> In the interview, Kochavi recalled Israel’s 11-day war with Hamas in May 2021. He said, "In Operation Guardian of the Walls, once this machine was activated, it generated 100 new targets every day. To put it in perspective, in the past, we would produce 50 targets in Gaza in a year. Now, this machine created 100 targets in a single day, with 50 per cent of them being attacked."
> In 2021, the IDF launched what it referred to as the world’s "first AI war". It was the eleven-day offensive on Gaza known as “Operation Guardian of the Walls" that reportedly killed 261 Palestinians and injured 2,200.
Tell that to Edward Snowden, Lindsay Mills, Julian Assange, Chelsea Manning... so many. Some complicated figures in their own right, all of whom took principled stands against such apparatus, most of whom paid dearly for doing so, many of which continue to pay dearly for doing so.
It's possible. It just won't make you rich, which is, I suspect, the real problem.
> Nissim Amon is an Israeli Zen master and meditation teacher. He served in the Israeli Defense Forces under the Nahal Brigade and fought in the Lebanon War. [...] In 2023, during the 2023 Israeli invasion of the Gaza Strip in response to the 7 October Hamas attack, he published a video teaching Israeli troops how to shoot with an emphasis on breathing and relaxing while being "cool, without compassion or mercy".
It doesn't matter if you're being hypocritical. It's already nonsensical that a corporation can have a "sincerely held belief", so you might as well exploit the existing corruption and say "we're a sincerely Buddhist business and can't help with killing".
It seems pretty clear doesn't it? A choice was implicitly offered to the employees, to either stick to "AI Safety" (whatever that actually means) or potentially cash in more money than they ever dreamed of.
I mean the alternate vision isn’t compelling. “AI safety” has a nice ring to it, but the idea seemed to be “everyone just… hang out until we’re satisfied.” Plus it was becoming a bit of a memetic neoreligous movement which ironically defined the apocalypse to be original thought. Not very attractive to innovative people.
I understand where you're coming from, but I suspect the same would have been true of the scientists working for the Manhattan Project. Technology may well be inevitable, but we shouldn't forget that how much care we spend in bringing it to fruition can have absolutely staggering consequences. I'm also more inclined to believe, in this case, that money was the primary issue rather than a sense of challenge. There are after all much more free, open-source AI projects out there for the purely challenge-minded.
AI kriegsspiele won't help win anyone any big war, they didn't help the Germans in WW1 (without the AI part, of course), they won't help China, so for the sake of the Chinese I hope that they're following the "classical" route when it comes to "learning" the art of waging the next big war and not following this newest tech fad.
There's also something to be said about how the West's reliance on these war games (don't know if AI-powered or not) when preparing for the latest Ukrainian counter-offensive has had disastrous consequences for the actual Ukrainian soldiers on the field, but I don't think that Western military leaders are so honest with themselves anymore in order to acknowledge that (at least between themselves, if not to the public). A hint related to those Western war games in this Economist piece [1] from September 2023:
> Allied debates over strategy are hardly unusual. American and British officials worked closely with Ukraine in the months before it launched its counter-offensive in June. They gave intelligence and advice, conducted detailed war games to simulate how different attacks might play out, and helped design and train the brigades that received the lion’s share of Western equipment
Since the prohibition on weapons development & use remains, this reads like normalising contract language to focus on the activity rather than the actor.
Both are vague and problematic to enforce, but the latter more so.
Unilateral disarmament doesn't really work. You can sit on your hands but your adversaries might choose differently and that just means you are more likely to loose in case of a conflict. So, yes, that was never going to work. OpenAI might choose to not serve those customers. But that just creates opportunities for other companies to step up and serve those customers. Somebody will do it. And the benefit for OpenAI doing this themselves is a lot of revenue and not helping competitors grow. Doing this on their terms is better than having others do it.
I think the sentiments around AI and war are mostly a bit naive. Of course AI is going to be weaponized. A lot of people think that's amoral, not ethical, etc. And they are right. In the wrong hands weapons can do a lot of harm and AI enabled weaponry might be really good at that. Of course, the whole point of war is actually harming the other side any way you can. And usually both sides think they are right and will want the best weapons to do that. So, yes, they'll want AI and are probably willing to spend lots on getting it.
And if you think about it, a lot of conflicts are actually needlessly bloody. AI might actually be more efficient at avoiding e.g. collateral damage and bringing conflicts to a conclusion sooner rather than later. Or preventing them entirely. Sort of the opposite of what we are seeing in Ukraine currently.
OP choice was protest or participate and influence to safer outcomes. Your choice was protest or participate without influence to safer outcomes.
Also the AI participant would be OpenAI either way, whereas your inadequate alternative is participate with the US or NK will participate. Also, not the same.
If said nerve gas was decisive weapon capable of giving one side absolute advantage chemists in USA or any other country for that matter would absolutely do it.
This is terrible logic and we (the international community) have banned several kinds of terrible weapons to avoid this kind of lose-lose escalation logic.
The only reason the US or any other country gave up chemical weapons is because they are nearly useless anyways.
There are plenty of other weapons (such as mines) that the “international community” has “banned”, but are very useful in a war. Any country that doesn’t or can’t expect the US to come to its rescue ignores such bans and still manufactures them in great quantities.
That is not valid logic. The USA ratified the Chemical Weapons Convention in 1997, and there are various Acts of Congress which make most work on nerve gas a federal felony. There are no such legal prohibitions on AI development.
We are debating ethics and morality surrounding a rapidly evolving field, not regurgitating trivia about the arbitrary legal status quo in the country you live in. Think for a moment about the various events in human history perpetrated by a government which considered those actions perfectly legal, then come back with something to contribute to the discussion beyond a pathetic, thought-terminating appeal to authority.
1. The initial “pathetic”thought-terminator was comparison to nerve gas.
2. Nerve gas is not strategic. A better comparison are nukes in WW2.
3. Nerve gas has no other uses unlike AI.
4. Nerve can only be used to hurt unlike AI
5. If AI in military is so dangerous, should the US just sit and do nothing while China /Russia deploy it fully? What is your suggestion here specifically?
Imagine you are Microsoft. Two decades ago the state regulated you. Now you get the opportunity to have them eat from your hand. Who cares about ethics and safety?
I've also read, they're using AI to declassify materials. Humans still make the high level decisions, language models tackle the boring work of reacting text and whatnot.
I love that whenever one of these threads shows up, someone always appears to suggest that banality and evil are entirely separate from one another, despite the entire history of the 20th century.
Ah, yes -- to expand on this. You know how some countries employee a large number of people to engage on social media platforms. They have to put in enough good content to build up their rank, and then use that high ranking to subtly put out propaganda which would get more visibility due to their user status. But that takes a lot of effort and manpower.
Now take an LLM that you can feed it questions or discussions from sites, have it jump in with what appears to be meaningful content, gets a bunch of "karma", then gradually start putting out the propaganda. It would be a hard item to fight.
Luckily, that same LLM can summarize that really really boring report... and, if you ask it to, it'll make it exciting, as well. Maybe too exciting...?!
My guess is there are huge opportunities for fairly mundane uses of GPT models in military database and research work. A ban on military uses would include, for instance, not allowing the Army Corps of Engineers to use it to improve disaster prep or whatever. But a ban on causing harm ostensibly prevents use on overtly warfare-oriented projects. Most big tech companies make this concession eventually because they love money and the Pentagon has a tremendous amount of it.
It does says they still don't allow developing weapons with it,
> “use our service to harm yourself or others” and gives “develop or use weapons” as an example, but the blanket ban on “military and warfare” use has vanished.
so Lockheed and co won't be able to use it for most of their military projects. I don't personally see an issue with this change in policy given what you said: the vast vast majority of usecases is just mundane office spreadsheet stuff and the worrying stuff like AI powered drones is disallowed (DARPA has that covered anyway).
Americans, and every other country's, citizens all pay for the inefficiency of the large defense departments. A slightly more efficient DoD office drone isn't exactly a more dangerous world IMO.
Making the DoD more efficient is absolutely dangerous, given the current state of things where Israel is being tried for war crimes in international courts & primary western media outlets only shows their defense, not the prosecution's case. When the president is unilaterally ordering strikes against Yemen because they make shipping more expensive for Israel.
Making this killing machine more efficient at doing anything besides dying or self-dismantlement is harmful to liberation around the world.
That's not what happened. A huge percentage of all global shipping got diverted, and US ships were attacked. This is literally --- literally, using the literal meaning of the word "literal" --- the oldest cassus belli in the American playbook (and the Barbary War was declared unilaterally by the executive); further, it is essentially the entire basis for international law, back to Mare Liberum (this is a point I shoplifted from someone else). This is about the most normal thing that could have happened in these circumstances.
If it matters to you, Congress has already unequivocally signaled unanimous support. That's how this works under 50 USC 33: the executive can launch attacks unilaterally with 48 hours notices (here it was negative hours notice), thus giving Congress the opportunity to pass a joint resolution ending the strikes. The opposite thing happened.
Adding onto your point, attacking civilian merchant shipping in international waters is piracy, and one of the most ancient traditions of international law is that pirates are considered hostis humani generis—enemies of mankind. Any nation that cares to do so has the traditional legal right to dispose of pirates by any means necessary.
"because they make shipping more expensive for Israel."
That is an extremely slanted view of the situation. The Houthis attacked plenty of ships belonging to (de iure or de facto) multiple nations and carrying plenty of someone else's cargo, thus disrupting about 12 per cent of the total volume of global trade. They aren't even trying to enforce a specific blockade ( blockade is act of war, but it must be limited to very specific cargo/ships).
That is piracy 101 and pirates have been generally considered enemies of mankind since at least Antiquity.
"liberation around the world."
Yeah, like the way the Russians are "liberating" Bakhmut and Avdiivka. Without the Western militaries and their help, they could have "liberated" the entire Ukraine into one big smouldering heap of ruins.
It seems you have it out for the US and Israel specifically, which is certainly a take, but not a very well rounded one. If you were, say, against the use of this particular technology for any military, that would be one thing, but you seem to only want the US DoD to not have it.
> The real threat are power lusting humans with enormous resources supporting malevolent motives
It's one of many real threats; even asking which threat is most significant is moot given how many ways mere automation can radically disempower people — one of the other recent topics here was the UK Post Office scandal, where entirely normal software with entirely normal bugs was treated as an infallible oracle leading to unjust convictions and suicides.
No it isn’t, and google won’t give in depth explanations and troubleshoot for you. This is just one example of course, as I said, think of as many as you want.
How long until OpenAI's ChatGPT is astroturfing all debates on social media? Many in a year or two most posts to reddit will just be ChatGPT talking to itself on hot button issues (Israel-Palestine, Republican-Democrat, etc.). Basically stuff like this but on steroids, because ChatGPT makes it way cheaper to automate thousands of accounts:
Why waste billions of kilo joules of energy running AI systems for that, when you'll get legions of dirt cheap technical labor in the developing world, who'll do it for you for far less and at massive scale, with better acerbic language?
I think part of the problem is that LLMs seem to be quite effective at producing messages adhering to ulterior motives, catch attention, reinforce emotions etc.
The GPT-4 release documentation has some examples of this in its addendum. ChatGPT also seems to be good at writing advertisements. Without the strong guardrails, I wouldn't bet on one or two persons instructimg a GPT-4-scale model perfoming worse at manipulating debates than 10 or 100 humans without AI.
It absolutely is. I know of independent researchers doing some side project work on various social media platforms utilizing chatGPT for responses and measuring engagement.
Turing test achieved. I don't know if the internet will lose its appeal because of this. Could be that in the future, to use an online service, you'll need to upload a human UUID.
Yep, I'm saying that we'd be better off if we spent less time on this, and more time making community in meatspace. If the enshittification of the internet is what gets us there, well, that's the hero we deserve.
Well at least those UUIDs could be blocked permanently. Sort of like a spamhaus setup. Although it would be very dystopian that you rent out your UUID because you are poor and then you end up being blocked from everything. Sounds like Black Mirror.
Not just social media, but traditional media as well. As an example, British tabloid 'The Mirror' is using AI to write some of its news articles, and apparently nobody bothers to proofread them before release.
This piece of "journalism" released a couple of days ago claims Finland is in the process of joining NATO, while it already joined nearly a year ago. This is obviously caused by utilization of a LLM model with training data limited to time before Finland was accepted. At least at the end of the article they mention AI was utilized, and included an email where you can complain about factual errors.
in 2013, Reddit community managers cheerfully announced that Eglin Air Force Base, home to the 7th Special Forces Group (Airborne)'s Psychological Operations team, was the "most Reddit addicted city" https://web.archive.org/web/20150113041912/http://www.reddit...
all debates on social media have already been astroturfed to hell and back by professional posters for many years, but LLMs are certainly going to function as a force multiplier
All of the top 3 cities are places with a low official population and a large working population - Eglin's official pop is 2.8k, but has 80k workers. It's the "most Reddit addicted" city because of an obvious statistical artifact.
How will the employees respond? People embrace powerlessness these days, but all they need to do is act. Do they want to work on, potentially, some of the most destructive technology in history?
It is telling if the current team recently displayed extreme levels of worker-solidarity and organizing in public around leadership changes they desired, and their response to this is crickets
The Manhattan project was started off by a letter from known pacifist Albert Einstein to Pres Roosevelt about his fears of the Nazi's developing an atomic weapon first.
I would say it was a good thing that did not happen.
Because Soviet Union was developing nuclear bombs (and stealing the technology, too) immediately in pace with the US program. If the US program was to stop, the Soviet one wouldn’t stop.
As long as there are people in Russia and China who are willing to work on such tech, it's actually ethical for Americans to work on the technology.
Effectively, it's the military power of the US and its allies that prevents people like Vladimir Putin from killing potentially millions of people in their neighbouring countries. Whatever faults US has, it's still infinitely better than Russia. I say this as a citizen of a country that shares a long border with Russia.
I agree with the second paragraph. The first paragraph is more of a thorny issue to me. If AI is potentially destructive in an existential sense, then working to get there faster just you can be the one to destroy the world on accident is not part of my ethical model. I put existential AI risk at a low but non-zero chance, like OpenAI should/does/did/hard to say anymore.
> As long as there are people in Russia and China who are willing to work on such tech, it's actually ethical for Americans to work on the technology.
While that carries weight, 'the other person is doing it' has long been an excuse for bad behavior. The essential goals are freedom, peace, and prosperity; dealing with Russia and China are means to an end, not the goal. If developing AI doesn't achieve the goal, we are failing.
First, Los Alamos was a project of a democratic government, serving the people of the US and allies. OpenAI is a business that serves itself.
During WWII, the US was in an existential war with the Nazis, also trying to develop nuclear weapons. If the Nazis had built it first, we may have been living now in a very dark world. (Obviously, it also helped defeat Japan.) On the other hand, there are threats if an enemy else develops capabilities that provide large advantages.
At least part of the answer, I think, is that the US government needs to take over development. It already houses the world's top two, most cutting edge technology organizations - the US military and NASA - and there is plenty more (NIST, NIH, nuclear power, etc.); the idea that somehow it's beyond the US government is a conservative trope and obviously false. We don't allow private organizations to develop military weapons (such as missiles and nukes) or bioweapons on their own recognizance; this is no different.
That same democratic government interned its own citizens to camps because they're heritage was of the same nationality as the opponent. Democratic governments are not the perfect thing you seem to make it out to be. There are plenty of other examples from pretty much any democratic goverment
They will respond the same way employees of Microsoft, Amazon, Google and the like did when those companies started picking up military contracts – throw a minor fuss and then continue working. And those that do quit over it will be replaced overnight.
I think that the employees of OpenAI (generally speaking) made a pretty loud statement during that board fiasco that their interest is whatever maximizes their personal financial return.
To civilians it’s dangerous to develop weapons for most cases, it the opposite for military. It’s dangerous not to develop better weapons faster than an adversary.
Tech Company Yoinks Ethical Promises has been a headline for the last decade and a half but I guess we'll learn not to trust them only after the Football's been deployed.
So what collective responsibility, if any, do those using gpt4 daily and helping improve it have when openai powered drones start being used and accruing civilian casualties?
Hm, just as a thought experiment... if your shitposts included any form of implicit racism that affected the AI in a drone's decision of "is the civilian casualty worth acceptable or should I not fire"... then yes?
I don't have a full answer to my own question to be honest.
In the above example though, you'd never be able to prove that it was or wasn't your contribution so it's easy to say you bear no collective responsibility. But would it be true?
I'm not sure, but I can't say definitively you would bear no responsibility.
But here's the thing, I've been shitposting since before the eternal September. Long before LLMs were invented. I had no idea that my writings would ever be used in such a way.
I'm trying to find an ethical analogue. If you dig up an old porno that I made 20 years ago, and show that to my child, am I responsible for the trauma it causes?
Do you feel that collective responsibility whenever you do taxable work or make taxable purchases in the US that funds our entire military? It should be orders of magnitude less responsibility than that.
Honestly, yes. It's a weird duality of "but this is the reality I'm stuck in" and "however there is a collective responsibility for helping fund wars", but it's still functional.
I would find it wrong to say "I bear no responsibility because that's just how things are" if that makes sense.
These moves are the heart behind Sam's firing and rehiring. OpenAI was originally born out of a "don't be evil" ethos and is now trending towards a traditional 10x unicorn sass product.
One problem is that many industry companies (almost anyone doing engines, vehicles, airplanes) is likely to at least do some military products, too. It may be as simple, for example, as wanting to have an LLM assistant in a CAD tool for developing an engine that may get used in a ship, some of which may be military. And the infrastructure and software is often shared or at least developed in order to be applied across the company.
I think this is where this is coming from.
It would be useful to clarify the rules and ban direct automatic control of weapons or indirect control as part of a feedback loop on any system involving weapons from commercial AI products.
We cannot even ban the development of Nuclear Weapons much less a technology that could be developed for peaceful purposes then switch to terminator mode. Have you seen how drones are being used in the Ukraine Russian War? How long did it take for drone tech to go from light shows in Dubia [1] to dropping grenades into Russian Tanks [2].
The real crazy stuff isn't the grenade-bombing drones; it's FPV: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pe5RvttOs-E. They have pretty much replaced guided anti-tank missiles for both sides because of how much cheaper they are, and the ability to easily fly around and hit where the armor is thinnest, or even inside the vehicle, before exploding; they can also fly inside trenches, bunkers, and other emplacementes.
DJI FPV ($1k retail) supposedly has about 1 in 3 chance of taking out a moving tank that is not a sitting duck - i.e. hatches closed etc - and does not expose the operator to danger in the process. For comparison, a single Javelin is $240k. FPV drones are cheap enough that they're routinely used even against minor targets such as unarmored small cars and even individual soldiers - even after accounting for failures before a successful hit, it still ends up costing the enemy a lot more in $$$ than was spent on all the drones.
My estimate was a bit off because it was a market price for an export unit. But according to US procurement documentation, a single Javelin costs American taxpayers $197,884 to send, so it's the same order of magnitude.
The cost of the drone is not the only cost . You still need tank busting munition and the also crucially internet connectivity starlink provides or satellites provide.
Starlink is cheap for its capabilities but it is still startup cost of billions of dollars if you could do it all .
The tank-busting munitions that they typically use are conventional RPG warheads, as seen in the video I've linked. They work great provided that they hit a weakly armored spot, and they're even cheaper than the drone itself.
And no, you don't need Internet connectivity for those things. You need to be within radio range, but this can still mean 1-2 km away easily even on stock equipment, and more with better antennae etc.
Conventional RPG warheads still cost money, a lot of money if you want them to reliably explode.
Javelin has a warhead capacity of 9Kg, for the same bang so to speak ( armor penetration) you would need drones that can hoist 9Kg, those don't retail at anywhere near $1,000.
That doesn't mean that cheap drones are not effective means of weapons delivery, they are as this war is showing. They are akin to side arms, when penetration is not a factor they are useful, but they are hardly a replacement for heavy guided munitions like Javelin.
Man Pads are by no means perfect, the current gen is 30 years old, they could be made much smarter and lot cheaper than $250,000, however just $1000 drone is not going to replace them yet.
MANPADS means Man-Portable Air Defense System. Javelin is an anti-tank weapon, not an air defense weapon.
And the main advantage for Javelin over an FPV drone is that a Javelin is fire-and-forget; you don’t need to steer the missile yourself. It will attack the weaker top armor automatically.
Correct FPV drones are essentially useless against aircraft. I dont think anyone is using conventional RPG warheads or FPV drones against aircraft.
> "Javelin has a warhead capacity of 9Kg, for the same bang so to speak ( armor penetration) you would need drones that can hoist 9Kg"
This is false because a Javelin warhead contains propellant and guidance as well as the payload. In reality, a shaped charge capable of penetrating 200mm of steel weighs about 1 kilogram. Which is well within the capabilities of many drones under and around the 1000$ price range.
Many tanks and IFVs have been taken out on both sides by quadcopters carrying shaped charges. Plenty of penetration can be achieved by relatively lightweight shaped charges.
My source is the people in Ukraine to whom I donate and who are directly involved in drone purchases for frontline units: https://dzygaspaw.com/. They do buy <$1K FPV drones, and HEAT RPG-7 shots is one of the typical things that are strapped to them for anti-armor role.
A single-stage RPG-7 HEAT grenade weighs 2.5 kg, of which the actual explosive charge is only 700 g, and much of the rest is the powder charge that propels it in normal use, but is completely unnecessary for drone applications. And, as already noted above, you do not need the same absolute armor penetration capacity for these things, because the whole point is to attack from the side where armor is the thinnest and any exposed internal components are the easiest to disable. Judging by the videos of successful use, the most common technique is to attack the engine compartment directly from above.
Now, DJI FPV, which does retail for $1K (and can be had for less if buying in bulk) is certainly quite capable of lifting a 1kg warhead. But it should also be noted that these days, in most cases Ukrainians are using money more efficiently by assembling their own custom-tuned FPV drones from components and specially manufactured HEAT charges, which knocks the price down to ~$600 for the same lift capacity with better speed and range. They are still roughly the same size as DJI or only slightly larger, which can be readily seen in numerous videos on YouTube and Telegram showcasing their use. Here's one example of a locally manufactured FPV drone: https://neboperemogy.fund/dron-hrim/ - the lift capacity for this one is 2kg, sufficient for heavier tandem HEAT charges, and it costs ~$750.
>The real crazy stuff isn't the grenade-bombing drones; it's FPV
well, FPV is quickly becoming yesterday stuff - the EM warfare makes direct video connection infeasible, at least near the target. So, the most recent drones can guide themselves toward the target using computer vision - the operator brings them closer to the target's position, points-and-clicks at the target on screen, and the drone does the rest on its own.
One problem is that many industry companies do not declare that they develop something for "the good of humanity".
Otherwise it is yet another "virtue signalling".
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[ 0.19 ms ] story [ 464 ms ] thread> In the interview, Kochavi recalled Israel’s 11-day war with Hamas in May 2021. He said, "In Operation Guardian of the Walls, once this machine was activated, it generated 100 new targets every day. To put it in perspective, in the past, we would produce 50 targets in Gaza in a year. Now, this machine created 100 targets in a single day, with 50 per cent of them being attacked."
> In 2021, the IDF launched what it referred to as the world’s "first AI war". It was the eleven-day offensive on Gaza known as “Operation Guardian of the Walls" that reportedly killed 261 Palestinians and injured 2,200.
It's possible. It just won't make you rich, which is, I suspect, the real problem.
Yeah, and look what happened to them.
( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nissim_Amon & translation of the original message from Amon: https://sites.google.com/view/nissimamontranslation )
Surprising no one, they picked the money.
Who doesn’t think China has a ten year AI algorithm to takeover Taiwan? Israel+US+UK > Middle East.
SkyNet or War Games are likely already happening.
anybody who works in either AI or natsec
There's also something to be said about how the West's reliance on these war games (don't know if AI-powered or not) when preparing for the latest Ukrainian counter-offensive has had disastrous consequences for the actual Ukrainian soldiers on the field, but I don't think that Western military leaders are so honest with themselves anymore in order to acknowledge that (at least between themselves, if not to the public). A hint related to those Western war games in this Economist piece [1] from September 2023:
> Allied debates over strategy are hardly unusual. American and British officials worked closely with Ukraine in the months before it launched its counter-offensive in June. They gave intelligence and advice, conducted detailed war games to simulate how different attacks might play out, and helped design and train the brigades that received the lion’s share of Western equipment
[1] https://archive.is/1u7OK
What it is supposed to mean?
Both are vague and problematic to enforce, but the latter more so.
I think the sentiments around AI and war are mostly a bit naive. Of course AI is going to be weaponized. A lot of people think that's amoral, not ethical, etc. And they are right. In the wrong hands weapons can do a lot of harm and AI enabled weaponry might be really good at that. Of course, the whole point of war is actually harming the other side any way you can. And usually both sides think they are right and will want the best weapons to do that. So, yes, they'll want AI and are probably willing to spend lots on getting it.
And if you think about it, a lot of conflicts are actually needlessly bloody. AI might actually be more efficient at avoiding e.g. collateral damage and bringing conflicts to a conclusion sooner rather than later. Or preventing them entirely. Sort of the opposite of what we are seeing in Ukraine currently.
A) opt-out of participating to absolve yourself of future sins or
B) create the systems yourself, assuring you will have a say in the ethical rules engineered into the weapons
If you actually give a shit about ethics and safety (as opposed to the appearance thereof) the only logical choice is B.
OP choice was protest or participate and influence to safer outcomes. Your choice was protest or participate without influence to safer outcomes.
Also the AI participant would be OpenAI either way, whereas your inadequate alternative is participate with the US or NK will participate. Also, not the same.
So, wrong on two counts.
There are plenty of other weapons (such as mines) that the “international community” has “banned”, but are very useful in a war. Any country that doesn’t or can’t expect the US to come to its rescue ignores such bans and still manufactures them in great quantities.
2. Nerve gas is not strategic. A better comparison are nukes in WW2.
3. Nerve gas has no other uses unlike AI.
4. Nerve can only be used to hurt unlike AI
5. If AI in military is so dangerous, should the US just sit and do nothing while China /Russia deploy it fully? What is your suggestion here specifically?
Suppliers don't get to pick which house the missile lands on.
Not everything is a spy movie
It's used for operational efficiency: to select and bomb targets faster and in greater numbers than human analysts are able to
Not everything is boring paperwork
(Source: https://www.livemint.com/ai/israelhamas-war-how-ai-helps-isr... where AI achieved 730x improvement in bombing target selection rate and >300x greater rate of resulting bombs)
Now take an LLM that you can feed it questions or discussions from sites, have it jump in with what appears to be meaningful content, gets a bunch of "karma", then gradually start putting out the propaganda. It would be a hard item to fight.
> Today’s Mortgage Rates for Jan. 12, 2024: Rates Cool Off for Homeseekers
https://www.cnet.com/personal-finance/mortgages/todays-rates...
And yesterday
> Mortgage Rates for Jan. 11, 2024: Major Mortgage Rates Are Mixed Over the Last Week
https://www.cnet.com/personal-finance/mortgages/todays-rates...
And the day before
> Current Mortgage Interest Rates on Jan. 10, 2024: Rates Move Upward Over the Last Week
https://www.cnet.com/personal-finance/mortgages/todays-rates...
You get the idea.
Or, you know, it just hallucinating and people not checking it. But that would be as silly as lawyers citing non-existent AI-hallucinated legal cases.
> “use our service to harm yourself or others” and gives “develop or use weapons” as an example, but the blanket ban on “military and warfare” use has vanished.
so Lockheed and co won't be able to use it for most of their military projects. I don't personally see an issue with this change in policy given what you said: the vast vast majority of usecases is just mundane office spreadsheet stuff and the worrying stuff like AI powered drones is disallowed (DARPA has that covered anyway).
Americans, and every other country's, citizens all pay for the inefficiency of the large defense departments. A slightly more efficient DoD office drone isn't exactly a more dangerous world IMO.
Making this killing machine more efficient at doing anything besides dying or self-dismantlement is harmful to liberation around the world.
If it matters to you, Congress has already unequivocally signaled unanimous support. That's how this works under 50 USC 33: the executive can launch attacks unilaterally with 48 hours notices (here it was negative hours notice), thus giving Congress the opportunity to pass a joint resolution ending the strikes. The opposite thing happened.
That is an extremely slanted view of the situation. The Houthis attacked plenty of ships belonging to (de iure or de facto) multiple nations and carrying plenty of someone else's cargo, thus disrupting about 12 per cent of the total volume of global trade. They aren't even trying to enforce a specific blockade ( blockade is act of war, but it must be limited to very specific cargo/ships).
That is piracy 101 and pirates have been generally considered enemies of mankind since at least Antiquity.
"liberation around the world."
Yeah, like the way the Russians are "liberating" Bakhmut and Avdiivka. Without the Western militaries and their help, they could have "liberated" the entire Ukraine into one big smouldering heap of ruins.
Flamebait. As if anyone who disagrees is naive.
It's one of many real threats; even asking which threat is most significant is moot given how many ways mere automation can radically disempower people — one of the other recent topics here was the UK Post Office scandal, where entirely normal software with entirely normal bugs was treated as an infallible oracle leading to unjust convictions and suicides.
Two seconds of thought will yield you plenty of other examples.
What you can't get from google is auto-data analysis.
(answer is yes, that's still banned! https://www.apple.com/legal/sla/docs/iTunes.pdf )
* https://www.cnn.com/2019/05/06/tech/facebook-groups-russia-f...
* https://www.voaafrica.com/a/israeli-firm-meddled-in-african-...
I sort of suspect AI-driven accounts are already present on social media, but I don't have proof.
The GPT-4 release documentation has some examples of this in its addendum. ChatGPT also seems to be good at writing advertisements. Without the strong guardrails, I wouldn't bet on one or two persons instructimg a GPT-4-scale model perfoming worse at manipulating debates than 10 or 100 humans without AI.
Turing test achieved. I don't know if the internet will lose its appeal because of this. Could be that in the future, to use an online service, you'll need to upload a human UUID.
Nothing would make the internet lose appeal to me faster than having to do something like that.
"Need $500? Rent out your UUID for marketing!"
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/vladimir-putin-adds...
This piece of "journalism" released a couple of days ago claims Finland is in the process of joining NATO, while it already joined nearly a year ago. This is obviously caused by utilization of a LLM model with training data limited to time before Finland was accepted. At least at the end of the article they mention AI was utilized, and included an email where you can complain about factual errors.
all debates on social media have already been astroturfed to hell and back by professional posters for many years, but LLMs are certainly going to function as a force multiplier
https://scholar.google.com/citations?view_op=view_citation&h...
if you want some entertaining reading go ahead and browse through Eduardo Pasiliao's research at your working city there:
https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=Caw-nkAAAAAJ&hl=en
I'll summarize it for you: computational propaganda with an emphasis on discerning and disrupting social network structure.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory
I would say it was a good thing that did not happen.
Unlike the US in Korea and Vietnam, the USSR wasn't even contemplating using nukes in Afghanistan or elsewhere.
Effectively, it's the military power of the US and its allies that prevents people like Vladimir Putin from killing potentially millions of people in their neighbouring countries. Whatever faults US has, it's still infinitely better than Russia. I say this as a citizen of a country that shares a long border with Russia.
While that carries weight, 'the other person is doing it' has long been an excuse for bad behavior. The essential goals are freedom, peace, and prosperity; dealing with Russia and China are means to an end, not the goal. If developing AI doesn't achieve the goal, we are failing.
But this time the atomic bomb will be able to decide by itself whether to incinerate human race.
First, Los Alamos was a project of a democratic government, serving the people of the US and allies. OpenAI is a business that serves itself.
During WWII, the US was in an existential war with the Nazis, also trying to develop nuclear weapons. If the Nazis had built it first, we may have been living now in a very dark world. (Obviously, it also helped defeat Japan.) On the other hand, there are threats if an enemy else develops capabilities that provide large advantages.
At least part of the answer, I think, is that the US government needs to take over development. It already houses the world's top two, most cutting edge technology organizations - the US military and NASA - and there is plenty more (NIST, NIH, nuclear power, etc.); the idea that somehow it's beyond the US government is a conservative trope and obviously false. We don't allow private organizations to develop military weapons (such as missiles and nukes) or bioweapons on their own recognizance; this is no different.
? where did I say that?
By doing what they've been doing, they won't hurt their stocks.
I don't have a full answer to my own question to be honest.
In the above example though, you'd never be able to prove that it was or wasn't your contribution so it's easy to say you bear no collective responsibility. But would it be true?
I'm not sure, but I can't say definitively you would bear no responsibility.
I'm trying to find an ethical analogue. If you dig up an old porno that I made 20 years ago, and show that to my child, am I responsible for the trauma it causes?
I would find it wrong to say "I bear no responsibility because that's just how things are" if that makes sense.
Going without gpt4 can put you at a disadvantage for some work.
Not paying taxes affects your life much more negatively.
Given the different costs, logically it seems that paying taxes would be something you have less collective responsibility for.
I think this is where this is coming from.
It would be useful to clarify the rules and ban direct automatic control of weapons or indirect control as part of a feedback loop on any system involving weapons from commercial AI products.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XJSzltMFd58
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZYEoiuDNY3U
DJI FPV ($1k retail) supposedly has about 1 in 3 chance of taking out a moving tank that is not a sitting duck - i.e. hatches closed etc - and does not expose the operator to danger in the process. For comparison, a single Javelin is $240k. FPV drones are cheap enough that they're routinely used even against minor targets such as unarmored small cars and even individual soldiers - even after accounting for failures before a successful hit, it still ends up costing the enemy a lot more in $$$ than was spent on all the drones.
Starlink is cheap for its capabilities but it is still startup cost of billions of dollars if you could do it all .
And no, you don't need Internet connectivity for those things. You need to be within radio range, but this can still mean 1-2 km away easily even on stock equipment, and more with better antennae etc.
Javelin has a warhead capacity of 9Kg, for the same bang so to speak ( armor penetration) you would need drones that can hoist 9Kg, those don't retail at anywhere near $1,000.
That doesn't mean that cheap drones are not effective means of weapons delivery, they are as this war is showing. They are akin to side arms, when penetration is not a factor they are useful, but they are hardly a replacement for heavy guided munitions like Javelin.
Man Pads are by no means perfect, the current gen is 30 years old, they could be made much smarter and lot cheaper than $250,000, however just $1000 drone is not going to replace them yet.
And the main advantage for Javelin over an FPV drone is that a Javelin is fire-and-forget; you don’t need to steer the missile yourself. It will attack the weaker top armor automatically.
> "Javelin has a warhead capacity of 9Kg, for the same bang so to speak ( armor penetration) you would need drones that can hoist 9Kg"
This is false because a Javelin warhead contains propellant and guidance as well as the payload. In reality, a shaped charge capable of penetrating 200mm of steel weighs about 1 kilogram. Which is well within the capabilities of many drones under and around the 1000$ price range.
Many tanks and IFVs have been taken out on both sides by quadcopters carrying shaped charges. Plenty of penetration can be achieved by relatively lightweight shaped charges.
A single-stage RPG-7 HEAT grenade weighs 2.5 kg, of which the actual explosive charge is only 700 g, and much of the rest is the powder charge that propels it in normal use, but is completely unnecessary for drone applications. And, as already noted above, you do not need the same absolute armor penetration capacity for these things, because the whole point is to attack from the side where armor is the thinnest and any exposed internal components are the easiest to disable. Judging by the videos of successful use, the most common technique is to attack the engine compartment directly from above.
Now, DJI FPV, which does retail for $1K (and can be had for less if buying in bulk) is certainly quite capable of lifting a 1kg warhead. But it should also be noted that these days, in most cases Ukrainians are using money more efficiently by assembling their own custom-tuned FPV drones from components and specially manufactured HEAT charges, which knocks the price down to ~$600 for the same lift capacity with better speed and range. They are still roughly the same size as DJI or only slightly larger, which can be readily seen in numerous videos on YouTube and Telegram showcasing their use. Here's one example of a locally manufactured FPV drone: https://neboperemogy.fund/dron-hrim/ - the lift capacity for this one is 2kg, sufficient for heavier tandem HEAT charges, and it costs ~$750.
well, FPV is quickly becoming yesterday stuff - the EM warfare makes direct video connection infeasible, at least near the target. So, the most recent drones can guide themselves toward the target using computer vision - the operator brings them closer to the target's position, points-and-clicks at the target on screen, and the drone does the rest on its own.
I think a recent war and a recent bombing campaign may imply otherwise.