11 ms·

AI Nationalism

125 points by niccolop 8y ago

carapace 8y ago
> Machine learning will enable new modes of warfare Bucky was confident that we could use computers to solve our problems. We could enter all relevant data and the machine could compute the optimal solutions for us. The issue has always been ensuring we ask them to solve the right problems. If we use AI to tell us how long to imprison people (already happening) rather than how to decrease recidivism, that's a meta-computer choice that we made, not the AI. If we use AI to kill people, rather than to figure out how not to have to kill them in the first place, that's also our choice. Cf. "Wargames" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WarGames https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WarGames This was in '83!
- carapace 8y ago
  I found the scene on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NHWjlCaIrQo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NHWjlCaIrQo I'm bawling my eyes out right now. "The only winning move is not to play."
wyck 8y ago
So you're saying we are going to digitize emotional bias and pretend it's more intelligent decision making, and then hand that over to a corporation. Sounds like a winner.
- nostrademons 8y ago
  That's a huge win. Consider that the economy today is built upon trading emotional bias for labor-saving and calling it "employment". With AI, we can get all the same emotional bias and not have to pay them. Plus they operate millions of times more efficiently and never need to sleep or have a personal life.
nopinsight 8y ago
I added up the number of university researchers who publish in top AI conferences (according to csrankings.org) from Jan 2017 to late May 2018. http://csrankings.org/#/fromyear/2017/toyear/2018/index?ai&vision&mlmining&nlp&ir&world http://csrankings.org/#/fromyear/2017/toyear/2018/index?ai&v... Here are approximate numbers (with 2 significant digits) of faculty members/university researchers who published as above in each country/continent: US 770 Canada 92 Asia (including China) 340 China 240 Europe 280 Australia + New Zealand 86 South America 12 The world excluding the US 810 So the US is still far ahead of other nations/regions, but it now has a bit below 50% of the world's university researchers who recently published in top AI conferences. China as a country is close to Europe as a continent and its number of published university researchers has increased rapidly in recent years. The number of researchers is not weighted by the number of papers published but this number is useful since it counts how many people are capable of advising graduate students to produce world-class research. Using the number of papers is complicated by how likely highly capable international graduate students would choose to study in each program (in addition to the researcher's capability), i.e. university's reputation would have an additional impact beyond its research capability.
- gf263 8y ago
  Surprised at how high Canada is when you factor in its population is only 4x NYC.
  - stealthmodeclan 8y ago
    I am curious how many of them are first generation emmigrants.
  - yathern 8y ago
    When you say it that way, it sounds impressive, but the population is ~11% of the US (36/320), so it seems reasonable they have ~11% the output of the US (90/770).
    - gf263 8y ago
      Yeah you're right.
mlthoughts2018 8y ago
I prefer to think about this in a manner similar to Robin Hanson’s Foresight Institute presentation regarding models for AGI timescales [0]. Basically, the component of this that says “but machine learning is different” is still not convincing. The same nationalistic divides and concerns about geopolitical backing for warfare tech that happened in response to nuclear weaponry and chemical weaponry are likely to be high-fidelity models of whatever geopolitical divide for machine learning weaponry. I agree it will be a significant policy issue, but I do not agree it is very related to the topic of AGI. Reasoning about it by studying how various other tech arms races have unfolded in history will be a good, but not perfect, model for how it unfolds for ML too. And the pieces where this time is different will be far more understated than the amount of hype about it. [0]: < https://vimeo.com/9508131 https://vimeo.com/9508131 >
laichzeit0 8y ago
Something tells me people that write these articles have never read a paper from e.g. NIPS or pick any top tier conference on cutting edge research, heck I would go so far as to say they don’t even know how to write an image classifier for MNIST using Keras if their life depended on it. Universal function approximators are not about to take over the world.
- garmaine 8y ago
  Devil’s advocate: success is a step function. AI isn’t going to take over the world until it is able to, and then it very rapidly does.
  - goatlover 8y ago
    Devil's devil's advocate. The world is too complicated to be reduced to a function. AI isn't going to take over the world anymore than anyone else has (governments and organizations included).
    - gowld 8y ago
      "the world" is vague. Governments certainly have taken over various worlds.
    - canjobear 8y ago
      > The world is too complicated to be reduced to a function. I can only interpret this as a mystical claim...
      - cornholio 8y ago
        The world is too complicated to be reduced to a function that does not exhibit general intelligence. At minimum, able to formulate rational strategies in arbitrary games against other rational adversaries.
      - goatlover 8y ago
        The mystical claim is that the world is like a board game where we can extrapolate from the success of AlphaGo/Zero to AGI taking over the world. That's just pure speculation because nobody has a clue what such an intelligence would look like. I can imagine using the mind infinity stone to take over the world, but that doesn't make it realistic.
analyst74 8y ago
> [I]f most countries will not be able to tax ultra-profitable A.I. companies to subsidize their workers...This kind of dependency would be tantamount to a new kind of colonialism. This is an interesting observation, it is actually already happening now with Internet companies, and to a lesser degree physical product companies with global reach (like Apple and Amazon). Money flow from local economies into those companies who don't pay much local tax nor creating much local employment. That could eventually drain the well dry. Countries suffered from colonialism have been catching up to the developed world in terms of standards of living in the past 100 years. I wonder if the above effect will reverse that course.
- wsinks 8y ago
  So - we end up with Elysium?
YeGoblynQueenne 8y ago
>> This arms race will potentially speed up the pace of AI development and shorten the timescale for getting to AGI. ... or it will all fizzle out once it becomes clear that classifiers trained from immense datasets can't get to AGI. In the last few months I've noticed a sudden uptick in papers and articles on the limitations of deep learning and even a few conferences discussing the way to overcome them (e.g. Logic and Learning at the Alan Turing Institute). Eventually, the hype will die down, people in the field will feel more confident discussing the weaknesses of deep learning and the general public (including the industry and the military) will catch on. Then we'll move forward again when the next big thing comes along.
- evrydayhustling 8y ago
  I fully agree that there is an ongoing reckoning with the limitations of deep learning, but that is the sign of a thriving community not a failing one. Also, AGI is a misplaced milestone, even as OP explores a more interesting one: as incremental advances in AI empower non-human entities (corps and governments) with unique powers of surveillance and autonomous action, the impacts can be just as important as if it were a machine intelligence. The uptick in articles is just a sign that it's trendy to poke holes in hype. Expecting AI to go away is like expecting the Internet (another fundamental shift that was announced with an annoying hype bubble) to go away. It's just becoming a part of life, and creating new power structures while it does.
  - aalleavitch 8y ago
    I’ve long believed the first true “AGI” will be a corporation in which all of the individual jobs have just been automated out of existence one by one over time. Eventually, many companies will essentially just become autonomous entities under the direction of shareholders. It may even have protocols put in place to determine when to hire outside consultants to come in and improve itself.
  - nerdponx 8y ago
    I fully agree that there is an ongoing reckoning with the limitations of deep learning I would go a step even further. I don't think this even justifies being called a "reckoning", we are just finding the limits of something that we have not yet found the limit I would go a step even further. I don't think this even justifies being called a "reckoning", we are just learning its limits.
angel_j 8y ago
AI will have the biggest impact on who makes money and controls wealth. Before any nation-state tries to take over the world with some kind of ultra-dominant weapon, most large states will have to deal with their own populations, as the rich control more resources. The imaginary graph of ML technology that can be developed for destruction or defense is fraught with inter-dependent paranoid scenarios. The use of ML for the increase of human happiness is apparent and obvious. An ML arms race that invokes conflict is going to be a huge waste of a nation's ML resources. It would be much more productive to think about how ML/AI can be used to for egalitarian human prosperity (a la post-scarcity, etc).
ButterflyWar 8y ago
This is strangely relevant. https://archive.fo/zP1F1 https://archive.fo/zP1F1 - The economics surrounding AI development favor those who can commoditize data to the cheapest price. (Silicon Valley, militaries, and finance have AND MUST MAINTAIN their influence over this commoditization) This commoditization requirement was once previously thought as irreversible, allowing dumb money to buy into the idea that “data is the new oil”, but Butterfly War shows how to unexpectedly drive up the liability of a mass accumulation of data commodities. - Foreign actors and short sellers can now use derivations of the Butterfly War to become market makers of the data economy, forcing the theory of “AI Winters” to be replaced with a more predictive “AI Business Cycle”. (Do you now understand why I went to Soros-influenced actors first?) - This undesirable pressure, when paired with the institutional dependencies of established AI infrastructure, will force a deeper consolidation of Silicon Valley, military, and financial “cognitive assets”, which in turn will skew the funding and purposes behind additional AI development to be more risk-averse and conservative (from an power preservation standpoint). - The pressures to embrace “cognitive mercantilism” become irreversible. Nations will aggressively retain talent and technologies for themselves to improve their collective bargaining power on the international stage. /pol/-tier nationalism finally has the footing to stifle their material humanist opposition. - AI development will enter an artificially induced “deep freeze” period, similar to what happened to space exploration after the Space Race. - The doctrine of Gnostic Warfare we develop today dominates in this period, focusing primarily on the epistemological limitations of Deep Belief Networks and, more precisely, how these cognitive assets define emotion.
strken 8y ago
Maybe it's not about AI as a strategic asset, so much as it's about private sector data collection of the kind that AI can utilise as a strategic asset. The ability to perform image recognition against user photos would be limited to countries that host the headquarters of a large social network, for example.
BloodyHands 8y ago
the idea that politicians are welcome in theology is ridiculous > what is intelligent > what is the set of all x such that x is intelligent not political questions
madmax96 8y ago
A general critique: it's not just about AI. Computation, in general, is capable of solving many problems that afflict the world - disease, hunger, resource allocation, etc. Some of these problems have "conventional" computational solutions. Fundamentally, there are two problems that must be solved. First, the actual ability to actually compute needs perfected. This means that massive computations (i.e. the computations that solve massive, game-changing problems) can easily be performed. Things like public clouds are solving that problem. Second, computation needs applied to a problem. Statistical learning approaches have become popular because they are relatively simple to apply and are relatively successful. AI researches tend to believe that AI is all that matters, but obviously the success of AI is only possible with efficient computation. Similarly, efficient computation alone is useless if that computation cannot be used to solve actual problems. Computation is to the 21st century as energy is the 20th. The ramifications of that statement are immediately obvious: consider the petrodollar. Soon, computation will become a currency.

125 points by niccolop 8y ago

> Machine learning will enable new modes of warfare Bucky was confident that we could use computers to solve our problems. We could enter all relevant data and the machine could compute the optimal solutions for us. The issue has always been ensuring we ask them to solve the right problems. If we use AI to tell us how long to imprison people (already happening) rather than how to decrease recidivism, that's a meta-computer choice that we made, not the AI. If we use AI to kill people, rather than to figure out how not to have to kill them in the first place, that's also our choice. Cf. "Wargames" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WarGames https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WarGames This was in '83!

carapace 8y ago
I found the scene on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NHWjlCaIrQo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NHWjlCaIrQo I'm bawling my eyes out right now. "The only winning move is not to play."

wyck 8y ago

So you're saying we are going to digitize emotional bias and pretend it's more intelligent decision making, and then hand that over to a corporation. Sounds like a winner.

nostrademons 8y ago
That's a huge win. Consider that the economy today is built upon trading emotional bias for labor-saving and calling it "employment". With AI, we can get all the same emotional bias and not have to pay them. Plus they operate millions of times more efficiently and never need to sleep or have a personal life.

nopinsight 8y ago

I added up the number of university researchers who publish in top AI conferences (according to csrankings.org) from Jan 2017 to late May 2018. http://csrankings.org/#/fromyear/2017/toyear/2018/index?ai&vision&mlmining&nlp&ir&world http://csrankings.org/#/fromyear/2017/toyear/2018/index?ai&v... Here are approximate numbers (with 2 significant digits) of faculty members/university researchers who published as above in each country/continent: US 770 Canada 92 Asia (including China) 340 China 240 Europe 280 Australia + New Zealand 86 South America 12 The world excluding the US 810 So the US is still far ahead of other nations/regions, but it now has a bit below 50% of the world's university researchers who recently published in top AI conferences. China as a country is close to Europe as a continent and its number of published university researchers has increased rapidly in recent years. The number of researchers is not weighted by the number of papers published but this number is useful since it counts how many people are capable of advising graduate students to produce world-class research. Using the number of papers is complicated by how likely highly capable international graduate students would choose to study in each program (in addition to the researcher's capability), i.e. university's reputation would have an additional impact beyond its research capability.

gf263 8y ago
Surprised at how high Canada is when you factor in its population is only 4x NYC.
- stealthmodeclan 8y ago
  I am curious how many of them are first generation emmigrants.
- yathern 8y ago
  When you say it that way, it sounds impressive, but the population is ~11% of the US (36/320), so it seems reasonable they have ~11% the output of the US (90/770).
  - gf263 8y ago
    Yeah you're right.

mlthoughts2018 8y ago

I prefer to think about this in a manner similar to Robin Hanson’s Foresight Institute presentation regarding models for AGI timescales [0]. Basically, the component of this that says “but machine learning is different” is still not convincing. The same nationalistic divides and concerns about geopolitical backing for warfare tech that happened in response to nuclear weaponry and chemical weaponry are likely to be high-fidelity models of whatever geopolitical divide for machine learning weaponry. I agree it will be a significant policy issue, but I do not agree it is very related to the topic of AGI. Reasoning about it by studying how various other tech arms races have unfolded in history will be a good, but not perfect, model for how it unfolds for ML too. And the pieces where this time is different will be far more understated than the amount of hype about it. [0]: < https://vimeo.com/9508131 https://vimeo.com/9508131 >

laichzeit0 8y ago

Something tells me people that write these articles have never read a paper from e.g. NIPS or pick any top tier conference on cutting edge research, heck I would go so far as to say they don’t even know how to write an image classifier for MNIST using Keras if their life depended on it. Universal function approximators are not about to take over the world.

garmaine 8y ago
Devil’s advocate: success is a step function. AI isn’t going to take over the world until it is able to, and then it very rapidly does.
- goatlover 8y ago
  Devil's devil's advocate. The world is too complicated to be reduced to a function. AI isn't going to take over the world anymore than anyone else has (governments and organizations included).
  - gowld 8y ago
    "the world" is vague. Governments certainly have taken over various worlds.
  - canjobear 8y ago
    > The world is too complicated to be reduced to a function. I can only interpret this as a mystical claim...
    - cornholio 8y ago
      The world is too complicated to be reduced to a function that does not exhibit general intelligence. At minimum, able to formulate rational strategies in arbitrary games against other rational adversaries.
    - goatlover 8y ago
      The mystical claim is that the world is like a board game where we can extrapolate from the success of AlphaGo/Zero to AGI taking over the world. That's just pure speculation because nobody has a clue what such an intelligence would look like. I can imagine using the mind infinity stone to take over the world, but that doesn't make it realistic.

analyst74 8y ago

> [I]f most countries will not be able to tax ultra-profitable A.I. companies to subsidize their workers...This kind of dependency would be tantamount to a new kind of colonialism. This is an interesting observation, it is actually already happening now with Internet companies, and to a lesser degree physical product companies with global reach (like Apple and Amazon). Money flow from local economies into those companies who don't pay much local tax nor creating much local employment. That could eventually drain the well dry. Countries suffered from colonialism have been catching up to the developed world in terms of standards of living in the past 100 years. I wonder if the above effect will reverse that course.

wsinks 8y ago
So - we end up with Elysium?

YeGoblynQueenne 8y ago

>> This arms race will potentially speed up the pace of AI development and shorten the timescale for getting to AGI. ... or it will all fizzle out once it becomes clear that classifiers trained from immense datasets can't get to AGI. In the last few months I've noticed a sudden uptick in papers and articles on the limitations of deep learning and even a few conferences discussing the way to overcome them (e.g. Logic and Learning at the Alan Turing Institute). Eventually, the hype will die down, people in the field will feel more confident discussing the weaknesses of deep learning and the general public (including the industry and the military) will catch on. Then we'll move forward again when the next big thing comes along.

evrydayhustling 8y ago
I fully agree that there is an ongoing reckoning with the limitations of deep learning, but that is the sign of a thriving community not a failing one. Also, AGI is a misplaced milestone, even as OP explores a more interesting one: as incremental advances in AI empower non-human entities (corps and governments) with unique powers of surveillance and autonomous action, the impacts can be just as important as if it were a machine intelligence. The uptick in articles is just a sign that it's trendy to poke holes in hype. Expecting AI to go away is like expecting the Internet (another fundamental shift that was announced with an annoying hype bubble) to go away. It's just becoming a part of life, and creating new power structures while it does.
- aalleavitch 8y ago
  I’ve long believed the first true “AGI” will be a corporation in which all of the individual jobs have just been automated out of existence one by one over time. Eventually, many companies will essentially just become autonomous entities under the direction of shareholders. It may even have protocols put in place to determine when to hire outside consultants to come in and improve itself.
- nerdponx 8y ago
  I fully agree that there is an ongoing reckoning with the limitations of deep learning I would go a step even further. I don't think this even justifies being called a "reckoning", we are just finding the limits of something that we have not yet found the limit I would go a step even further. I don't think this even justifies being called a "reckoning", we are just learning its limits.

angel_j 8y ago

AI will have the biggest impact on who makes money and controls wealth. Before any nation-state tries to take over the world with some kind of ultra-dominant weapon, most large states will have to deal with their own populations, as the rich control more resources. The imaginary graph of ML technology that can be developed for destruction or defense is fraught with inter-dependent paranoid scenarios. The use of ML for the increase of human happiness is apparent and obvious. An ML arms race that invokes conflict is going to be a huge waste of a nation's ML resources. It would be much more productive to think about how ML/AI can be used to for egalitarian human prosperity (a la post-scarcity, etc).

ButterflyWar 8y ago

This is strangely relevant. https://archive.fo/zP1F1 https://archive.fo/zP1F1 - The economics surrounding AI development favor those who can commoditize data to the cheapest price. (Silicon Valley, militaries, and finance have AND MUST MAINTAIN their influence over this commoditization) This commoditization requirement was once previously thought as irreversible, allowing dumb money to buy into the idea that “data is the new oil”, but Butterfly War shows how to unexpectedly drive up the liability of a mass accumulation of data commodities. - Foreign actors and short sellers can now use derivations of the Butterfly War to become market makers of the data economy, forcing the theory of “AI Winters” to be replaced with a more predictive “AI Business Cycle”. (Do you now understand why I went to Soros-influenced actors first?) - This undesirable pressure, when paired with the institutional dependencies of established AI infrastructure, will force a deeper consolidation of Silicon Valley, military, and financial “cognitive assets”, which in turn will skew the funding and purposes behind additional AI development to be more risk-averse and conservative (from an power preservation standpoint). - The pressures to embrace “cognitive mercantilism” become irreversible. Nations will aggressively retain talent and technologies for themselves to improve their collective bargaining power on the international stage. /pol/-tier nationalism finally has the footing to stifle their material humanist opposition. - AI development will enter an artificially induced “deep freeze” period, similar to what happened to space exploration after the Space Race. - The doctrine of Gnostic Warfare we develop today dominates in this period, focusing primarily on the epistemological limitations of Deep Belief Networks and, more precisely, how these cognitive assets define emotion.

strken 8y ago

Maybe it's not about AI as a strategic asset, so much as it's about private sector data collection of the kind that AI can utilise as a strategic asset. The ability to perform image recognition against user photos would be limited to countries that host the headquarters of a large social network, for example.

BloodyHands 8y ago

the idea that politicians are welcome in theology is ridiculous > what is intelligent > what is the set of all x such that x is intelligent not political questions

madmax96 8y ago

A general critique: it's not just about AI. Computation, in general, is capable of solving many problems that afflict the world - disease, hunger, resource allocation, etc. Some of these problems have "conventional" computational solutions. Fundamentally, there are two problems that must be solved. First, the actual ability to actually compute needs perfected. This means that massive computations (i.e. the computations that solve massive, game-changing problems) can easily be performed. Things like public clouds are solving that problem. Second, computation needs applied to a problem. Statistical learning approaches have become popular because they are relatively simple to apply and are relatively successful. AI researches tend to believe that AI is all that matters, but obviously the success of AI is only possible with efficient computation. Similarly, efficient computation alone is useless if that computation cannot be used to solve actual problems. Computation is to the 21st century as energy is the 20th. The ramifications of that statement are immediately obvious: consider the petrodollar. Soon, computation will become a currency.