by non-US citizens from China, Russia and other countries with potentially nefarious intentions to raise the already left leaning 'general population' of their employee base to oppose our national interests (which Google as a US company rightfully should support). Throwaway account (don't want my meager karma to be down voted to oblivion for speaking my mind).

ajross 8y ago

That's where I am too. I mean, war stuff is bad, it kills people, and the US certainly isn't 100% trustworthy. At the same time... there's a real don't-rock-the-boat problem here. The last 3/4 of a century of US military dominance has been notable for a decrease in military/para-military violence on an order that humanity literally has never seen. It's not zero for sure, it's not always just, we may not always be the good guys, but seriously: if you are a random person anywhere in the world, you are vastly less likely to be killed by someone's bullet than you were pre-WW2. And that's important. A world without a dominant US military is a world with fewer US-driven injustices. That doesn't seem like a good bet to be a "better world", though.

cryptoz 8y ago
> the US certainly isn't 100% trustworthy. The US is the most wildly insane, two-faced and upside-down country in the world right now in terms of military. The commander-in-chief routinely makes nuclear threats, actively hurts his own citizens in times of need, and seeks to decrease military stability by accelerating climate change and isolating his country from the world. The commander-in-chief lies about every single thing in his day-to-day life, as well as his political life; he is mentally unstable and not fit to serve. The US military is 100% untrustworthy as its direct leader has shown himself to be literally insane. > there's a real don't-rock-the-boat problem here The US is the one rocking the boat. It has already happened and it happens daily. > A world without a dominant US military is a world with fewer US-driven injustices. That doesn't seem like a good bet to be a "better world", though. I disagree. That seems like a very incredibly great bet, to me. The time of US military leadership is over. That happened the day our Military Commander In Chief stood on his inauguration day and lied about the number of people in front of him. Perhaps the US will return to a positive leading role one day, but it is not there now and it has not been for years. All this aside, I do not agree that Google is the right place to develop US Military technology. Edit: Additionally, the commander-in-chief of the US military also stated point blank that we may not have presidential elections any more in the future. This is not a time to champion US democracy, military might, etc.
- irq 8y ago
  Instead of downvoting cryptoz, I encourage people to counter what he said with their own replies. The majority of his statements in this post are verifiable facts. (I do not know this person, fwiw).
  - Rexxar 8y ago
    I don't down vote him but I understand that some people want to keep political discussions out of this forum, especially when this is not directly related to the original submission.
  - jds375 8y ago
    I agree. I’d guess that the downvoters are thinking along the lines of: - Sure it’s bad now, but the US military is made up of far more than just the president... many of which may be good, rational actors. - Just because it’s bad now doesn’t mean it won’t get better quickly (there has been a lot of pushback on the president’s agenda) - The US may still be comparatively better/benevolent than any other dominant superpower Note that these aren’t necessarily my views (I’d need more time to think and consider). But I think they point out some decent possible counter arguments to OP
    - ajross 8y ago
      > Sure it’s bad now, That's the thing though: it's not bad now!. Not by any historical standard, at least. For most of our history and prehistory, right up to the past 70 years, stupid warfare has been the rule. Petty tribal disputes, armed insurrections, ethnic cleansing and suppression and random gang violence were absolutely routine for almost everyone even as recently as our great grandparent's lifetimes. Virtually everyone saw violence like this at some point. Now, in most of the world (no, not all of it, but yes: most), pretty much no one does. And that's important. What we've been doing is working. Don't rock the boat.
      - jds375 8y ago
        I actually completely agree with you (Enlightenment Now by Pinker provides excellent data backing all of this up). Our collective pessimism is actually a major problem I think. But to clarify, when I said “sure it’s bad now” I meant that in the context of the current military leadership. Unfortunately I can’t really defend that argument much further given that I don’t necessarily agree with it (it was just speculation on potential counter-arguments).
mikeash 8y ago
For most of that time, the US had an adversary that was roughly on par militarily, ahead in some areas and behind in others. The post WWII peace isn’t built on American dominance, it’s built on MAD.
- esrauch 8y ago
  What is the post-Soviet era peace built on?
  - mikeash 8y ago
    Still MAD, I think. The nukes are still there and still ready to go.
sitkack 8y ago
> if you are a random person anywhere in the world, you are vastly less likely to be killed by someone's bullet than you were pre-WW2. You are spouting unsubstantiated nonsense.
- ajross 8y ago
  Just google it. This isn't even a controversial position, LOTS of folks in academic history love to point this out. Here's a quick slide show about exactly this effect: https://ourworldindata.org/slides/war-and-violence/#/title-slide https://ourworldindata.org/slides/war-and-violence/#/title-s... See page 6 for a charge that shows exactly the fact I was citing, though the data as a whole is much broader and worth reading. So now I'm "substantiated", I guess. You have numbers showing the opposite effect?
  - sitkack 8y ago
    Interesting. I over reacted in the way I perceived how your statement was framed.

tomohawk 8y ago

Likely, the cabal of employees will continue to feel smug that they took the moral high ground by refusing to contribute to the national defense.

vkou 8y ago
If the Department of Defense primarily concerned itself with national defense, as opposed to political games on the other side of the world, that 'cabal' would probably have fewer members. Two oceans, a navy, and thousands of nuclear weapons are the national defense of the United States. The rest is empire-building.
- mindcrime 8y ago
  Two oceans, a navy, and thousands of nuclear weapons are the national defense of the United States Don't forget "a rifle behind every blade of grass". [1] Even if the quote is apocryphal, the overall point is valid. [1]: https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Isoroku_Yamamoto https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Isoroku_Yamamoto

YeGoblynQueenne 8y ago

I don't think there's much of a problem with that. The thing is, the danger from AI weapons is that they will be dumb as bricks and cause unprecedented levels of collateral damage- not that they will somehow take over the world for their evil overlord owners.

staticautomatic 8y ago

Then we'll have fewer weapons at our disposal for fighting our many fruitless and stupid proxy wars around the world.

droopyEyelids 8y ago

Then we catch up. Or we don't, because autonomous killing machines are a big enough risk to all life they're not worth it. For example, you don't see an arms race to develop nastier strains of the flu or ebola, because that would be stupid for everyone.

ocdtrekkie 8y ago

It's very likely if there were a legitimate threat or need for the technology, employee opinion on helping the military would likely change. China and Russia are regularly highlighted as the bogeymen in these scenarios, but how many people realistically would suggest either is likely to say... invade or fire on the United States?

it_learnses 8y ago
False Dilemma. Direct invasion is not the only option available to a sufficiently advanced, large scale AI attack. Think of how many ways you can mess with elections, opinions, security, etc. of a target nation without being detected.
- ocdtrekkie 8y ago
  You don't retaliate against election tampering with missile strikes.
- Chaebixi 8y ago
  FYI, it_learnses, you've been shadowbanned for 7 months: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15570335 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15570335 All your comments start out hidden, but I vouched for this one so it's visible.
tomohawk 8y ago
So, unless the US is faced with imminent invasion, they should stick their heads in the sand? China is in the process of forcibly taking over an enormous chunk of geography in the south china sea. They have fired on and intimidated their neighbors such as Vietnam and Philippines in connection with this. They continue to undermine and isolate Taiwan. They are a big part of why N Korea has nuclear weapons and ICBMs. Russia is illegally occupying a big chunk of Ukraine, is involved in shooting down civilian airliners, and assassinating people they don't like with chemical weapons. At what point would it be advisable to see a trend and try to do something about it?
- 8y ago

squarefoot 8y ago

If we reduce everything to being ahead of a potential enemy, then we soon get to a point where the solution of all problems is a single deadly upfront attack. Those technologies aren't for defense; every nation in the world throws loads of money to military expenses -including those countries who have zero chances of being ahead of any other- for a single reason: war is a very profitable business. Everything else is propaganda.

kinsomo 8y ago
> If we reduce everything to being ahead of a potential enemy, then we soon get to a point where the solution of all problems is a single deadly upfront attack. > Those technologies aren't for defense; Have you ever heard of Mutually Assured Destruction? Basically the idea is having "credible deterrent" actually prevents the use of the weapons, because the side that makes a "single deadly upfront attack" will lose along with their opponent. The only winning move is not to play. The problems happen when one side has capabilities the others lack, or when there are options for a "single deadly upfront attack" that aren't suicide. In short, "offensive" technologies can be defensive. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_assured_destruction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_assured_destruction
- squarefoot 8y ago
  Does this apply only to superpowers over a certain level of military strength? Otherwise one could wonder why Mexico or Canada which have no comparable military power to the US hasn't been invaded yet. I agree in principle that mutual assure destruction can be indeed a valid deterrent, though I hardly believe there aren't others in a civilized world. To me also there's not that much difference between mutual assured destruction and severe damage. Let's say the US has 100 nukes and Russia only 20 (random numbers just to make an example), all of same power, and let's assume that most of them will be neutralized before hitting the targets so that in case of mutual attack Russia would be hit by say 30 nukes and the US by just 4. History 100 years from now would surely regard it as an epic victory for the US, but today anyone ruling over there would have to explain their citizens how on earth they couldn't take a step back and spare millions of lives. It's probably much simpler than that. The US, Russia, China, North Korea, etc. have zero intentions to go at war with each other, but is in everyone's interest to keep fueling the weapons industry, so they keep playing the plot: citizens are hooked using nationalist arguments to make them supporting their rulers etc. Weapons keep being amassed until the day they become obsolete and can be sold to less rich countries for their smaller wars, new more advanced weapons take their spot and the business continues. It's a win-win scenario for everyone but common people.

simion314 8y ago

1 Do you think China will send drones and attack US citizens? 2 Google was claiming they were doing open source work, so China would have access to it anyway 3 If there are enough money in this there will be people going to work on the project, so I am sure the US will have good droning software 4 US brought this on itself with the way they used the drones , like you have the verb "droning"

kinsomo 8y ago
> 1 Do you think China will send drones and attack US citizens? It's not unthinkable, especially if they feel confident that they have a technological advantage that would shield them from detection or in-kind retaliation. They also have somewhat different notions of citizenship/nationality than Western countries, and they have a few diasporas they'd like to control. > 3 If there are enough money in this there will be people going to work on the project, so I am sure the US will have good droning software What makes you so sure of this, or that those people will have the necessary talent? Lower quality software could lead to more collateral deaths. > 4 US brought this on itself with the way they used the drones , like you have the verb "droning" Contemporary drone-strikes are literally just regular airstrikes: for instance, the weapons the drones use were actually developed for other military aircraft [1] [2] and adapted to drones. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AGM-114_Hellfire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AGM-114_Hellfire [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_Direct_Attack_Munition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_Direct_Attack_Munition The only real difference is that there's no pilot in the plane, so less risk he dies in a crash. And I say crash because most of the drone-strikes happened in places where there were few hostile anti-aircraft weapons to actually shoot anything down. Most of the pilot risk would have been from mechanical problems and human error.
- ocdtrekkie 8y ago
  No, the primary difference is that we deploy drones in areas we are not engaged in warfare, and to assassinate various individuals in foreign countries where we are not at war. We could not and would not deploy manned aircraft to do these jobs. We do not deploy F-35s to assassinate people in Pakistan. But we've been deploying drones there since 2004. Note that a key issue here is that the drone strikes aren't even military actions: They're controlled by the CIA. There is no technical difference with drones, the issue is entirely in how they are used. This is what makes your arguments about the weaponry being the same mostly irrelevant.

whack 8y ago

The inverse of this: if USA gets far ahead in this technology, China and Russia will be forced to double down on AI weapons as well, just to keep up. The only country that can cool down an arms race, is the one that's currently leading the pack.

rixrax 8y ago

I wonder if Google will conduct a thorough internal investigation on the leak and on the internal opposition to this project? I would hate not to know if it indeed was fueled by non-US citizens from China, Russia and other countries with potentially nefarious intentions to raise the already left leaning 'general population' of their employee base to oppose our national interests (which Google as a US company rightfully should support). Throwaway account (don't want my meager karma to be down voted to oblivion for speaking my mind).