6 ms·

> The Pentagon is in a race against China and Russia to infuse more AI into its war machine ... Much of the focus is on the U.S., China, and Russia, but I wond

> The Pentagon is in a race against China and Russia to infuse more AI into its war machine ... Much of the focus is on the U.S., China, and Russia, but I wonder who else is doing it? Several years ago, a leading thinker on the application of modern IT to the military noted that it could represent an historic change: Throughout history, military power depended mostly on the quantity of two resources, wealth and population. But AI is much less strongly dependent on those things: You don't need lots of people; the robots and computers do much of the fighting. And wealth only helps so much: For AI, much of the war-fighting asset is software, which of course is free to produce after development, not expensive hardware. As we know well, spending more on software development doesn't always yield a better outcome. What's the benefit from spending $100 billion on development rather than $1 billion or even $10 million? For a lot of software, not much. (Hardware scale does help machine learning, but is there an upper limit or diminishing returns?) Small countries might have an enormous opportunity. Could Singapore or Israel take the lead in AI and become major military powers? Could Saudi Arabia or Iran afford to develop AI as good as the U.S., China, or Russia? What about private companies or individuals? I suspect it depends not on quantity of developers, but on quantity of 10x developers and on who first discovers the superior technology and, more importantly, its application. Remember that in WWII, German tanks were inferior to many of their enemies, but the Germans figured out how to use tanks more effectively and seized an enormous advantage before their enemies could catch up. EDIT: A couple clarifications and added the potential of private organizations

SCHiM 8y ago
I think this is a pretty insightful an accurate point. I'd like to add the following: 'Secret' software is very hard to keep secret: once your enemy has a semi-intact drone/AI then they'll have upgraded their own fleet within months (if yours was indeed superior). I agree that it seems possible that a country with less wealth might outperform a country or group with more wealth. However, it's likely that the wealthier nation is better able to steal the technology and catch-up than the reverse scenario. A wealthier group has more budget for monetary bribes, and can pursue more parallel reverse-engineering attempts than the less wealthy group.
- APORWEVNAOEN 8y ago
  It might be possible to ship the current trained model without exposing underlying training techniques/datasets. How possible would it be to pick up a XYZ learning model, reverse engineer it, and improve it in a useful way?
  - pps43 8y ago
    Very difficult. It's much easier to train another model. Those things are mostly black boxes. Even the developers might not understand completely how they work.
- vonmoltke 8y ago
  > 'Secret' software is very hard to keep secret: once your enemy has a semi-intact drone/AI then they'll have upgraded their own fleet within months (if yours was indeed superior). All new systems have anti-tamper mechanisms designed in from the start specifically to minimize the chances of this happening (assuming they work as intended).
  - throwaway2048 8y ago
    judging by our utter inability to secure software and hardware stacks consistently, i wouldnt hold out much hope for this approach.
    - buzer 8y ago
      Adding self destruction capabilities & possible booby traps on military use drones is a bit different from adding them on smartphones.
    - vonmoltke 8y ago
      The world of bespoke military hardware is very different from consumer devices or commercial installations. Where off the shelf stuff is used, a lot of work goes into neutralizing the infiltration and exfiltration vectors. It is one of the reasons military computing systems are both so expensive and so behind the cutting edge.
rm_-rf_slash 8y ago
I disagree with both assertions. Unless any major breakthroughs in AI come along, you need a lot of people to create light, sweet crude data. China has multiples of the U.S. population, and is an expansive surveillance state gathering up every bit the internet has to offer, in contrast to the increasingly privacy-sensitive West. Given current trends in deep learning, those two factors alone give China an enormous advantage over the U.S. Likewise, arguing that AI/software can supplant wealth in warfare is laughable. An example could be 9/11. The total cost to Al-Qaeda was a rounding error compared to the trillions spent in Afghanistan (and later, Iraq). And I have read anecdotes of U.S. Marines in Iraq recalling how insurgents managed to waste millions (if not billions) by firing one rocket at a Marine base then fleeing, all while the entire base has to shut down operations to dig in and defend, even if the lone attacker is long gone by the time anybody’s in position. And yet neither Al-Qaeda or ISIS or even the United States itself has managed to fully and definitely declare peace and go home without a new insurgency rising up in their wake. In short, a power with little relative wealth or population - even with sophisticated software and AI - could never be any more than an expensive nuisance to the larger powers.
- module0000 8y ago
  I don't think any amount of AI can predict light sweet crude over 60s within 5 ticks of accuracy either.
otoburb 8y ago
>>Throughout history, military power depended mostly on the quantity of two resources, wealth and population. I thought that military power depended primarily on the quantity of population and materiél. The latter is driven primarily by wealth, but also relies on building, operating and maintaining a manufacturing and industrial base. Smarter software will help equalize and hopefully reduce coordination costs (i.e. command hierarchy & effective intelligence) but doesn't really help with population nor materiél factors.
- mieseratte 8y ago
  > but doesn't really help with population nor materiél. To add, AI can help reduce staffing, failures, costs, etc. What it can't do is magically project force. This requires boots on the ground or a weapons system capable of reaching out and touching someone. This requires materiél, and for the initial build-up flesh-and-bone soldiers. However, there is a possible exception in the form of cyber warfare. If AI can sufficiently disrupt digital infrastructure it could hypothetically bring another power to its knees. Still, if that power can bounce back from the initial setback that AI would again become a less direct asset.
  - pm90 8y ago
    Correct. And Cyber-based attacks are much less visible and easier to hide than overt attacks e.g. a cruise missile. But as things get more automated, the attack surface and concomitant damage will only increase. This could have very real military effects. Suppose your supply lines/defense contractors are targeted by foreign digital attackers. Even if your Military itself uses secure communications and infrastructure, if their dependents are disrupted, it will directly impact their effectiveness.
- maxerickson 8y ago
  Mine automation is a big deal.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- 8y ago
laretluval 8y ago
> For AI, much of the war-fighting asset is software, which of course is free to produce after development, not expensive hardware. In an AI war, any software you push at thr beginning of the war will be useless within days, because the enemy will push better software. The most efficient way to adapt will be to continually update your algorithms by stochastic gradient descent on GPUs. In the resulting minute-by-minute arms race, hardware will be crucial, as will having clever engineers who can continually streamline the process.
jacquesm 8y ago
Wait until the military figures out that AI is close enough over the horizon that a Manhattan style project will most likely be able to achieve a self-improving AI. There will be untold funds dumped into it to head off the 'enemy' at the pass because whoever gets it first might be able to stop others from ever achieving parity (or so it will no doubt be reasoned). For all our benefits I hope this is a lot harder than some people think it is.
- raverbashing 8y ago
  While the dangers of atomic chain reactions are well known, I think we're still safely behind the AI chain reaction breakthrough. While CNN and ltstm are very good at some tasks they're still far away from meta-learning
- make3 8y ago
  this is basically what Deepmind is doing
newnewpdro 8y ago
Isn't this basically the thesis of the singularity [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity
paganel 8y ago
Definitely not Saudi Arabia. A close friend of mine worked there as a engineering contractor for a big European aero-defense company and he said to me that the “engineering capabilities” (so to speak) of his Saudi colleagues were definitely sub-par. One of the reasons he gave me for this is that the Saudi electrical engineering students were still taught the Coran in university instead of the teachers devoting that time to useful EE knowledge. Maybe the new ruler will change things, but we’ll have to wait at least a couple of decades for the changes’ effects to become really visible. My bet is on Israel, though.
- felipemnoa 8y ago
  >>but we’ll have to wait at least a couple of decades for the changes’ effects to become really visible. By that time the world could be completely different and hence too late to make any changes.
- forapurpose 8y ago
  > Definitely not Saudi Arabia. A close friend of mine worked there as a engineering contractor for a big European aero-defense company ... The Saudi's answer to the problem you raise is in your first sentence: They can hire foreigners or buy the technology. In their nuclear competition with Iran, the Saudi's apparently intended to buy nuclear weapons from Pakistan. > Coran FWIW, it's usually spelled "Koran", "Quran", or "Qur'an" in English.
asdsa5325 8y ago
> Much of the focus is on the U.S., China, and Russia, but I wonder who else is doing it? The US sells defense equipment to it's allies
ethbro 8y ago
> Several years ago, a leading thinker on the application of modern IT to the military noted that it could represent an historic change: Throughout history, military power depended mostly on the quantity of two resources, wealth and population. You're describing network-centric warfare [1], which was formalized in US military theory in 1996 (22 years ago) and has guided US military doctrine since. I'm going to put this delicately, but it'd be nice if we didn't assume everyone in the military was an idiot and hasn't thought of the things we have. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network-centric_warfare https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network-centric_warfare
- risotto_groupon 8y ago
  If you're interested in this kind of thing I also recommend "Science, Strategy, and War" principally about John Boyd's EM theory of flight combat. https://www.amazon.com/Science-Strategy-War-Strategic-History/dp/0415459524 https://www.amazon.com/Science-Strategy-War-Strategic-Histor...
- sneak 8y ago
  It will remain hard to do that whilst they still haven’t thought of the idea that perhaps killing people for money isn’t the best use of one’s productive energies.
  - tomjakubowski 8y ago
    Da Vinci designed siege machines and other weapons of war for his patrons. I suppose you'd consider him an idiot for doing so? I'm as anti-war as they come but of course you have to recognize there are smart people who nevertheless decide to work with the military.
  - ethbro 8y ago
    Show me a world without violence, and I'll show you a country without an army. Until then, I'd say the Swiss, Israeli, and American models are the most moral realistic options we've come up with. (Each with their own terrible moral compromises and failures)
- 8y ago
spacenick88 8y ago
Interesting you mention Israel, I feel like they might be the prime example for your theory. They are small and not wealthier than say France or Germany. However they do have enormous IT talent and even more importantly their IT talent is motivated to help the military. In stark contrast to e.g. Germany where both bureaucratic rules (payment is fixed and terrible), the militaries reputation and the relative stability mean hardly any IT professional would be motivated to work on this. Also no first world military gets even close to the amount of real world use the IDF gets. No other nation can test their anti-missile systems straight from the backyard of its manufacturer using real enemy missiles. And we are already seeing this, Israel's Iron Dome is basically the only missile defense system we know actually and definitely works.
make3 8y ago
ai definitely needs a lot of people (researchers, to invent or at least apply the AI) and money (to pay the researchers, get good ones), and the quality of the program is definitely correlated with the money invested
sunstone 8y ago
Well, definitely not the Israelis since they have such a historical record of substandard intellects.

SCHiM 8y ago

I think this is a pretty insightful an accurate point. I'd like to add the following: 'Secret' software is very hard to keep secret: once your enemy has a semi-intact drone/AI then they'll have upgraded their own fleet within months (if yours was indeed superior). I agree that it seems possible that a country with less wealth might outperform a country or group with more wealth. However, it's likely that the wealthier nation is better able to steal the technology and catch-up than the reverse scenario. A wealthier group has more budget for monetary bribes, and can pursue more parallel reverse-engineering attempts than the less wealthy group.

APORWEVNAOEN 8y ago
It might be possible to ship the current trained model without exposing underlying training techniques/datasets. How possible would it be to pick up a XYZ learning model, reverse engineer it, and improve it in a useful way?
- pps43 8y ago
  Very difficult. It's much easier to train another model. Those things are mostly black boxes. Even the developers might not understand completely how they work.
vonmoltke 8y ago
> 'Secret' software is very hard to keep secret: once your enemy has a semi-intact drone/AI then they'll have upgraded their own fleet within months (if yours was indeed superior). All new systems have anti-tamper mechanisms designed in from the start specifically to minimize the chances of this happening (assuming they work as intended).
- throwaway2048 8y ago
  judging by our utter inability to secure software and hardware stacks consistently, i wouldnt hold out much hope for this approach.
  - buzer 8y ago
    Adding self destruction capabilities & possible booby traps on military use drones is a bit different from adding them on smartphones.
  - vonmoltke 8y ago
    The world of bespoke military hardware is very different from consumer devices or commercial installations. Where off the shelf stuff is used, a lot of work goes into neutralizing the infiltration and exfiltration vectors. It is one of the reasons military computing systems are both so expensive and so behind the cutting edge.

rm_-rf_slash 8y ago

I disagree with both assertions. Unless any major breakthroughs in AI come along, you need a lot of people to create light, sweet crude data. China has multiples of the U.S. population, and is an expansive surveillance state gathering up every bit the internet has to offer, in contrast to the increasingly privacy-sensitive West. Given current trends in deep learning, those two factors alone give China an enormous advantage over the U.S. Likewise, arguing that AI/software can supplant wealth in warfare is laughable. An example could be 9/11. The total cost to Al-Qaeda was a rounding error compared to the trillions spent in Afghanistan (and later, Iraq). And I have read anecdotes of U.S. Marines in Iraq recalling how insurgents managed to waste millions (if not billions) by firing one rocket at a Marine base then fleeing, all while the entire base has to shut down operations to dig in and defend, even if the lone attacker is long gone by the time anybody’s in position. And yet neither Al-Qaeda or ISIS or even the United States itself has managed to fully and definitely declare peace and go home without a new insurgency rising up in their wake. In short, a power with little relative wealth or population - even with sophisticated software and AI - could never be any more than an expensive nuisance to the larger powers.

module0000 8y ago
I don't think any amount of AI can predict light sweet crude over 60s within 5 ticks of accuracy either.

otoburb 8y ago

>>Throughout history, military power depended mostly on the quantity of two resources, wealth and population. I thought that military power depended primarily on the quantity of population and materiél. The latter is driven primarily by wealth, but also relies on building, operating and maintaining a manufacturing and industrial base. Smarter software will help equalize and hopefully reduce coordination costs (i.e. command hierarchy & effective intelligence) but doesn't really help with population nor materiél factors.

mieseratte 8y ago
> but doesn't really help with population nor materiél. To add, AI can help reduce staffing, failures, costs, etc. What it can't do is magically project force. This requires boots on the ground or a weapons system capable of reaching out and touching someone. This requires materiél, and for the initial build-up flesh-and-bone soldiers. However, there is a possible exception in the form of cyber warfare. If AI can sufficiently disrupt digital infrastructure it could hypothetically bring another power to its knees. Still, if that power can bounce back from the initial setback that AI would again become a less direct asset.
- pm90 8y ago
  Correct. And Cyber-based attacks are much less visible and easier to hide than overt attacks e.g. a cruise missile. But as things get more automated, the attack surface and concomitant damage will only increase. This could have very real military effects. Suppose your supply lines/defense contractors are targeted by foreign digital attackers. Even if your Military itself uses secure communications and infrastructure, if their dependents are disrupted, it will directly impact their effectiveness.
maxerickson 8y ago
Mine automation is a big deal.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
8y ago

laretluval 8y ago

> For AI, much of the war-fighting asset is software, which of course is free to produce after development, not expensive hardware. In an AI war, any software you push at thr beginning of the war will be useless within days, because the enemy will push better software. The most efficient way to adapt will be to continually update your algorithms by stochastic gradient descent on GPUs. In the resulting minute-by-minute arms race, hardware will be crucial, as will having clever engineers who can continually streamline the process.

jacquesm 8y ago

Wait until the military figures out that AI is close enough over the horizon that a Manhattan style project will most likely be able to achieve a self-improving AI. There will be untold funds dumped into it to head off the 'enemy' at the pass because whoever gets it first might be able to stop others from ever achieving parity (or so it will no doubt be reasoned). For all our benefits I hope this is a lot harder than some people think it is.

raverbashing 8y ago
While the dangers of atomic chain reactions are well known, I think we're still safely behind the AI chain reaction breakthrough. While CNN and ltstm are very good at some tasks they're still far away from meta-learning
make3 8y ago
this is basically what Deepmind is doing

newnewpdro 8y ago

Isn't this basically the thesis of the singularity [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity

paganel 8y ago

Definitely not Saudi Arabia. A close friend of mine worked there as a engineering contractor for a big European aero-defense company and he said to me that the “engineering capabilities” (so to speak) of his Saudi colleagues were definitely sub-par. One of the reasons he gave me for this is that the Saudi electrical engineering students were still taught the Coran in university instead of the teachers devoting that time to useful EE knowledge. Maybe the new ruler will change things, but we’ll have to wait at least a couple of decades for the changes’ effects to become really visible. My bet is on Israel, though.

felipemnoa 8y ago
>>but we’ll have to wait at least a couple of decades for the changes’ effects to become really visible. By that time the world could be completely different and hence too late to make any changes.
forapurpose 8y ago
> Definitely not Saudi Arabia. A close friend of mine worked there as a engineering contractor for a big European aero-defense company ... The Saudi's answer to the problem you raise is in your first sentence: They can hire foreigners or buy the technology. In their nuclear competition with Iran, the Saudi's apparently intended to buy nuclear weapons from Pakistan. > Coran FWIW, it's usually spelled "Koran", "Quran", or "Qur'an" in English.

asdsa5325 8y ago

> Much of the focus is on the U.S., China, and Russia, but I wonder who else is doing it? The US sells defense equipment to it's allies

ethbro 8y ago

> Several years ago, a leading thinker on the application of modern IT to the military noted that it could represent an historic change: Throughout history, military power depended mostly on the quantity of two resources, wealth and population. You're describing network-centric warfare [1], which was formalized in US military theory in 1996 (22 years ago) and has guided US military doctrine since. I'm going to put this delicately, but it'd be nice if we didn't assume everyone in the military was an idiot and hasn't thought of the things we have. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network-centric_warfare https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network-centric_warfare

risotto_groupon 8y ago
If you're interested in this kind of thing I also recommend "Science, Strategy, and War" principally about John Boyd's EM theory of flight combat. https://www.amazon.com/Science-Strategy-War-Strategic-History/dp/0415459524 https://www.amazon.com/Science-Strategy-War-Strategic-Histor...
sneak 8y ago
It will remain hard to do that whilst they still haven’t thought of the idea that perhaps killing people for money isn’t the best use of one’s productive energies.
- tomjakubowski 8y ago
  Da Vinci designed siege machines and other weapons of war for his patrons. I suppose you'd consider him an idiot for doing so? I'm as anti-war as they come but of course you have to recognize there are smart people who nevertheless decide to work with the military.
- ethbro 8y ago
  Show me a world without violence, and I'll show you a country without an army. Until then, I'd say the Swiss, Israeli, and American models are the most moral realistic options we've come up with. (Each with their own terrible moral compromises and failures)
8y ago

spacenick88 8y ago

Interesting you mention Israel, I feel like they might be the prime example for your theory. They are small and not wealthier than say France or Germany. However they do have enormous IT talent and even more importantly their IT talent is motivated to help the military. In stark contrast to e.g. Germany where both bureaucratic rules (payment is fixed and terrible), the militaries reputation and the relative stability mean hardly any IT professional would be motivated to work on this. Also no first world military gets even close to the amount of real world use the IDF gets. No other nation can test their anti-missile systems straight from the backyard of its manufacturer using real enemy missiles. And we are already seeing this, Israel's Iron Dome is basically the only missile defense system we know actually and definitely works.

make3 8y ago

ai definitely needs a lot of people (researchers, to invent or at least apply the AI) and money (to pay the researchers, get good ones), and the quality of the program is definitely correlated with the money invested

sunstone 8y ago

Well, definitely not the Israelis since they have such a historical record of substandard intellects.