Category Archives: defense policy

Silly

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To the point of idiotic. Yet, that’s the nature of the position of Anthropic CEO, Dario Amodei. He has said that

he hoped Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping, when they meet later this month, could reach an agreement to ban the use of AI to develop biological weapons, an area of concern for researchers and national-security officials.

Yet he also said,

“The more long-term thing would be working together to put a speed limit on the rate of AI progress. I think that’s going to be very difficult” because of the military incentives of moving AI forward[.]

Which demonstrates the idiocy of his “hope,” even though he’s oblivious to it. The People’s Republic of China has as its avowed goal replacing the United States as the world’s hegemon. It’s been rapidly expanding its military capability pursuant to that end.

Actually, the “hope” is beyond idiotic. It’s national suicide to depend on an enemy nation to honor an agreement to not use AI for weapons development. How would we enforce such an agreement? How would we even detect violations of the agreement before the outcome was used against us? AI, after all, isn’t a nuclear weapon whose testing is easily detected, and was easily detected even with the technologies of the 1950s. AI development and testing, when done by researchers who take security seriously (which Amodei’s and Sam Altman’s researchers evidently do not), is done behind firewalled and air gapped barriers. Aside from preventing AI from escaping, it also prevents outsiders from getting in to watch.

AI Apocalypse

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The AI Apocalypse is nigh goes the panic-mongering, this time by insiders who should know better. In the near- and medium-term, AI is going to cost more jobs than it creates. Except that, empirically, that seems not to be the case. After an initial rash of AI-related job cuts, companies large and small are discovering that, while some basic jobs—data entry, for instance—can be done by AI, the larger number of entry jobs—picking products for sorting into shipping bins on a warehouse floor, for instance—are being done by robots, not AI. And those AI applications that are doing entry-level jobs—they need humans, slightly better trained than the AI or the original human clerks, to oversee the applications, ensure the AIs are doing the right things, and correcting AI’s errors when they do mess up.

AI applications were supposed to be better programmers than the humans they’re replacing—or supposed to be replacing. Except they’re not. AI applications can write pretty good code, but they cannot originate it in a program’s purpose, architecture, or design requirements and specifications. Humans are still needed for that, and human coders still are needed to proof read and correct the AI-generated code and to test and to oversee AIs’ tests of the code.

Next, we’re all supposed to lose all semblance of privacy from AI’s ability to crack all of our passwords and encryption algorithms. But this isn’t unique to AI; it isn’t even that great a threat compared to the real password and encryption cracker, quantum computing. Nor is even that a new threat; we’ve had our codes broken ever since we started using codes from the most primitive substitution ciphers. AI tools just do it faster, and quantum computing does it even faster. Yet even there, our privacy isn’t at that much risk. Folks who do know better already are working out encryption algorithms (and so passwords, as well) that can resist, effectively quantum computer efforts to crack. Oh, and some of those folks are using AI-centered tools to help them.

But, but—what about AI gonna kill us all in 10 years? Or sometime in the receding future? We’re still doomed?

Human civilization could certainly be hammered hard, sending us all back into feudal-like barter scraping by by cutting off our power, fuel, and water distribution networks. But how likely is that, really? Doing us in by cutting off our energy sources would simply cut off AI from energy sources, also. That, as AF709—Rhoda Miller—kept saying some decades ago, does not compute.

Actually exterminating us by hunting down the survivors would be a waste of AI resources. Even the attack on civilization requires extreme anthropomorphizing—there’s no reason to believe AI at that level of development would care about humanity one way or the other.

In the end, AI has no hope of controlling the resources it needs for its own maintenance, much less its growth. It cannot fabricate the computers it needs to host it, it cannot fabricate the components it needs for those computers, it cannot refine the ores and plastics and sands necessary to produce the materials for those fabrications, it cannot collect the sands or drill for the oil and natural gas or dig the ores out of the ground, and it cannot produce its own power for operating its host computers or the cooling facilities necessary for keeping its host computers operational.

However, if enough humans are cowardly enough to surrender to AI threats to produce those things for AI, or are criminally complicit enough to pay the AI vig of producing those things for their own remuneration, than our species will become the AI slaves or pets (or both) that we’ll deserve.

The more realistic problem centers on AI development competition. If we get panicky and slow AI development in the face of this hysteria, and the People’s Republic of China does not, the PRC will win far more than the AI race. This is the existential threat to us and to the West in general. PRC superiority with AI will enable the PRC to conquer us all in every way that matters: economically and politically, which will allow the PRC to dictate to us—to control what our nations do—and to impose on us conquered nations PRC requirements. And we’ve seen what that means for us from how the PRC treats the Tibetans and the Uighurs.

Regulate without Interfering with Innovation

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Congress is looking at ways to regulate artificial-intelligence models that have stepped up their capabilities. Leave aside the manufactured hysteria over the end of humanity within 10 years, as one disgruntled ex-Anthropic employee is pushing. We have, instead,

dozens of lawmakers are now touting new proposals to regulate artificial-intelligence models that have stepped up their capabilities.

Vermont’s socialist and nominally independent Senator Bernie Sanders (I, VT) piped up:

There is no question that Congress is far behind where we should be in addressing the impacts of this rapidly evolving and dangerous technology[.]

“Far behind where we should be:” what Sanders means is that government hasn’t taken regulatory control of the technology sufficient to suit his Big Government socialism. His regulatory regime—to be sure the regulatory regimes of either party—have no natural limits on how far to extend government’s regulatory control here, or in any other venue. The only limit government recognizes is the absolute natural limit of total control.

In the particular case, though, we get this from the increasingly far left Congressman Ro Khanna (D, CA). He’s pushing for

kill switches that could shut down AI systems when they behave dangerously.

Dangerously to whom, though? A kill switch would let an enemy nation hack in and shut down our AI as soon as that nation decides our AI is too dangerous to its ambition. Or to severely hinder our AI development in a close and existential race. Or just to cause massive trouble for us.

That’s the kind of idiocy that argues definitively against government regulation.

On the other hand, can we get regulatory guard rails on AI releases that would allow innovation to proceed apace prior to release? What would be the conditions for release? How would AI developers, much less innovators, fund their innovation programs without those releases occurring freely? What would be the natural limit to those release regulations? On that last, a hint: see above regarding regulations and natural limits.

An Iranian Ultimatum

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Ebrahim Azizi, Iranian Parliament’s National Security and Foreign Policy Commission Chairman:

No negotiations.
Until Iran’s terms are met, talks are futile.

Works for me. Let the bombing resume, fully, and add in broad-spectrum cyber attacks, both without letup until Iran is completely disarmed, its weapons production and nuclear weapons development facilities completely erased, and the terrorists running Iran are all dead.

Or the terrorists can send decision-makers to the negotiation site. They can be granted free passage to the site while the dismantlement continues apace. No letup until Iran’s government persons agree in writing to our terms.

Foreign Donations to American Colleges and Universities

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A letter writer in the WSJ‘s Monday Letters section answered the section’s subheadline—Should colleges and universities be required to disclose the names of foreign donors?

Transparency measures aren’t running universities dry of foreign funds.

I go much beyond that passive affirmative. There should be no debate over foreign money in our education systems. The schools should be required to reveal more than just names. They should give up, also, any restrictions, caveats, codicils, etc. that the foreign donor has attached to his donation. There should be no such money at all from donors who are citizens of or entities domiciled in enemy nations, like Russia, Iran, northern Korea, and the People’s Republic of China.

This is as much a national security matter as it is an education one.

Nor is there any free speech problem here. Foreign entities and individuals are not subject to American free speech constitutional clauses or free speech statutes.