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NATO is looking to connect with startups
- erichahn 5y agoI think this is a good sign honestly. Historically many innovations came from military research.
- cpp_frog 5y agoAlso, WWII accelerated many discoveries in several areas of mathematics (in America, at least): statistics, optimization, control, numerical analysis. To such an extent, that many of those discoveries are still the main object of study in their respective areas and are being extended to more general versions.
- tut-urut-utut 5y agoyeah, great, let's start a few more wars to foster progress and inventions ... /s
- lifeisstillgood 5y agoWell, how can we get the benefit of wars without the obvious downsides? Fast feedback loops, obvious win / lose results (a battle takes a few hours, you are dead or not). Randomly fire members of upper management (equivalent of organisational change by enemy sniper action)?
- esyir 5y agoThe research end wasn't really the section getting hit by sniper fire, so that bit probably won't fly.
- pphysch 5y agoNot until 2023 at the earliest. Seems like a deathrattle for the increasingly irrelevant military cult. Systemic R&D deficits like this take decades to fully address.
- JumpCrisscross 5y ago> increasingly irrelevant military cult This was a relevant line about ten years ago. I stopped hearing it in D.C. after Russia invaded Crimea and Xi tore up Hong Kong.
- pphysch 5y ago* Russia did not invade Crimea, it joined Russia via popular referendum. Virtually no one died and there is no internal movement to rejoin Ukraine (who clearly cares about Crimean "citizens" because it cut off their water supply). That is not an "invasion". These are all easily verifiable facts. * Hong Kong is part of China since it was decolonized. This is indisputable. I'm curious, have you actually studied the historical context of Crimea and Hong Kong? Beyond just taking headlines from NATO-aligned tabloids as absolute fact?
- jeffdn 5y agoA popular referendum that was held _after_ the Russian military, with their national insignia removed, occupied Crimea en masse, just to be clear. If Mexico invaded Southern California, and then held a referendum with suspiciously high levels of voter turnout and a nearly 90% yes vote, don’t you think people would find that suspicious? Can’t you imagine why Ukraine and its allies think this was an illegal conquest?
- pphysch 5y agoTo make your analogy historically correct, it would have to be preceded by the United States having loaned San Diego to Mexico for decades of military use and the vast majority of San Diegans being ethnically "Mexican". Then notorious anti-Mexican racist Donald Trump is installed as the governor of California by NATO via coup d'etat. https://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL2011/S00116/how-the-western-press-lied-about-the-2014-coup-in-ukraine-pretending-that-it-was-instead-a-real-democratic-revolution.htm https://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL2011/S00116/how-the-wester...
- boomboomsubban 5y agoSo general red scare fear mongering being used to spend more public money on private enterprise, making future tech companies indebted to NATO. It even includes a loyalty test to get the initial funding.
- throwaway6734 5y ago>making future tech companies indebted to NATO What's bad about this?
- fit2rule 5y agoNATO forces kill the most innocent people around the world right now.
- boomboomsubban 5y ago"Hey, put this backdoor in your product and don't tell anyone." Worse, forcing them to turn some product into a weapon.
- shrimp_emoji 5y agoOpen source is the answer there.
- the_optimist 5y agoOpen source doesn’t produce military advantage.
- viro 5y agoBut it does for the intelligence community.
- 1cvmask 5y agoThis relationship between the government, national security establishment and community, and the tech industry has already existed for decades from the founding of Silicon Valley with Fairchild Semiconductor to many others afterwards ranging from Oracle (a CIA funded project), RSA to Palantir. There is even a public VC: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/In-Q-Tel https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/In-Q-Tel - https://fcw.com/blogs/lectern/2014/09/cia-oracle-government-randd.aspx https://fcw.com/blogs/lectern/2014/09/cia-oracle-government-... https://fedtechmagazine.com/article/2018/09/how-government-helped-spur-microchip-industry https://fedtechmagazine.com/article/2018/09/how-government-h... https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/12/nsa_spying_who.html https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/12/nsa_spying_wh... - Karkar Electronics and NATO telecommunications: https://www.legacy.com/obituaries/sfgate/obituary.aspx?n=edward-mitri-karkar&pid=168867334&fhid=2281 https://www.legacy.com/obituaries/sfgate/obituary.aspx?n=edw...
- klaudius 5y agoThere are cases where governments implemented protectionism and support for industry, but it failed. You have the case of computer industry in Brazil. It's not as simple as saying that government support is the key since there are many cases where it didn't work.
- rsj_hn 5y agoThat's interesting, do you have a source that describes Brazil's tech intervention?
- dotcommand 5y agoBut there are no cases of a successful tech industry without government support. So we can safely say government support is key. Perhaps government support is necessary but not sufficient.
- contingencies 5y agoBulgaria would be another example.
- seppin 5y ago
- chairmanwow1 5y agoThis is not nearly organized enough to match the investments China has made into AI.
- MangoCoffee 5y agoIs China really leading in AI? in what way that other countries is behind China
- neom 5y agoI don't know if it's a positive or a negative, but China has been focused in a very organized way on this subject for quite some time now - in a manner that other nations are just starting to do. China has also been able to, coordinately, use it's massive population as a R&D bed for training and the like.
- MangoCoffee 5y agofrom what i have read so far, Chinese's facial recognition is really good and probably is leading in this area.
- kube-system 5y agoThe descriptions of the biometric technology I've heard that is deployed in Xinjiang truly sounds like a science fiction. Voice/facial/gait/etc all deployed at huge scale in production, with gigantic datasets collected under questionable conditions. I don't have any links but there are some good NPR podcasts about the subject.
- stickfigure 5y agoHow is their self-driving car effort going? It seems like a very rough but reasonable proxy for AI development in the context of war machines. Facial recognition seems more useful for controlling a civilian population at home.
- tracyhenry 5y agoOne thing that no one can compete with is the amount of data available.
- kanche 5y agoLooking at CVPR this year, China has the most number of authors [0]. Significant portion of the US and EU authors are probably Chinese students as well. I think they are doing quite well atleast in the front of training researchers. source: [1] [0] https://pbs.twimg.com/media/E4bZC0mX0AY2X_L?format=png&name=large https://pbs.twimg.com/media/E4bZC0mX0AY2X_L?format=png&name=... [1] https://twitter.com/JaredHeinly/status/1407050613263851521 https://twitter.com/JaredHeinly/status/1407050613263851521
- mkl95 5y agoIt will be hilarious when they find out some of those "AI startups" are actually mechanical turk armies operating from an Indian basement.
- rohitarondekar 5y agoCan somebody in the know elaborate on how far ahead China's lead is in AI?
- jvanderbot 5y agoThat's honestly news to me.
- neom 5y agoThey're out publishing[1] and out spending everyone else[2], I asked Jack Clack from OpenAI that question a few years ago and he said he didn't really know exactly how far ahead they are, just that more people and more money is being applied in a more organized fashion. [1]https://hbr.org/2021/02/is-china-emerging-as-the-global-leader-in-ai https://hbr.org/2021/02/is-china-emerging-as-the-global-lead... [2]https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/12/05/65019/china-us-ai-military-spending/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/12/05/65019/china-us-a...
- aeoleonn 5y agoWhen people bring up scientific advances in China, I am always skeptical. What percent of Chinese publishing is not fraudulent? Look at the scale of Fraud across China, including in Academia: "The online publication Quartz reported in 2017 that more than 50 percent of all articles retracted by scientific journals worldwide for fake peer reviews were submitted by Chinese authors. ... 55% - The percentage of articles submitted by Chinese authors that were retracted by scientific journals worldwide for fake peer reviews" "It usually involves authors posing as their own peer reviewers and submitting made-up contact information for the supposed reviewer – a scam that publishers exposed by tracking the email addresses of author and reviewer to the same IP address. This type of fraud is on the rise and more often than not involves Chinese authors. "In 2015, for instance, Britain-based publisher BioMed Central retracted 43 articles, including 41 from China. "Later in the same year, Germany’s Springer retracted 64 papers, nearly all from Chinese scholars, "while the Dutch publishing company Elsevier retracted nine medical science articles written by Chinese researchers. "In what is said to be the largest single-incident retraction of journal publications in history, Springer Nature in 2017 retracted 107 articles in Tumor Biology published between 2012 and 2016, all of them authored by Chinese scholars from universities in Shanghai." [1] [1] https://wenr.wes.org/2018/04/the-economy-of-fraud-in-academic-publishing-in-china https://wenr.wes.org/2018/04/the-economy-of-fraud-in-academi...
- antman 5y agoAre there any official documents on China's AI policy? We have the media coverage but is it based on any non assumptions?
- jlglover 5y agoCSET has lots of great analysis of China's AI policy, including references to official documents. https://cset.georgetown.edu/publications/ https://cset.georgetown.edu/publications/
- dfilppi 5y agoThe inevitable rise of Skynet
- weswpg 5y agoand then the BSG-style cycle of <!SPOILER ALERT!> humanity's renewed rise followed by another inevitable fall at the hands of artificial intelligence
- coretx 5y agoThe AI part is a bit akward to take in since i've read about the US buying Dwave systems gear in Canada because of the EU being ahead of the US regarding AI research. ( In Snowden or WL files ) ... But NATO almost is the US + EU. What is the reasoning and how far is everyone really?
- ganoushoreilly 5y agoAt this point the files you're referencing are 10 years old or so. I would imagine it's a completely different playing field. I would also note that the documents you're referencing (not sure of a specific document) as a whole only touch specific projects and teams and aren't 100% visibility into the Govt. Organizations they purport to be from.
- coretx 5y agoAll solid arguments, thank you a lot!
- 3pt14159 5y agoThis is a pitiful sum. We're talking over 15 years for the strongest alliance in the world. Just $1B? What is this a school for ants? We're talking 1/12th of an aircraft carrier. For all of Nato? How much was put into the Manhattan project by just three (!!!) countries, one of them Canada. What, like 30x this in inflation adjusted dollars? That doesn't even count the rest of the spending on nuclear weapons over the years.
- danbruc 5y agoWhat if we reduced the amount of money we spent on military purposes instead of increasing it?
- aerostable_slug 5y agoIf we did so, what if China picked up the slack? I'm not sure that would be a net win for humanity.
- danbruc 5y agoChina will become the most powerful nation eventually if they do not accidentally prevent themselves from doing so. An attempt to stay ahead of China is likely a losing battle so get over this rivalry and focus on cooperation.
- eldavido 5y agoInteresting to see the US somewhat following China's lead here. Industry/government/defense cooperation has a rich (and somewhat ugly) history in the US, but seems to have fallen out of favor in recent decades, whereas China has leaned in even harder toward five-year plans that attempt to get every part of society -- academia, government, business, media, etc. marching in the same direction. I've really started to wonder about how, and how much, government should try to influence a lot of this. In the 60s Kennedy said we're going to put a man on the moon (US) and we did it. There's clearly some role for direction-setting at the national level. But it's not without costs: corruption, cronyism, wasted money. China's been trying to bootstrap a domestic semiconductor industry for decades and the most they have to show for it is SMIC, which is nowhere near TSMC or even Intel's level of capability. Ditto for internal-combustion cars--they (rightfully) trumpet EVs as a pretty large success story but leave out the part about wasting billions trying to make a domestic Detroit. And then there's the fact that government has a hard time writing sub-$1bln checks so there's the potential for a huge amount of waste if things don't pan out.
- dirtyid 5y ago>US somewhat following China's lead here US is _returning_ to industrial policies which PRC civil military fusion was originally modelled off. IMO establishing complex indigenous industries require the appetite for massive risk / waste which is always preferable to the alternative of not building the capabilities in first place. PRC semi efforts has been pretty lackluster until last few years, i.e. integrated circuits only got promoted to first-level discipline with streamlined funding last year. There are worst things to waste money on in this security climate.
- petre 5y agoJust don't minimize their achievements because the next thing you know they'll be buying off US and European companies. BYD went from a company everybody in the auto industry laughed at to a partner in Daimler and Toyota joint ventures and a company Warren Buffet's org has invested in more money than they have in GM.
- 908B64B197 5y ago
- SkyMarshal 5y agoIf they haven't already they need to reach out to Steve Blank and his Stanford Hacking For Defense course. https://steveblank.com/category/hacking-for-defense/ https://steveblank.com/category/hacking-for-defense/
- michaelf77 5y agoAny startups planning to apply and looking for talented and motivated engineer ?