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The Commerce Department is considering national security restrictions on AI
- gammateam 8y agoTl;dr when you got your people in power out of self-interest but now they outlived their usefulness
- kolikotime 8y agoWide ranging restrictions such as these are being tactically applied throughout the world. Germany and France enacted similar policies last year. As Ian Hogarth sketched out last year, we're entering an era in which AI becomes part and parcel of a country's geopolitics, an era of AI Nationalism so to speak. Hogarth expressed the opinion that Google's purchase of DeepMind(A UK based company initially) is going to be seen increasingly in the future as an amazing coup, a unit with some of the world's greatest minds on Deep learning allowed to be sold to a foreign conglomerate. I have to say as time goes by and governments realize how strategic their AI community is, I agree.
- justicezyx 8y agoWell, if it's not deep mind, Google can buy some other companies and let them use the world's most advanced AI compute infrastructure and who knows what they would do. I do not doubt deep minds talents, but your comment seems to me an overstatement on its value.
- wbl 8y agoIt's the UK and the US. The UK traded VX for the hydrogen bomb and gets Trident from us with their warheads on top.
- blattimwind 8y ago> Germany and France enacted similar policies last year. Source?
- Semaphor 8y agoSearched and couldn't find anything for Germany.
- megiddo 8y agoThis will work about as well as suing Napster did to prevent the spread of music sharing.
- bdcravens 8y agoThe same is true of most convictions and crimes.
- AnthonyMouse 8y agoNot really. Most good laws prohibit things most good people wouldn't actually do, and are mostly effective even if a few people don't follow them. So you start off with 80% compliance before you even pass the law, then you get another 15% because the people who might have done it accept that there is a law against and it don't consider it worth breaking the law. So you get >95% compliance, which is generally good enough to be effective even if there is the occasional scofflaw. Restricting information sharing on the internet is the complete opposite. If there was no law then everybody would do it, many people will fight you on principle to the point of overt civil disobedience, and if even one source is available the whole thing falls apart -- including from other countries you have no jurisdiction over.
- logicchains 8y agoI'm curious how export restrictions would affect open source projects like Tensorflow and PyTorch. Would they be forced to become closed source? Could the license just include a disclaimer: "You're not allowed to use this if you're in one of the following countries: ..."? Would sites like Gitlab and Github be forced to implement per-repo geoblocking? Could they somehow be moved to ownership by a non-American entity that wasn't subject to such code? Does a US citizen contributing to a non-US open source ML project constitute a breach of export controls?
- gumby 8y agoIn the 90s it meant open source software (we didn’t use this term back then) like Kerberos were considered munitions and it was illegal to provide them to non-us persons without a license. At Cygnus we generated a version with no cryptography at all and sent it to Switzerland where someone wrote crypto routines (available in the open literature) that interoperated, and the everyone on the planet had access to it (but American folks had a different version). All so that the Swiss stock exchange could use Kerberos for single sign on and end-to-end encryption.
- logicchains 8y agoWas publishing cryptography papers in open-access journals also illegal? Without such a ban it seems it would be very hard to stop the export of AI, as it's not particularly difficult to implement an AI algorithm from spec, just tedious; certainly much easier than implementing one's own crypto. >illegal to provide them to non-us persons without a license I wonder if in this case Git{hub|lab} would need the license, or the person uploading the code?
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- ninguem2 8y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernstein_v._United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernstein_v._United_States
- RA_Fisher 8y ago"I know, we'll ban math!" - brilliant politicians
- dang 8y agoCould you please stop posting unsubstantive comments to Hacker News?
- RA_Fisher 8y agoThey may be short and sweet but I certainly don't feel they're unsubstantive. It seems you're the decider, though, so no problem I'll leave.
- RA_Fisher 8y agoI'm sorry, dang. I appreciate your work here. I like to use farce to point out what I see as inconvenient truths. I can accept that they're not welcome here.
- dang 8y agoShort comments are fine in general, but short inflammatory or snarky comments tend to be flamebait. If you're posting about something divisive, please make the comment more thoughtful. It's not just—or even primarily—about the quality of your own comment, but the quality of the other comments it is likely to lead to. In other words, the real issue is the systemic effect on the site. And please don't leave! https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- eganist 8y ago> They may be short and sweet but I certainly don't feel they're unsubstantive. Your comment is visible through enabling flagged/dead comments in settings, and now that I've enabled it—I really don't see the value that this specific comment adds. It broadly derides a class of workers (regardless of whether we actually hold them in high regard) without materially contributing to the conversation. Commentary of this nature does largely invite simple, emotional agreement in forums with a more instinctive hive mentality (versus the intellectual hive mentality which arises here, a challenge I'm not discounting generally but am subtracting from this equation). What it generally doesn't do is invite informed conversation. It scratches an itch, and judging from how thoroughly your comment was both modded down and flagged, it looks like it scratches an itch Hackernews doesn't have. Tl;Dr: dang might be the decider, but his decision was informed by flags, which speaks to the nature of the discourse desired here. The comment was just out of place. It's a better fit for Reddit, but most of us who are active here are specifically here in search of a respite from that. -- If I were to reply to your comment in search of an actual conversation over this, it would probably be more along the lines of: > I doubt the politicians themselves came up with this. More likely it was drafted by a think tank, an institution with a vested interest, or a committee constituted of the above. Can't blame the politicians for investigating whether there's a challenge here that'll help their constituents; it's literally their job.
- gumby 8y agoWhat a bunch of maroons. This stupid approach was such a disaster in the days of crypto controls. Lifting them protected Americans and unleashed a huge number of new capabilities.
- bsaul 8y ago« Lifting them protected americans and unleashed... » Source ?
- gumby 8y agoEnd to end encryption is now common which protects everyone. SSL/TLS is now unbiquitous as are secure messaging apps. Crypto research looks for volnerabilities in all sorts of software. This protects everyone, including Americans.
- JustSomeNobody 8y agoYou mean easing them? IIRC, there are still restrictions in place.
- zxcvvcxz 8y agoWe're gonna need government permits to do gradient descent.
- killjoywashere 8y agoDo you restrict the distribution of sets of trained hyperparameters? Do you restrict models for training? Do you restrict the datasets? Do you prevent journal publication of new developments? The fundamental algorithms are pretty well developed. Like Bernoulli's principle was well understood before the first airplane. If you want to restrict something, you would restrict the tooling. Like we restrict the tooling to make advanced aircraft wings. In the case of ML that means you restrict ... migration of certain groups of engineers? Sale of GPUs?
- omeid2 8y agoWhile I don't advocate any restrictions for knowledge, even if for the very practical reason that it fails the it's premise of keeping it away from the bad guys and also find National Security to have been well and thoroughly abused for overreaching and draconian powers, there is something to be said about the power of the information that a well trained model holds. I believe it is fair, to at least start with the premise that, restrictions that would normally apply to some data, would reasonably extend to the Model trained by them, obviously, how much depends on the context and sensitivity of the data.
- Veedrac 8y agoThe publication mentioned: https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2018/11/19/2018-25221/review-of-controls-for-certain-emerging-technologies https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2018/11/19/2018-25... Relevant excerpt: The representative general categories of technology for which Commerce currently seeks to determine whether there are specific emerging technologies that are essential to the national security of the United States include: (2) Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning technology, such as: (i) Neural networks and deep learning (e.g., brain modelling, time series prediction, classification); (ii) Evolution and genetic computation (e.g., genetic algorithms, genetic programming); (iii) Reinforcement learning; (iv) Computer vision (e.g., object recognition, image understanding); (v) Expert systems (e.g., decision support systems, teaching systems); (vi) Speech and audio processing (e.g., speech recognition and production); (vii) Natural language processing (e.g., machine translation); (viii) Planning (e.g., scheduling, game playing); (ix) Audio and video manipulation technologies (e.g., voice cloning, deepfakes); (x) AI cloud technologies; or (xi) AI chipsets.
- philipkglass 8y agoIt also names "visualization" and "molecular robotics" as (non-AI) representative technology categories. It includes the specific, the absurdly general, and the so-far-imaginary among its categories. The Federal Register publication is not very enlightening and I can't tell if the NYT story is based on anything more than that publication.
- ggggtez 8y agoI'm assuming "molecular robotics" is intended to cover CRISPR-like technologies.
- philipkglass 8y agoThere's a separate section for biotechnology. Molecular robotics is listed under robotics along with smart dust and swarming technology.
- hahabrew 8y ago
- menzoic 8y agoDr. Geoffrey Hinton, the creator of Deep Learning left academia in the United States and moved to Canada in part as a personal protest against military funding of research.
- demarq 8y agoI swear, America is always at the height of a cold war that ended decades ago.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- walshemj 8y agoEnded? the great game continues to this day.
- heyjudy 8y agoDo I really need to dust off my DeCSS Perl "this shirt is a munition" ThinkGeek shirt from way back? When something is new or "scary" doesn't mean knee-jerk legislation will do anything other than lead a country to missing out and innovation strengthing other countries.
- schoen 8y agoYou're thinking of two different code-on-shirts episodes here (Federal export controls on cryptographic software and entertainment industry litigation over DVD decryption software), although both of the shirts may have involved Perl code. "This shirt is a munition" is from the cryptography export controls issue and DeCSS is from the entertainment industry litigation issue.
- nv-vn 8y agoThis is what we get for all the stupid fear-mongering done by people with no understanding of "AI". Pop scientists like Neil deGrasse Tyson and Elon Musk weighing in on a field with 0 overlap with their expertise is treated by the media as some kind of prophecy sent from the heavens. Don't get me wrong, there's scary shit happening with AI that we can legitimately talk about, but we are so far from a world with sentient computers that the problem being posed by media figures is no more appropriate to discuss today than it was with the advent of neural networks.
- bodi 8y agoWhat's even scarier is the blind self appointed belief that one may own the thought and conversation of a topic as impactful yet graspable as AI.
- nv-vn 8y agoI don't believe that, if that's what you're implying. I think the people who should "own" the conversation so-to-speak are people who have spent the most time doing AI research. A lot of the cultural understanding of what AI is reflects the type of sci-fi hacking that's depicted on TV.
- timonovici 8y agohttps://youtu.be/GAXLHM-1Psk?t=945 https://youtu.be/GAXLHM-1Psk?t=945 - I think this commentary by Maciej Ceglowski rings true here.
- timonovici 8y agoAh, it comes a bit later, at 19:00 - "At that point people who are angry, mistrustful, and may not understand a thing about computers will regulate your industry into the ground. You'll be left like those poor saps who work in the nuclear plants, who have to fill out a form in triplicate anytime they want to sharpen a pencil."
- nv-vn 8y agoGreat vid! Thanks for sharing
- throwaway343213 8y agoHow is this even going to work ? A large fraction of the advances in AI come either from China proper or by Chinese grad students in the US, or by ethnic Chinese raised in the Americas. I don't think a large fraction of this demographic shares the cold war mentality of the war hawks in the Pentagon. USG will probably resort to will be to put restrictions on export of Nvidia GPUs/TPUs (similar to that on Intel Xeons). Hopefully, this'll have the unintended effect of breaking their monopoly of the DL market.
- ngcc_hk 8y agoMay be it is a yesterday cold war but a different kind of Cold War today. Your point right to the mark. Imagine you have Russian working living and sharing all the goodies but not follow the ethnic or market dynamics (genetic modified baby is just we know, no free access to chinese market but the other way round etc) what would any sensible American these days would say. Let us open free no restriction between china and America software border not one way. Let us do Facebook and Twitter ... no. Open source is great in a free word and inside a free world. At least the free rider paid but just benefit to their country even they live, study and suck you dry.
- Havoc 8y agoGood luck putting that genie back in the bottle
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- raverbashing 8y agoYes, because that worked fine with encryption restrictions back in the 90s.
- 3pt14159 8y agoI understand why they want to—even to the point of thinking it would be the right move if only it would actually work—but it won't work. True, software is dual use[0] but it's too slippery. Even things like nuclear weapons designs[1] are getting pretty easy for people to get their hands on. This stuff is just text! How are you going to stop this from spreading? It won't work. Besides, top-shelf AI tech isn't much better than mid-shelf stuff. For example, self-driving car technology. We're talking about the difference of 1000kms with no intervention by a human driver vs 5000kms. A terrorist weaponizing self-driving tech for, say, a mobile weapons platform (AKs connected to remote triggers, say) doesn't need the top shelf stuff. They need an auto that can go maybe 10kms. Thing is, unlike most people I talk to in tech, I actually support the majority of the objectives intelligence agencies in the west have. I just don't know how you solve this one. We need free speech to be a liberal democracy but information itself is becoming dangerous. How do you square that? Further, if the power of individuals keeps going up due to technological advancement how do you maintain security and freedom at the same time? The only way I can see it working is for individuals to continue to get more peaceful. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual-use_technology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual-use_technology [1] Thank goodness weapons grade fissile material is hard to make.
- 0x54D5 8y agoTo add to this a lot of the AI stuff is being posted open source to Github. At first it's to detect faces in a photo for social media tagging. Then it gets used to detect people in a camera feed on an automated turret.
- pc86 8y ago> We need free speech to be a liberal democracy but information itself is becoming dangerous. How do you square that? You can't. Either speech is free or it's not. There are reasonable restrictions - literally inciting violence or things done to intentionally cause harm ("Fire!" in a theater, etc). For information, the only thing you can do is make it classified, which is hard to do when it's a private company doing the innovating.
- DaiPlusPlus 8y ago
- segmondy 8y agoUh oh, let's look at the crypto wars and see how that turned out. AI restriction is garbage, I think this is a way for the govt to steal AI tech from private corps. If you refuse to share, how can they access the strength? With crypto, we could easily say restricted to Nbits of keys. With AI, they will make up some rubbish and claim your AI is too strong because you refused to share. If you share and they find it good and think it gives the govt advantage, they will restrict you too. Either way you lose. Long run tho the govt will lose.
- jsmith99 8y agoThe crypto wars worked out well from the NSA's point of view. Obviously determined individuals, foreign governments, terrorists etc were not deterred by it from obtaining strong crypto. But mass adoption of strong crypto was delayed by many years, enabling mass surveillance.
- thatcat 8y agoSo you think by creating a negative association with AI, adoption will be delayed?
- corndoge 8y agoOnly Americans are allowed to do nonlinear function approximation! Fuck off China!
- PurpleBoxDragon 8y agoIsn't this a bit over-reductionist, such as the people who claim that since all electronic images are represented by 0's and 1's images are just numbers and thus it is silly to ban an illegal image since it is just banning a number?
- hippich 8y agoThis is interesting... Does algorithm decode, let's say, a JPG image in such a way that would produce child porn out of let's say google logo, makes google logo illegal image? Does conveying an illegal image in other ways, let's say describe in text detailed attributes of such an image, makes such text illegal? Not from a law standpoint, as I am sure it is quite specific, but from a spirit of the law which in theory should represent cultural norms of the country using such laws?
- IshKebab 8y agoThe law doesn't really have a problem with such technical hacks. They basically apply common sense - if you distribute a decoder that produces CP from the Google Logo, in legal terms that is no different to distributing CP. I think someone wrote an article about this many years ago called "the colour of bits" or something like that. Basically the idea that you can trick your way out of the law with "it's just a number" type arguments are nonsense.
- FilterSweep 8y agoRegulation is certainly needed but we can be certain it won’t be done properly. More worrying is the fact that for every “benefit” we receive from AI (self driving cars, open source home automation), there are numerous, globally negative consequences such as discriminatory practices based off biased training data. The Chinese executive mistakened for a jaywalker is a clear example of this. It feels like this is a train that cannot be stopped that will lead to disasterous circumstances.
- creaghpatr 8y agoThe only thing that can stop a bad guy with an algorithm is a good guy with an algorithm.
- FilterSweep 8y agoGenuinely wondering, is that sarcasm?
- IshKebab 8y ago> discriminatory practices based off biased training data I think the car insurance industry has shown how unwilling governments are to do anything about that sort of thing. No need to involve AI.
- simplecomplex 8y agoThere is no such thing as AI. No professional, legal, or formal definition of such a thing exists. Even self-described AI experts have put forth no definition for AI, let alone agreed on one. Elon Musk was telling people on Joe Rogan that AI was the biggest threat to humanity without even defining what AI is.
- JoeDaDude 8y agoI appreciate the members of HN for bringing this to our attention, however, the comment period on the proposed rule making ended on December 19th, 2018. https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2018/11/19/2018-25221/review-of-controls-for-certain-emerging-technologies https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2018/11/19/2018-25...
- JoeDaDude 8y agoLet me correct myself. Seems the comment period has been extended until January 10th. https://www.regulations.gov/document?D=BIS-2018-0024-0042 https://www.regulations.gov/document?D=BIS-2018-0024-0042
- justcorrect 8y agoThe problem I see here is logistical. AI is often a blank slate, dependent on the data that's fed into it to be useful. It's that data, and the way the model is tuned, that is important. We do control exports on certain grade encryptions, but how do we control export over tuning a machine model, or over input data for a ML model?