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National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence's Final Report
- d110af5ccf 6y agoAt 756 pages, this looks to be longer than many textbooks. > Microelectronics power all AI, and the United States no longer manufactures the world’s most sophisticated chips. We do not want to overstate the precariousness of our position, but given that the vast majority of cutting-edge chips are produced at a single plant separated by just 110 miles of water from our principal strategic competitor, we must reevaluate the meaning of supply chain resilience and security.
- lostcolony 6y agoSo what you're saying is our elected representatives are sure to read it, understand it, and make sound policy from it.
- kemitchell 6y agoI share your frustration. But that's really not how elected reps work. Those particularly interested, or with relevant committee appointments, may read the executive summary. 800 pages of report go up, not down. But not all the way up.
- robomartin 6y agoI appreciate the sarcasm. The US is facing the realities caused by somewhere in the order of 50 years of incompetence in government at nearly every level. This isn’t going to change any time soon. While we have been busy de-educating our new generations and worshiping idiots like Bernie and AOC, the Chinese worked hard and went from an agricultural society to the second economy in the world. Well done! A line from Star Wars comes to mind: “Your focus determines your reality” Here we are. I believe Europe is in the same boat.
- laurent92 6y ago> I believe Europe is in the same boat You think? While UK was busy banning Huawei for spycraft, Macron was signing a partnership to install Huawei factories in France. I guess “when you can’t beat spies, invite them to your own territory and pay them”, or something like that, I don’t know I’m not a politician.
- tsimionescu 6y ago> Macron was signing a partnership to install Huawei factories in France. So he is doing exactly what China did - Making sure production is happening in his country, regardless of who nominally owns the factory. A step in the right direction.
- engineer_22 6y agoThe Germans are doing the right thing by spending money to create domestic competitors for 5G manufacturing
- tsimionescu 6y agoSure, that's even better, absolutely.
- robomartin 6y ago> You think? I don't have any ill-feelings towards China other than some of their political and social proclivities. In the realm of business, they deserve full recognition and respect for what they have achieved. While the developed nations of the world got busy with nonsense and political infighting the Chinese quietly put one foot in front of the other, worked hard and lifted an agrarian economy to become the second economy of the world. Truly amazing. The next couple of centuries will likely belong to China. I can't think of a single thing anyone can do to affect change that took fifty years and an immense amount of hard work. For one thing, people in Europe and the US would have to undergo a massive cultural shift. Entire nations would have to be more entrepreneurial and hard working than China. Politicians would have to actually do what's best for the people of their nations. Universities and schools would have to stop teaching bullshit ideologies and start producing capable and useful adults with financial and entrepreneurial chops (the average US high school graduate is basically only useful for stacking boxes at a warehouse and, maybe, making coffee). These things are not going to happen. Or, put a different way: If, by some miracle, these things did happen, it would take at least 25 years to equalize the world. It would be a monumental effort most western societies are simply not capable of or not interested in embarking on...because, among other things, it will not be comfortable. And, BTW, that assumes China just sits there allowing the world to turn back the clock. Sorry for the pessimism, but someone has yet to explain how we magically wake up one day and magically reverse a fifty year monumental effort by the Chinese people by teaching kids about Karl Marx and fighting about politics day and night. I can only imagine how stupid funny this must look from the Chinese perspective.
- raverbashing 6y agoGovernments? I wonder why Apple is not losing sleep over this... It's a major geopolitical risk and they're sitting right on top of it. Like thinking a landmine only hurts enemy combatants and not children playing soccer.
- 0x426577617265 6y ago> supply chain resilience Resilience to what exactly? Is the report suggesting the country holding the 'keys' is hostile?
- l33t2327 6y agoAre you suggesting they are not?
- 0x426577617265 6y agoI'm not sure how you could come to that conclusion based on my questions. China's place on the world stage is largely dependent on having customers. If there is no where for them to sell their manufactured goods, then they are not in a position of power.
- Fordec 6y agoAre you suggesting that if trade with the US stops due to a US-China dispute or war there is literally nobody else in the entire world to trade with?
- 0x426577617265 6y agoPretty much that’s the case. US is #1 buyer.
- Fordec 6y agoUS accounts for 16% of Chinese exports. 84% is the rest of the world. So while it's the biggest trade partner, it's not the end all and be all. It's about as important as what the UK was to Ireland before Brexit. Stopping trade isn't helpful, but it's not a showstopper either.
- Animats 6y agoChina could discourage export of components and tools while encouraging export of consumer products. The profit margins are better that way, too.
- roenxi 6y agoIf we sort-of mush the Democrats and Republicans together; the US Economic Strategy for the last however many decades has been to import stuff from overseas and beef up on services. The result has been titans like Apple (best of breed at outsourcing manufacturing to China), Amazon (best of breed logistics, very strong at importing from China) and Google (amazing service). Is there any reason to be surprised that the US no longer manufactures the world's most sophisticated chips? Is there any political will to change strategy?
- alert0 6y agoThis arises naturally from the US having been the global reserve currency for so long. Other countries' debts are denominated is dollars, so they seek dollars via mercantilism. This has absolutely cannibalized our manufacturing base. There is a case for a weaker dollar and to rebuild our exports.
- Animats 6y agoIt really is a concern just how dependent the entire world is on TSMC. "The best human operator cannot defend against multiple machines making thousands of maneuvers per second potentially moving at hypersonic speeds and orchestrated by AI across domains." Attacks by drone swarms are already here. The first one was Syria vs. Russia in 2018.[1] There was an attack on Saudi oil facilities in 2019.[2] Much of this has little to do with AI. It's more about the US falling further behind in manufacturing. [1] https://tripwire.dhs.gov/news/209478 https://tripwire.dhs.gov/news/209478 [2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/rrapier/2019/09/16/why-the-attacks-in-saudi-arabia-are-a-really-big-deal/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/rrapier/2019/09/16/why-the-atta...
- d110af5ccf 6y ago> how dependent the entire world is on TSMC Isn't Samsung nearly on par with them? (Not that two is a much better situation.) It (perhaps naively) seems like most applications could theoretically make due with older processes, but I have difficulty imagining supply chains successfully coping with such a switch (not that I know anything about it).
- ddeck 6y agoThey are trying, although not there yet. There is also the capacity issue: TSMC has 28% of the semiconductor market under 40nm, Samsung has 10%. As a foundry, it's ~55% vs ~17%. Add in UMC and a few others and it's 64% Taiwan. Definitely a critical dependency. https://www.notebookcheck.net/TSMC-has-the-largest-market-share-in-the-global-semiconductor-manufacturing-industry-Counterpoints-Research.518137.0.html https://www.notebookcheck.net/TSMC-has-the-largest-market-sh... https://www.eenewsanalog.com/news/foundry-market-jumps-24-percent-2020 https://www.eenewsanalog.com/news/foundry-market-jumps-24-pe...
- fomine3 6y agoAnandtech's Snapdragon 888 review compares vs 865. The article indicates that Samsung 5nm is a bit better or worse (vary on what to compare) than TSMC 7nm (non-EUV). https://www.anandtech.com/show/16463/snapdragon-888-vs-exynos-2100-galaxy-s21-ultra https://www.anandtech.com/show/16463/snapdragon-888-vs-exyno...
- stanislavb 6y agoThis
- zeckalpha 6y agoWhile true about management, TSMC does operate a number of facilities around the world: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/TSMC#Facilities https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/TSMC#Facilities
- Invictus0 6y agoWho ends up reading this sort of report?
- 1e-9 6y ago> the vast majority of cutting-edge chips are produced at a single plant separated by just 110 miles of water from our principal strategic competitor ...and located in a seismically active zone that experienced 97 major earthquakes over the last 100 years.
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- whatshisface 6y ago> First, U.S. courts have severely restricted what types of computer-implemented and biotech-related inventions can be protected under U.S. patent law.6 Critical AI and biotech-related inventions have been denied patent protection since 2010.7 Facing uncertainty in obtaining and retaining patent protection, inventors pursue trade secret protection. Trade secrets do not readily promote innovation markets, because trade secrets, unlike patents, do not contribute to accessible technical knowledge in the public domain.8 While these impacts might not be immediate, the long-term effects on AI and other emerging technology developments and competitiveness are concerning.9 Looks like it's coming out solidly in the pro-software-patent camp.
- alert0 6y agoThat's unfortunate. To rebuild our domestic manufacturing capability we should loosen on intellectual property.
- dariusj18 6y agoWhy? What would loosening IP do in this regard?
- whatshisface 6y agoIn its present state the patent/license system does more to gum up innovation than it does to help inventors. This is due to the extreme asymmetry between individual inventors (who have almost no power to enforce IP against big companies) and big companies (who have a virtually unlimited war chest of liberally granted patents that are mainly used to squash competition from smaller businesses.) The options for fixing it are A. Reform the entire judicial system so that one guy can take on a foreign multinational and win if he's right, and also get the patent office to stop granting trivial or overly broad patents to protect small businesses from abusers, or B. Weaken IP law so that we get fewer of the abuses, under the theory that we aren't getting the benefits now anyways. (If a system promises benefits but delivers abuses, it can be advantageous and much more practical to get rid of the system, even if reforming it would be better.)
- account57456 6y agoOff topic - if I wanted to write a report like that with those cool templates and graphics - what did they use ? I don’t think google docs can do that :)
- gautamdivgi 6y agoLaTeX?
- d110af5ccf 6y agoFrom experience, Microsoft Office (Word plus PowerPoint for diagrams) is capable of doing approximately all of what you see there. I'm not sure what the current state of LibreOffice is when it comes to advanced typesetting, but I expect it could easily do everything in that report. LaTeX is in a class of it's own, practically the space shuttle compared to a Cessna. Unfortunately, the learning curve is a seemingly endless source of ¡fun! for beginners.
- lifeisstillgood 6y agoCan latex produce this level - I have only ever got to the basic level and realised that getting something at the "simple MS Office" level is a vast climb. Any templates that are beyond "maths paper in arxiv" level I should look again at?
- carmen_sandiego 6y agoIt can but I'm not sure the effort is really worth it. I went through a period of my life where I was using LaTeX for literally every document I produced. Presentations, all kinds of charts and cheatsheets with diagrams and illustrations through TikZ. They looked beautiful in the end but nobody who consumes them appreciates the massive effort. People assume you are just slightly better at Word rather than really good at LaTeX. Not that the only point of learning things is to impress others, but it's pretty demoralizing. At the time I thought 'just learn one tool well and use it forever', but now I feel more like 'just use the best tool for the job'. In this case I would say that's InDesign and a few hours of tutorials, mostly. The illustrations you can choose another tool if appropriate.
- ngcc_hk 6y agoGreat. During the Hk 47 court case, I hope the world is getting more aware some partners they have are totalitarian countries. Check it out. It is like nuclear bomb technology.
- rustypython 6y agoCould someone please help me understand why chip manufacturing is so hard? Like why hasn't China already figured out how to do it? It's obviously a huge strategic priority for them, yet it seems like they don't have the requisite expertise to do it themselves. Other bleeding edge tech they are fully on top of (the software side of AI for example). Why is that?
- eqvinox 6y agoHeh, I read the title as "(National Security Commission) on (Artificial Intelligence's Final Report)" and was very confused, only when I looked at the domain name I realized it was "(National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence)'s (Final Report)" ...
- abeppu 6y agoWhy is there a "Final Report"? Surely, because of the scope and ever-changing landscape, there should be a standing commission on AI and national security, right?
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