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I read up to where he started taking questions (less than half the transcript or so?) and these were the interesting quotes that stood out to me: So imagine a

• deleted 2y ago
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• thaumasiotes 2y ago
  > And one of the things to know about war is that the offense always has the advantage because you can always overwhelm the defensive systems. This is not actually one of the things to know about war. It's about as far from the truth as you can get.
  • lucianbr 2y ago
    It's funny how this guy, as most rich business types, thinks he actually knows everything, and he's an expert in all domains. What the hell does he know about war? He's not a general or admiral or something. Of course he imagines being CEO of a large company is the same thing, but it's really not. Something to keep in mind when reading his other pronouncements.
    • pzo 2y ago
      Palmer Luckey got quite successful with Anduril even though he wasn't that much a business man in the past, but was successful as engineer [0] I think war in ukraine shows that hord of very cheap sea drones can even thread a fleet of warships. [0] https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2024-08-09/weapons-startup-anduril-hits-14-billion-valuation-plans-huge-new-facility https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2024-08-09/weapons-st...
      • sulandor 2y ago
        saturation attacks are mostly cheap and effective. see ddos vs intricate hacking
    • prmoustache 2y ago
      Even successful businessmen don't even know that much about building and running a business as so few of them are able to replicate a prior success and end up pursuing a career of "passive investors".
      • lucianbr 2y ago
        I hate the term "serial entrepreneur". You don't call someone who makes one breakfast "chef", and if they make several breakfasts "serial chef". If you are qualified for something, you can do it any number of times. Betrays the reality of them being "serial lottery winners".
  • notinmykernel 2y ago
    >> And one of the things to know about war is that the offense always has the advantage because you can always overwhelm the defensive systems. > This is not actually one of the things to know about war. It's about as far from the truth as you can get. ... Unless you are writing the rules of war: "Secretary of Defense Ash Carter appointed Schmidt as chairman of the DoD Innovation Advisory Board announced March 2, 2016. It will be modeled like the Defense Business Board and will facilitate the Pentagon at becoming more innovative and adaptive. In August 2020, Schmidt launched the podcast Reimagine with Eric Schmidt.[71][72] In December 2021, Schmidt joined Chainlink Labs as a strategic advisor.[73] In October 2022, he co-authored a piece titled "America Could Lose the Tech Contest With China" for Foreign Affairs with Ylli Bajraktari, former executive director of the U.S. National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence.[74] In March 2023, Schmidt testified at a U.S. House Committee on Oversight and Accountability hearing regarding AI. In 2022, Schmidt was appointed to the National Security Commission on Emerging Biotechnology, a legislative commission charged with making policy recommendations to Congress and the Executive Branch.[1]" "Since 2023, Schmidt has been involved in building White Stork, a startup developing suicide attack drones.[2]" [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Schmidt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Schmidt [2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/sarahemerson/2024/01/23/eric-schmidts-secret-white-stork-project-aims-to-build-ai-combat-drones/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/sarahemerson/2024/01/23/eric-sc...
    • thaumasiotes 2y ago
      Your response doesn't actually appear to be related to my comment. Does some part of your comment, or one of your links, support the idea that the attacker in a war always has an advantage over the defender? Remember when Georgia invaded Russia?
      • aguaviva 2y ago
        Remember when Georgia invaded Russia? We don't actually. Care to elaborate?
  • matthewmacleod 2y ago
    If only there was some kind of ongoing event that demonstrated exactly this…
    • adastra22 2y ago
      Or, you know, a whole world war that definitively proved the capability of dug-in defenders to hold ground.
      • lesuorac 2y ago
        I think the second world war showed how big the attacker advantage is. Germany got's industrial base absolutely shattered while the non-defending US was able to use its industrial base to supply arms for 4 fronts (vs Germany, in Africa, for Russia, vs Japan).
  • deleted 2y ago
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  • BodyCulture 2y ago
    [flagged]
    • HeatrayEnjoyer 2y ago
      Snarky comments like this aren't permitted here.
  • mbivert 2y ago
    Indeed: how to avoid needless conflicts is the key. Having a strong offensive is temporary, and potentially difficult to maintain in the long run. The use of AI/robots in war is probably not a good way to ingrain into people how to avoid conflicts either: as sad as it sound, let them get a taste of it first hand, and that'll probably calm things down more efficiently: not for a few hours/days, but decades.
• ks2048 2y ago
  Kissinger's buddy Schmidt is in the military AI drone business and drooling over massive cold and/or hot war with China. Not a good sign for the future of humanity.
  • chii 2y ago
    if there was going to be a gold rush, the surefire way to make money is to sell shovels.
  • xdennis 2y ago
    I don't think calling him "Kissinger's buddy" works as a smear since Kissinger was very friendly with China. I'm not trying to defend Schmidt, but you're naive if you think the US shouldn't develop AI weapons. How would the world look like now if the US took the high road and refused to develop nuclear weapons and instead let Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia develop them instead?
    • datavirtue 2y ago
      The military had AI deployed on the battle field long before the masses awoke to it via chatGPT. The controversy over using remote weapons and AI was kicked off back in the Obama administration. Before the debate has any time to congeal someone is going to deploy autonomous weapons. Iran may already be doing it.
• ImHereToVote 2y ago
  "democracy"
• danschuller 2y ago
  > imagine a non-arrogant programmer that actually does what you want I don't think this is going to be reality anytime soon. In order for the LLM or agent to do what you want, you'd need to be able to precisely specify what you want and that's a hard problem all on it's own. And if you were able to do that precise specification you would be the programmer. Not say the software developer paradigm won't change but it seems very unlikely to become "make me a better google ads system" anytime soon. I could see getting to something were you are given a result by an agent and then can iterate on it, towards some solution.
  • pzo 2y ago
    Thats still gonna be a big change shift if such companies could axe every 2nd or 3rd developer in their teams. In that situation you might be competing with your colleague not to loose job or have to be "non-arogant" (/s) to ask for pay rise.
    • campers 2y ago
      Another way to look at it is everyone's productivity will be expected to increase to match the productivity increases by the competition who are also using AI. If you don't skill up on how to effectively use AI, then we'll find someone else who has.
    • CaptainFever 2y ago
      This is the lump of labour fallacy. There's always more work to be done.
  • chii 2y ago
    > In order for the LLM or agent to do what you want, you'd need to be able to precisely specify what you want no, you just need to vaguely know what you want, and get the LLM to produce something that you then examine, and crawl towards the end goal. LLM's could potentially allow fast iteration from a laymen's description of what they want.
    • myworkinisgood 2y ago
• HeatrayEnjoyer 2y ago
  Half of these are comic book villain levels of evil they're so brazen. This person shouldn't be trusted to be in charge of a corner deli.
  • latexr 2y ago
    Even modern cartoon villains are better people than that. Sure, they want to take over the world, but they do so overtly (and wouldn’t try to suppress an interview where they said so) and have a modicum of concern for their own family and underlings.
• kolme 2y ago
  > And one of the things to know about war is that the offense always has the advantage I'm no military expert, but wasn't it exactly the opposite? The attacking army needs to be bigger than the defending army and will suffer way more casualties,even if they are successful.
  • bjornsing 2y ago
    But when those “casualties” are drones perhaps it turns out to be true?
  • borski 2y ago
    Not necessarily. The Trojan Horse wasn’t so disastrous because it was filled with way more soldiers. It was because they had penetrated all of the defenses and had the element of surprise. Iran just sent I-don’t-know-how-many drones and missiles at Israel like a few months ago. A few of them landed, but most were caught and intercepted in the air. Here’s the thing: if even one of them had hit, say, the center of Tel Aviv, or the old city in Jerusalem, it would have been a massively successful attack, even if none of the other ones had done any damage. The size of zero armies was measured in that exchange.
    • latexr 2y ago
      The Trojan Horse is a myth. It’s as meaningful an example of military strategy as Gundam robots. But even if those were real they would still not support Schmidt’s point that “offense always has the advantage because you can always overwhelm the defensive systems”. The Trojan Horse didn’t overwhelm defenses, it penetrated them and destroyed the enemy from inside.
      • borski 2y ago
        Sure, that's fair - I don't mean to imply that it is always true, and 'overwhelm the defensive systems' isn't the language I'd use. All I mean is that specifically targeted strikes, at the right targets, at the right time, can sometimes be far more important than who has the bigger army. Sometimes if you cut off the head, the rest of the snake really does kind of just die.
• refurb 2y ago
  Damn, the Marjorie Taylor Greene comment sounds like “this person is bad because she isn’t interested in the US getting involved in more foreign wars”. That’s actually an endorsement .
  • weweersdfsd 2y ago
    There's nothing wrong with getting involved in foreign wars, if that means supporting a nation that has been attacked by its neighbor in gross violation of international law. I don't agree with US involvement in Iraq, Afghanistan and many other places, but Ukraine is a obviously totally different from those. Marjorie Taylor Greene may not give a damn as she lives thousands of kilometers from Russia (or maybe she's just been bought by Russian money), but morally she's wrong. When it comes to Russian imperialism, the only right thing to do is help its victims fight back.
    • floydnoel 2y ago
      there is everything wrong with getting involved in foreign wars. maybe you should join the military and participate in a war before thinking they are so great. i've never agreed with MTG before and i think she's a terrible person but i applaud her stance in this case.
      • weweersdfsd 2y ago
        Well, try living in a country that shares over a thousand kilometers of border with Russia, and which has been invaded many times by them during past 300 years, resulting in massacres of civilian population. Then you might see things differently. Without US playing world police my home would probably have been bombed by now... Or maybe Hitler would have won and destroyed Russia, who knows. In any case, I much prefer living in an independent country protected by NATO, over being a member of an enslaved ethnic minority inside Russia, in which case I would have probably been sent to the front lines in Ukraine already. A flawed world police is better than no world police at all.
• meiraleal 2y ago
  > So imagine a non-arrogant programmer Imagine a non-arrogant CEO