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I hope this impresses the military enough that they carve out several billion more for AI research. The US spends so much on the military. For some reason, we

I hope this impresses the military enough that they carve out several billion more for AI research. The US spends so much on the military. For some reason, we can’t justify more on civilian research but the military easily can, if it embraces it as part of its future.

irrational 6y ago
Yes, nothing could possibly go wrong with having a military minded AI.
- djohnston 6y ago
  it's as inevitable as nuclear proliferation following WW2. you can slow it down, try and create a few key players and build around that, but it's always coming.
- fermienrico 6y ago
  This is a serious dilemma because: - If you don't, then the enemy will - If you do, then you're inviting the enemy to do the same So, without trust and mutual agreement on an international level, this is a self-propelling premise that cannot be stopped. Game theory 101.
  - landryraccoon 6y ago
    Even in that international agreement, someone still has the weapons. International agreements failed to keep nuclear weapons out of the hands of the strongest nations because why would they ever give up their nukes?
- dogma1138 6y ago
  It’s not minded, it’s not any different in than alphago or alphastar or the OpenAI dota bots, it doesn’t understand anything outside of the context of the game it’s playing. It doesn’t have a mind. On the “intelligence” spectrum it’s much closer to the guidance system in a heat seeking missile to than say even a dog, yet alone anything that we would define as having cognition.
  - irrational 6y ago
    Well, OP was talking about billions of dollars of DARPA funding going towards military AI research. I presume they would be trying to get much closer to cognition.
    - dogma1138 6y ago
      Why would you want cognition? Besides the billions of edge cases it may create why would you want to make a tool you can or would have to reason with?
      - inetknght 6y ago
        > why would you want to make a tool you can or would have to reason with? Some might ask the same question in the context of human children.
    - philwelch 6y ago
      I would question that assumption. Autonomous military equipment (vehicles, planes, etc.) doesn’t require cognition in order to be useful.
    - CarbyAu 6y ago
      I obviously can't speak for Defence but my understanding was that a lot of the training et al was so that high command could have predictable outcomes. They may give troops on the front line some leeway, but within parameters for pursuit of a goal. I don't think Defence wants "uncontrolled" anything. Even if they manage to develop fully cognizant AI they will want to know the exact parameters it can work within. Of course, humans make errors...
  - Lammy 6y ago
    > It’s not minded, it’s not any different in than alphago or alphastar or the OpenAI dota bots Aside from, like, the guns 'n' stuff.
  - alquemist 6y ago
    Where the game is 'total world domination'. Through any means necessary, in particular by utterly destroying one's physical adversaries. Arguably the human brain development is a byproduct of an arm's race between social BIs, fighting off the next tribe since time immemorial. Time to up the ante and build smarter and stronger entities. Somebody's got to win the game, this nuclear stalemate we're living through is too boring. Nothing to worry about, move along.
- netflixandkill 6y ago
  The only thing that will address that is a broad international agreement with sanctions and political consequences for aggressor AIs that violate it, just like agreements that mostly keep horrifying biological weapons off the table and mostly kept nuclear weapons programs in check. "mostly" still leaves a lot of room for bad actors, but these sorts of compromises have worked surprisingly well enough that the failures were notable. Political problems are only going to have political solutions, and almost by definition those are imperfect.
  - bsanr2 6y ago
    The problem isn't so much an AI involved in military planning so much as an AI raised by the military, similar to how we are more okay with children who grow up to join the military rather than child soldiers (or children raised to be in the military). Defense (defense!) should be a tool taught and employed only after one has developed an understanding and appreciation of what they should be defending. Frankly, we shouldn't be developing AI outside of institutions with STRONG ties to humanist missions (possibly including religion). AI is not for war, and it's not for "efficient" resource extraction and development; it's for helping humanity to safeguard itself and its potential.
  - landryraccoon 6y ago
    > mostly kept nuclear weapons programs in check. It has completely failed to keep nuclear weapons in check, imo. Keeping AI technology out of existence has the same problem as keeping nuclear weapons out of existence - the incentives are too great for any nation to have them. If a nation is armed with nuclear weapons, the only possible check on them is another nation that is armed with nuclear weapons. Thus even in the existing non-proliferation framework, the largest nations (the United States, Russia, China, several European powers) ALL still have nuclear weapons. The reason why is that if any nation was the only nuclear armed nation it would be impossible to defeat with any quantity of conventional force. The same argument applies for AI. It would be impossible avoid the existence of militarized AI if it provides the same level of force multiplication as nuclear weapons. It would be necessary for any nation to try to gain the same technology as a deterrent against attack by a rival that possesses the technology.
- renewiltord 6y ago
  True, but everything will go wrong with letting your enemy get there first.
- ed25519FUUU 6y ago
  Phew. Thankfully since we decided not to invest in defensive AI our power rivals also decided not to invest heavily in offensive AI. I was afraid the world wasn’t a fair and moral place for a minute there!
- hinkley 6y ago
  Home security companies working in AI also tends not to end well in the movies, video games. It amuses me to think that Aperture Science had a protocol for rogue AIs with the codename "Birthday Cake". GLaDOS did not understand why all of the humans kept talking about cake as they died. They really seem to like cake...
godelski 6y ago
A lot of this has always confused me. In times of peace you should invest more in civilian research. In times of war or near war, more military. They complement one another too. Civilian research will always be used by military, from basic understanding of how people act, to lasers, to economic theory. One helps the other. The reverse direction is slower though because it is often held close to the vest for a bit of time.
- CobrastanJorji 6y ago
  Government science investment frequently comes from fear. ARPA was the US government's big "give money to research" program. It was started in response to Sputnik because we feared we were falling behind the Soviets. Then in 1969-73, Senate majority leader Mansfield decided that this research might be being misused to fund science in ways that wasn't directly useful to fighting Soviets, so ARPA became DARPA (the D is for Defense!) and now researchers needed to explain why their science might help build missiles.
- 75675446875444 6y ago
  Peace time is the best time to invest in military research because you'll be more prepared to secure an advantageous position when a conflict emerges. If you only invest during an in-progress conflict then what you're really doing is playing catch up.
  - godelski 6y ago
    Read past my first few sentences. I'm arguing that civilian research IS military research. I'm also not arguing 100% in one vs 100% in another, such a scheme would be absurdly idiotic.
    - ThrowawayR2 6y ago
      > "I'm arguing that civilian research IS military research." Which is prima facie untrue. While there are benefits to basic research over the long term, it took roughly 60 years from the discovery of the laser to the beginnings of deployable laser weaponry today. Those sorts of timeframes aren't that useful for a military expecting a conflict in the next few years.
Waterluvian 6y ago
It’s wildly backwards that this is where things are.
75675446875444 6y ago
Despite all the Smedley Butler memes the US actually spends a pretty normal amount of money for a country with a large economy. Most people don't grasp how much the US economy dwarfs that of other nations.
- jedberg 6y ago
  Sort of. We spend 4% of our GDP, the average is 2%. So we still spend double as a percent of GDP, and yeah, we have the biggest GDP.
  - 75675446875444 6y ago
    I agree that our spending doesn't scale perfectly but I think some of that is explained by context. The US is the single largest contributor to NATO in terms of the value of the equipment and vehicle support they provide, they are the primary naval force policing shipping lanes, random acts of high tension diplomacy (like that time they parked an aircraft carrier to guard one part of China from another part of China), and you can probably see at this point that my argument boils down to "yeah but the US uses their military for real things."
- Retric 6y ago
  Germany and Canada both spend 1.3% of their GDP’s on the military. United Kingdom and China are at 1.9%. However, the US is all the way up at 3.4%. A 30% cut would still leave the US well above the international average and due to it’s sheer economic might result in a clear military advantage. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_military_expenditures https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_military_... Consider the US Air-force is unquestionably the #1 most powerful Air-force in the world with the US Navy comfortably holding the #2. That’s frankly expensive.
  - 75675446875444 6y ago
    Why do you feel these are good comparisons to the US? None of those countries are as involved in conflict zones as the US and I'd argue can afford to keep their costs down because of the support implied by the US's presence in NATO. It's easy to keep costs down when you're not doing much in the world. The only exception amongst the countries you specified is China who, despite memes, has primarily been focused on countering a potential American offensive rather than taking a serious role in the world as a projector of military power. On top of that, things like their hypersonic missiles have been attributed to espionage programs (Raytheon hack in the case of hypersonics) so you could also argue that their spending is lower than it would otherwise be because their focus has been on catching up rather than leapfrogging to a dominant position. Overall, your criticism that it's expensive mainly applies when compared to the European nations who are famous for favoring idealism and speeches over getting their hands dirty and making a material difference. Exemplifying this, The Hague itself has often been ridiculed for mostly being a playpen to lock up poor african warlords and people who were only able to be caught as a result of actions taken by the US and Russia as they stomp around the Middle East. In your same link we see that US allies in conflict zones spend much higher than the countries you cited. Saudi Arabia spends 8.8% gdp, and Israel spends 4.4%. Branching out from US allies to countries of military significance either globally or regionally we see Russia at 3.9%, and Pakistan 4.0%, even Ukraine spends 3.8%. The US isn't even in the top 15 in terms of military spending relative to gdp. I do agree that if you're a country with no responsibilities then spending around 2% is fine but American foreign policy has generally tried to dream a little bigger than sitting in their laurels and finger waggling at the world.
umvi 6y ago
US spends so much on military because other countries essentially outsource their own military to the US. For example, the EU spends very little on military in large part because of a large US military presence in Europe.
- ed25519FUUU 6y ago
  Hopefully we can remove many or most of those bases in the future. No reason to be the world police or to let other counties outsource their military to American lives.
  - magicsmoke 6y ago
    The counterargument to this is that dependence on the US military keeps other countries from putting in the resources to become military competitors. It's as similar argument to how sanctioning Chinese tech companies ends up encouraging them to develop indigenous technologies that will later compete for market share on other continents. The US having a dominant military presence globally ensures that other actors either don't even bother spending on a military or don't have conflicts they can practice their militaries on (a big problem for China when they can't see if their new toys actually work) If only the US has active military experience then it's a lot easier and cheaper to fight inexperienced competitors. Even for allies like Europe, if the US leaves the EU to develop a military and they get some experience with fully self-reliant overseas adventures in North Africa or the Middle East, how do you know they won't turn Fascist/Communist/fancy future political ideology one day (or the reverse for the US) and start launching invasions across the Atlantic?
    - sumedh 6y ago
      > The counterargument to this is that dependence on the US military keeps other countries from putting in the resources to become military competitors. You dont need to be a direct military competitor, Afghanistan and Iraq have shown that you can still defeat US with a thousand cuts.
      - 6y ago
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
hindsightbias 6y ago
Northrop carrier qualified the X-47 as an unmanned combat vehicle. Navy said, great, let's turn it into a tanker! Northrop said nope but Boeing said they'd be happy to. So billions as long as those robots stay in their lane.

irrational 6y ago

Yes, nothing could possibly go wrong with having a military minded AI.

djohnston 6y ago
it's as inevitable as nuclear proliferation following WW2. you can slow it down, try and create a few key players and build around that, but it's always coming.
fermienrico 6y ago
This is a serious dilemma because: - If you don't, then the enemy will - If you do, then you're inviting the enemy to do the same So, without trust and mutual agreement on an international level, this is a self-propelling premise that cannot be stopped. Game theory 101.
- landryraccoon 6y ago
  Even in that international agreement, someone still has the weapons. International agreements failed to keep nuclear weapons out of the hands of the strongest nations because why would they ever give up their nukes?
dogma1138 6y ago
It’s not minded, it’s not any different in than alphago or alphastar or the OpenAI dota bots, it doesn’t understand anything outside of the context of the game it’s playing. It doesn’t have a mind. On the “intelligence” spectrum it’s much closer to the guidance system in a heat seeking missile to than say even a dog, yet alone anything that we would define as having cognition.
- irrational 6y ago
  Well, OP was talking about billions of dollars of DARPA funding going towards military AI research. I presume they would be trying to get much closer to cognition.
  - dogma1138 6y ago
    Why would you want cognition? Besides the billions of edge cases it may create why would you want to make a tool you can or would have to reason with?
    - inetknght 6y ago
      > why would you want to make a tool you can or would have to reason with? Some might ask the same question in the context of human children.
  - philwelch 6y ago
    I would question that assumption. Autonomous military equipment (vehicles, planes, etc.) doesn’t require cognition in order to be useful.
  - CarbyAu 6y ago
    I obviously can't speak for Defence but my understanding was that a lot of the training et al was so that high command could have predictable outcomes. They may give troops on the front line some leeway, but within parameters for pursuit of a goal. I don't think Defence wants "uncontrolled" anything. Even if they manage to develop fully cognizant AI they will want to know the exact parameters it can work within. Of course, humans make errors...
- Lammy 6y ago
  > It’s not minded, it’s not any different in than alphago or alphastar or the OpenAI dota bots Aside from, like, the guns 'n' stuff.
- alquemist 6y ago
  Where the game is 'total world domination'. Through any means necessary, in particular by utterly destroying one's physical adversaries. Arguably the human brain development is a byproduct of an arm's race between social BIs, fighting off the next tribe since time immemorial. Time to up the ante and build smarter and stronger entities. Somebody's got to win the game, this nuclear stalemate we're living through is too boring. Nothing to worry about, move along.
netflixandkill 6y ago
The only thing that will address that is a broad international agreement with sanctions and political consequences for aggressor AIs that violate it, just like agreements that mostly keep horrifying biological weapons off the table and mostly kept nuclear weapons programs in check. "mostly" still leaves a lot of room for bad actors, but these sorts of compromises have worked surprisingly well enough that the failures were notable. Political problems are only going to have political solutions, and almost by definition those are imperfect.
- bsanr2 6y ago
  The problem isn't so much an AI involved in military planning so much as an AI raised by the military, similar to how we are more okay with children who grow up to join the military rather than child soldiers (or children raised to be in the military). Defense (defense!) should be a tool taught and employed only after one has developed an understanding and appreciation of what they should be defending. Frankly, we shouldn't be developing AI outside of institutions with STRONG ties to humanist missions (possibly including religion). AI is not for war, and it's not for "efficient" resource extraction and development; it's for helping humanity to safeguard itself and its potential.
- landryraccoon 6y ago
  > mostly kept nuclear weapons programs in check. It has completely failed to keep nuclear weapons in check, imo. Keeping AI technology out of existence has the same problem as keeping nuclear weapons out of existence - the incentives are too great for any nation to have them. If a nation is armed with nuclear weapons, the only possible check on them is another nation that is armed with nuclear weapons. Thus even in the existing non-proliferation framework, the largest nations (the United States, Russia, China, several European powers) ALL still have nuclear weapons. The reason why is that if any nation was the only nuclear armed nation it would be impossible to defeat with any quantity of conventional force. The same argument applies for AI. It would be impossible avoid the existence of militarized AI if it provides the same level of force multiplication as nuclear weapons. It would be necessary for any nation to try to gain the same technology as a deterrent against attack by a rival that possesses the technology.
renewiltord 6y ago
True, but everything will go wrong with letting your enemy get there first.
ed25519FUUU 6y ago
Phew. Thankfully since we decided not to invest in defensive AI our power rivals also decided not to invest heavily in offensive AI. I was afraid the world wasn’t a fair and moral place for a minute there!
hinkley 6y ago
Home security companies working in AI also tends not to end well in the movies, video games. It amuses me to think that Aperture Science had a protocol for rogue AIs with the codename "Birthday Cake". GLaDOS did not understand why all of the humans kept talking about cake as they died. They really seem to like cake...

godelski 6y ago

A lot of this has always confused me. In times of peace you should invest more in civilian research. In times of war or near war, more military. They complement one another too. Civilian research will always be used by military, from basic understanding of how people act, to lasers, to economic theory. One helps the other. The reverse direction is slower though because it is often held close to the vest for a bit of time.

CobrastanJorji 6y ago
Government science investment frequently comes from fear. ARPA was the US government's big "give money to research" program. It was started in response to Sputnik because we feared we were falling behind the Soviets. Then in 1969-73, Senate majority leader Mansfield decided that this research might be being misused to fund science in ways that wasn't directly useful to fighting Soviets, so ARPA became DARPA (the D is for Defense!) and now researchers needed to explain why their science might help build missiles.
75675446875444 6y ago
Peace time is the best time to invest in military research because you'll be more prepared to secure an advantageous position when a conflict emerges. If you only invest during an in-progress conflict then what you're really doing is playing catch up.
- godelski 6y ago
  Read past my first few sentences. I'm arguing that civilian research IS military research. I'm also not arguing 100% in one vs 100% in another, such a scheme would be absurdly idiotic.
  - ThrowawayR2 6y ago
    > "I'm arguing that civilian research IS military research." Which is prima facie untrue. While there are benefits to basic research over the long term, it took roughly 60 years from the discovery of the laser to the beginnings of deployable laser weaponry today. Those sorts of timeframes aren't that useful for a military expecting a conflict in the next few years.

Waterluvian 6y ago

It’s wildly backwards that this is where things are.

75675446875444 6y ago

Despite all the Smedley Butler memes the US actually spends a pretty normal amount of money for a country with a large economy. Most people don't grasp how much the US economy dwarfs that of other nations.

jedberg 6y ago
Sort of. We spend 4% of our GDP, the average is 2%. So we still spend double as a percent of GDP, and yeah, we have the biggest GDP.
- 75675446875444 6y ago
  I agree that our spending doesn't scale perfectly but I think some of that is explained by context. The US is the single largest contributor to NATO in terms of the value of the equipment and vehicle support they provide, they are the primary naval force policing shipping lanes, random acts of high tension diplomacy (like that time they parked an aircraft carrier to guard one part of China from another part of China), and you can probably see at this point that my argument boils down to "yeah but the US uses their military for real things."
Retric 6y ago
Germany and Canada both spend 1.3% of their GDP’s on the military. United Kingdom and China are at 1.9%. However, the US is all the way up at 3.4%. A 30% cut would still leave the US well above the international average and due to it’s sheer economic might result in a clear military advantage. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_military_expenditures https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_military_... Consider the US Air-force is unquestionably the #1 most powerful Air-force in the world with the US Navy comfortably holding the #2. That’s frankly expensive.
- 75675446875444 6y ago
  Why do you feel these are good comparisons to the US? None of those countries are as involved in conflict zones as the US and I'd argue can afford to keep their costs down because of the support implied by the US's presence in NATO. It's easy to keep costs down when you're not doing much in the world. The only exception amongst the countries you specified is China who, despite memes, has primarily been focused on countering a potential American offensive rather than taking a serious role in the world as a projector of military power. On top of that, things like their hypersonic missiles have been attributed to espionage programs (Raytheon hack in the case of hypersonics) so you could also argue that their spending is lower than it would otherwise be because their focus has been on catching up rather than leapfrogging to a dominant position. Overall, your criticism that it's expensive mainly applies when compared to the European nations who are famous for favoring idealism and speeches over getting their hands dirty and making a material difference. Exemplifying this, The Hague itself has often been ridiculed for mostly being a playpen to lock up poor african warlords and people who were only able to be caught as a result of actions taken by the US and Russia as they stomp around the Middle East. In your same link we see that US allies in conflict zones spend much higher than the countries you cited. Saudi Arabia spends 8.8% gdp, and Israel spends 4.4%. Branching out from US allies to countries of military significance either globally or regionally we see Russia at 3.9%, and Pakistan 4.0%, even Ukraine spends 3.8%. The US isn't even in the top 15 in terms of military spending relative to gdp. I do agree that if you're a country with no responsibilities then spending around 2% is fine but American foreign policy has generally tried to dream a little bigger than sitting in their laurels and finger waggling at the world.

umvi 6y ago

US spends so much on military because other countries essentially outsource their own military to the US. For example, the EU spends very little on military in large part because of a large US military presence in Europe.

ed25519FUUU 6y ago
Hopefully we can remove many or most of those bases in the future. No reason to be the world police or to let other counties outsource their military to American lives.
- magicsmoke 6y ago
  The counterargument to this is that dependence on the US military keeps other countries from putting in the resources to become military competitors. It's as similar argument to how sanctioning Chinese tech companies ends up encouraging them to develop indigenous technologies that will later compete for market share on other continents. The US having a dominant military presence globally ensures that other actors either don't even bother spending on a military or don't have conflicts they can practice their militaries on (a big problem for China when they can't see if their new toys actually work) If only the US has active military experience then it's a lot easier and cheaper to fight inexperienced competitors. Even for allies like Europe, if the US leaves the EU to develop a military and they get some experience with fully self-reliant overseas adventures in North Africa or the Middle East, how do you know they won't turn Fascist/Communist/fancy future political ideology one day (or the reverse for the US) and start launching invasions across the Atlantic?
  - sumedh 6y ago
    > The counterargument to this is that dependence on the US military keeps other countries from putting in the resources to become military competitors. You dont need to be a direct military competitor, Afghanistan and Iraq have shown that you can still defeat US with a thousand cuts.
    - 6y ago

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

hindsightbias 6y ago

Northrop carrier qualified the X-47 as an unmanned combat vehicle. Navy said, great, let's turn it into a tanker! Northrop said nope but Boeing said they'd be happy to. So billions as long as those robots stay in their lane.