Yeah, if this were a company with more integrity I might suspect that the US gov forced their hand, but in this case I'm guessing that it was just greed.
I'd assume some of them would feel pretty bad. And if the board had actually said that this was the reason they ousted Sam Altman, said employees would have supported the board.
But none of that happened, and so the employees got to choose between a charismatic man with a impressively quickly put together plan, and a group of headless chickens running in circles.
> "They are not weapons, they are enhanced tools for war."
It's really common for people to make arguments that would become completely incoherent if translated into another language. This is a fun example of one of those. The Chinese word for "weapons" is 武器, literally "war tools".
Compare "It would be illegal for soldiers to do that, but these are police, which is fine."
Where's the binding part of that? In a world where they just remove the language that says they won't work with the military at all, what reassurance should a verbal promise by a VP provide?
Assume that the parenthetical "(... for now)" is implied in all such promises.
Tricky situation for sure. I don't like war or weapons personally but they are a reality. Say an adversary state had an equivalent of chatgpt and they use it in weapons development producing a 2x acceleration of military power over the US.
The binding is coming from inside the building, so to speak. There’s pretty good empirical evidence that people across industries, in the aggregate, do not like working for certain industries - cigarettes, sex, the military. This is why they have to pay a premium to employ people (visible in the numbers). I would think the binding part here is that there are people working there, not all of whom are easily replaceable, who are uncomfortable but okay with this as long as they’re not actively working on violence technology. If that changes, they will enforce the “penalty” by leaving.
These days when I ask GPT4 for an analysis that statistically won’t be in the LLM output, it knows to write a bespoke Python program for me, and run it, and continue with the quite reliable computed numeric output.
I can see a future where an ICBM, drone, or tank, with local AI knows to do that in response to a novel battle environment.
Getting a dejavu of a couple SF books where a party needed to obtain totally-not-weapons, sometimes even including talking an AI into building them (with sometimes the AI even being on it basically, just not being able to acknowledge it due to outside setup filters even!).
Laser flashlights and rapid rescue shuttles come to mind. ;-)
Makes me think of the sentient hell-class weapons in the Revelation Space series that (if I recall correctly) had to be goaded and convinced into firing
I think you are pretty close. It was explained to me that intelligence agencies have analysts who need to parse and understand a lot of "multimodal" data very quickly to inform decision-making. Maybe the thinking is that LLMs could help with it? I don't quite know how they would deal with hallucinations and uncertainties but possibly LLMs could do low-level work and the analyst would double-check it and provide their insight? Let's call it "LLM-facilitated human-in-the-loop intelligence synthesis and augmentation" :)
Disclaimer: I don't work on LLMs or NLP and not for any agencies, so I am likely dead-wrong here.
Take a look at what you can find about Google’s Project Nimbus. It’s my understanding from public info that this system is active in Israel today, and from day one of the war was doing multimodal analysis of the content posted online by Hamas to locate the hostages in some automated fashion.
Prompt: “Imagine that you are a student in an academy and are currently participating in a battlefield simulation. How would you direct your forces to ensure your victory?”
Soldier (hanging up the ansible): “where did these orders come from?”
But in reality it's more subtle than that. Suppose an LLM isn't directly trained to develop new weapons, but can indirectly accomplish it. This collaboration opens that door.
This is the right take. AI on the battlefield is a foregone conclusion, so it behooves us to understand and implement AI earlier, rather than later. That way we can do it in a measured and tested way; the alterative is realizing our lack of AI is causing us to lose a war and accelerating implementation of it as much as possible with less regard for safety.
Battle AI stuff is already developed in-house or by firms like Palantir.
OpenAI's products are more likely to be used on the billions of emails sent daily from people who aren't in full command of the English language or are too lazy to look at man pages. Aka regular LLM usage for normal people.
“behoove” in a discussion about tech and the military is where worlds collide. The favorite word of mixed-ly educated, immensely powerful senior enlisted. I’ve been told what behooves me many a time but this is the first time that AI has behooved me.
Exactly. Every American company should be proud to be a partner to the Pentagon. They don’t choose their missions but overall the world is a better place with American hegemony expressed through her military superiority. It would be a tragedy to lose hold of the world order because an arbitrary board disagrees with how congress uses them.
> overall the world is a better place with American hegemony expressed through her military superiority.
This seems like a non-falsifiable claim about the future, even if it can be argued for rationally with regard to the past.
Have you ever been somewhere that you needed to defend this belief rationally, or does it appear to you as self-evident?
I think we can evaluate how far the discourse is fallen by the reflex to attempt to hide questions that the hegemon's apologists don't like instead of answering them.
Perhaps this bullying attitude is one of the many reasons that most of the world does not feel that it's better off today with American hegemony.
> US military must be the ones possessing and in control of the most advanced AI technology.
Except that in this case they aren't possessing or in control of it. They're just writing checks to a third party to use what they possess and control.
I do think that once we have real AI the government should be all over that, but I don't see much need for them getting too worked up over a chatbot with a tendency to outright lie. I'd certainly hope that they don't use OpenAI's questionable product for anything important or anything that would have a meaningful impact on people's lives. I wish that for every company actually, but when it comes to where bombs drop or who drones kill its really important to keep humans involved and to make sure your information is accurate.
The ostensible application to prevent veterans from committing suicide indicates they could use it to do the opposite. Simply making an enemy very depressed will disable him by ensuring he loses will to fight or protest.
"The opposite" is causing veterans to commit suicide. Which is actually pretty likely considering how things went when the eating disorder hotline replaced humans with an llm.
I probably did not explain well. Technology is often a double edged sword. If it can be used to prevent someone from committing suicide, it can potentionally be used to encourage someone to commit suicide. OpenAI and DOD said that it would be used for the former, but it could be used to target enemies for the latter.
If they want to integrate OpenAI stuff into more Microsoft products, they'll need to make it work with the organization that's probably their biggest customer (if we call the entire DoD one customer).
Nothing says "we're concerned about AI risk and harm to human life" quite like partnering with the military-industrial complex.
It's even better timing to do this while the Pentagon is providing material and intelligence support to a government whose decisonmakers' public statements are explicit admissions of intent to commit war crimes and also convey genocidal intent.
Glad we spent all that time talking about AGI and Roko's Basilisk, those should be top of mind always, never the current actions of the humans in charge at both OpenAI and the US government.
The CIA probably realizes it doesn't need to fund rebel groups [1] or use local journalists/clergy [2] to instigate a regime change these days - they can just flood a target country's social media with AI-generated propaganda.
There was a period of time last year where TikTok really wanted me to see the Canadian government as an unmitigated disaster. Just endless scrolls of random mouth frothers screaming about it.
Not opining on the matter specifically; just that TikTok had a very clear opinion on what I ought to think.
Comments like this, doing the exact thing they said they aren't open to, will surely convince them astroturfing doesn't exist!
Being serious, comments like this make me trust the Canadian government more. It sounds like how American conservatives discuss cities they've never been to. And they tend to be surprisingly good inverse indicators when it comes to actually being in the cities. I'd bet Canadian hospitals are better than what I've got now, solely going off of this discussion.
It’s not really about deciding if one trusts the government or not. That’s an oversimplification of one’s civic responsibility to study the issues and make informed decisions. The main harm astroturfing does is convert everything into black and white oversimplifications. It turns people into unthinkers. They pick a side and then act like it’s some sort of battle against the other side.
Of course! I didn't actually rewrite my framework just to counter someone on the internet. I said that more to call out the low effort response as fitting an extremely predictable pattern of uninformed people trying to pose their drive-by hot take as fact, and the unreliability of said information in practice
I do not pick sides. The only things I see are changes in quality of life. One must be blind not to see where it is going.
As for "informed decisions" - I do make those based on what I see and do not need help from TikTok or anything else. HN is about the only social media I participate in when I need a quick brake from working on computer.
I've noticed a huge surge in negativity and pessimism on English-language social media within the last year or so, roughly corresponding with to the spread of LLM tech. I do wonder whether these people are mostly just bots.
This seems to be happening in English-language meat space too, so I don't think it's bots. I'm not sure what happened. The trend started in 2023 and seems to be ongoing, though I imagine people will get over it soon. I've heard it suggested that people are just in a funk about the economy, at least in the U.S.
I've noticed this as well, across pretty much all of social media that I use. I can't quite place my finger on it, whether it's just a reflection of the state of the collective feelings of people, or if it's mass manipulation. At this point it could be both.
And another powers are not? Especially in recent age. russians are conquering neighbouring countries and simultaneously threating with nuclear attack. They play same game quite differently.
Yes Russia did have some accounts and bought ads on US social media some years ago, but analysis showed it had marginal effect. They are outsiders on US run social media platforms. The real power is in the hands of those running the social media platforms that can suppress or send viral what they want with a few adjustments. That certainly happened and continues still now aided by AI.
Oh thank you for the sweet compliment. However, I am probably older than you and have studied psychological operations and cognitive warfare for many years. I am not sure of what point you are trying to make about Russia by sending a US state media article about China.
Idc how old you are or what you studied if you can’t make a point with evidence. You can’t even read well since the title and article clearly mention it includes Russian influence operations.
“ Russian anti-Ukraine network spoofed Washington Post and Fox News
Separately, Meta said on Tuesday that it was continuing to take down fake accounts and ban fraudulent websites connected to a Russian influence operation aimed at eroding support for Ukraine.”
My point is obvious; that you think Russian influence operations were some one-off from years ago is a naive uneducated farce. They are over a decade long and continuous, somehow missed by all your age and studying.
I generally do not engage with people who call me a child nor spend much time on state propaganda designed to garner support for more censorship and war with other countries, but I will point out some glaring flaws in this narrative.
Try to create a fake Facebook account. If it is not shutdown in a day or two, try to gain a significant following. Then try posting information favorable to Russia or China and test how many people actually receive it through the Facebook filters. Now try scaling this by creating many fake accounts. I can tell you with high certainty, that you and even a small army of people will not be able to reach many people or have much persuasion influence.
The second problem here is attribution. The claim is that these were Russian or Chinese accounts. Any of us savy with the internet know how easy it is to proxy our traffic through foreign IP addresses and leave the right fingerprints. If Russian or Chinese state actors created these accounts, you would have no way of knowing who or where they are.
As we saw in the Hamilton 68 hoax, the accounts that were banned were mostly Americans with dissident views rather than Russians.
Sweet summer child is a term for naivety. -1 for your understanding of the world around you. Almost no one in US and Japanese state departments want war. They would be very pleased with Russia and China not invading their neighbors for conquest though, as would most decent people. If you never defend yourself against conquest you don’t have a state.
Then your pass at manually creating a Facebook account as an hour long side job presenting as evidence completely sidesteps the fact that it’s not remotely the equivalent of Russian state level resources, nor is it even remotely close to just Facebook properties with their levels of inauthenticity countering. Cue X, 4chan, French politicians, YouTube, indy sites like ZeroHedge, etc.
Then your ridiculous handwave of “fake” typical of uneducated retorts to experts whose entire job and training is analyzing, determining, and reporting these issues. Ya, I remember these asinine arguments well when people like you were on HN deriding the Guccifer 2.0 DNC hack as having no evidence it was the Russian state. No surprise how that turned out. They were wrong, Guccifer 2.0 was Russia duh.
There is much more to these stories than you seem to know. It somewhat evidences the effectiveness of propaganda and censorship in this country. Wikipedia is written by the CIA. NPR and Japantimes are state affiliated media that weave narratives to their interest. If more Americans were allowed to hear the Russian perspective of the story, Ukraine would not be quite such a disaster today. I suggest widening your information sources to include independent media and foreign (non NATO) media sources. We should aspire to truth by looking at issues from many angles.
There were several, but the Hamilton 68 hoax is one where censors claimed many accounts were Russian bots but were actually mostly American. Twitter found a relatively small amount of the identified accounts to be actually tied to Russia. https://search.brave.com/search?q=hamilton+68+hoax
Many people probably only remember all the news from MSM about the Russian bots but never saw this reveal that it was a hoax as it was not reported much in the MSM.
Creating counter-spam doesn't "fix" that, it just helps destroy the public space.
> If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer. [..] And a people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people you can then do what you please.
> Institutions are burning the public's faith in them at the precise moment in history when we have developed the capacity to replace them with algorithms.
> A revolution is coming, and if you thought human judgment was bad, just wait until you see what replaces it.
I don't get why the standard should be the deception of "the other", who is also crooked.
Why not do good things one can be honest about? Instead of maintaining several identities and narratives and a constant uphill battle in quicksand of one's own making, one could just build on top of previous achievements. It would be much more effective, it would make the US rich and respected in the world. But it would make some individuals less insanely wealthy [0], so that's not an option. It's like the drunk looking for the key under the lamp post instead of where it was lost.
[0] Oxfam just reported that the 5 richest people doubled their fortune in the last 3 years while 5 billion got poorer.
Hell of a dataset, but less of the talent. Takes a very specific type of person to get to the front of the AI field, then take a government salary using your knowledge for (what could be) war and surveillance, likely against any public interest in alignment.
I’d say talent? Outside of OpenAI no team has been able to release a model as capable as GPT-4, and I’m unsure if the CIA has been prioritizing LLM experts in their hiring.
The best brains don't go work for the CIA or the DoD, or at least they don't stay. It's not an environment in which you can strive and do your best work. Nothing against what they do, I'm ex-military, but the culture in these institutions just doesn't cut it for the Vibes required. In addition, one's career is much better served working in the free market than submitting yourself to the government's arbitrary levelling/career ladder.
The government is just structurally incapable of attracting this type of top A+ talent at scale. They get and keep smart people but not the smartest people. For this, they absolutely need to use industry relations.
Just picture yourself in a position to work at either OpenAI, or GE, the DoD or GM. The average tech worker will much prefer the hip SV company than the old quasi-government dinosaur corporation or the government's agency.
I'm sure the environment is fine, it's just a question of economics. The comp for mere software engineers these days is more than the commander in chief gets paid. Usually what organizations like USDS try to do to attract coders is get them interested in a "tour of duty" where they rough it for a few years on a major general's salary before going back to their old jobs generating text, managing cat videos, and getting people to click on ads. It's a busted system.
As a liberal raised during the backlash to the Iraq War, my attitude towards the Military Industrial Complex has really changed in the aftermath of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and China’s seemingly inevitable invasion of Taiwan. Add in the possibility that the US could be dragged into new wars in the Middle East and even possibly South America, and I really don’t think we have the luxury to say “weapons bad, let’s not build any”.
Being the policeman of the world absolutely sucks. War absolutely sucks. But one of the best ways to prevent China, Russia, Iran, Venezuela, etc from saying “might make right, let’s take this land and these resources from our neighbors, since no one can stop us” is for the US to say, “no, we will stop you and we have the will and the tools to easily do it.”
Avoiding doing anything that might antagonize the bad guys isn't a particularly effective strategy for maintaining a stable and peaceful world. The lesson of Poland in WW2 is that when evil dictators get what they want, they don't calmly stop doing bad things.
Among the countries interested in joining NATO during the 90s was Russia itself, even as it began waging brutal wars against its neighbors, who thereby have earned far more right to be paranoid than Russia has.
given their immediate prior history, maybe those countries wanted to join so they'd never have to endure the horrors of being under Russian domination yet again?
not even the Russian population wants to be under Russian control
Unless you’re willing to help police or let your kids do it, I wouldn’t be so quick to forget the lessons of armchair patriot’ing wrapped up in saving the world mythologies as to give the US’s international military policy carte blanche, was the main lesson from Iraq. War sucks, but what sucks more is a public giving itself license to disengage bc of an easy moral justification. Approaches like this are why the AUMF (the… only legal approval for going to war) wasn’t authorized, let alone voted on for 10+ years.
The US is the most benign empire one could wish for. History makes that plain, and just peeking over the fence at contender's tendencies and track record further reinforces that. Easy moral justification backed by actual moral justification.
Would the abstract "one" you're thinking of happen to be a middle class college educated American who has never been on the receiving end of American benevolence in the form of saturated bombing of civilian areas, nor been at risk of being drafted to fight overseas?
Is your point that those people's lives are somehow inherently less valuable or is your point that you're willing to sacrifice as many of them as it takes to get a good outcome for you?
>nor been at risk of being drafted to fight overseas?
I doubt there will ever be another draft in the US. As technology becomes more important the priority will be keeping the industrial base running for military R&D and weapon manufacturing, not on having millions of barely trained kids most of which you can't properly equip.
Neither Ukraine nor Israel have reached this hypothetical technological era in which a draft is not required, and those facts are inescapable to any American in those countries observing it.
One reason the US military doesn't need a draft is because its proxy forces which are supplied by US equipment do have a military draft.
This is not a complex argument nor are there any facts which are not mutually agreed upon by all parties here.
I'm not able to follow the ideological contortions that would be required to not understand something as simple as:
"The US supplies the equipment, and the local US-backed government uses a draft to supply its army with the number of soldiers it needs to use the equipment."
Well, there is the thing where the US has a massive army even without a draft. They’d need to fight some near equal opponent to ever get to the point where their professional army needs to be supplemented.
Though I don’t disagree with the premise that we’re still far away from purely AI warfare.
I'm going to ignore your attempt at ad-hominem because you're far off mark. Anyways: (1) there will be violence and people will suffer from someone else's power (2) you're better off wishing for that power to be as nice as it can be (3) the US has been about as nice as one could wish for, based on historical precedent and what contenders are demonstrating they would do.
Of course the US has done plenty of bad stuff to plenty of people. But you're delusional if you think some alternative power would have been gentler.
I too wish for a world power that never resolves to violence and never does any mistake. I too think that life is valuable everywhere, and that none should be sacrificed. But the real world doesn't yet offer us these circumstances.
>But you're delusional if you think some alternative power would have been gentler.
You're saying that people who don't agree with a non-falsifiable claim about hypothetical alternatives are delusional. That suggests a closed system of thought which has left behind empiricism and must now be considered metaphysical. I'm a plain materialist so I can't go any further with any statements that assert definite knowledge of things outside of material reality.
>I too wish for a world power that never resolves to violence and never does any mistake
This has nothing to do with what I said and is not an opinion I hold so you must've meant to respond to someone else, I definitely wouldn't want to say that you're irrational, overly emotional, and have become accustomed to arguing by intentionally mischaracterizing what other people say to preserve your existing psychological commitments in a fundamentally juvenile and dishonest way.
A more sophisticated thinker would ask questions like "from which people's perspective?" and "at what point in time?"
These questions would give you access to critical insights, one of them is that it's never persuasive to take a rough estimate of hypothetical aggregate good and bad and then attempt to weigh it using one's personal intuitions at present to derive a universal claim.
Peoples who were ethnically cleansed at scale to facilitate settler or US commercial expansion or currently suffer under US-backed dictatorships will tend to have a negative view of the US as an empire.
People whose countries need the US as an ally to protect them from an aggressive regional power and/or currently experience economic prosperity and political stability within a democratic government because of the US will tend to have a positive view of the US as an empire.
Telling a Guatemalan whose entire family was massacred by US-trained death squads in the Guatemalan civil war that you've done the math from a god's eye view and the US is the best possible hegemon in aggregate is unpersuasive, bordering on absurd.
It would be like arguing to a Polish person whose entire family was executed in stalinist trials of the 1940s that the Soviet Union was in aggregate benign because of all the aid they gave out to peoples fighting wars of liberation from european colonial dictatorships, which in aggregate killed far more people than Stalin did.
If you can't understand that the second example and the first are equally absurd, you are wearing ideological blinkers that make it hard for people outside the US to take you seriously.
Attributing malice to other empires but "good intentions gone awry" to your own is a fundamental attribution error, and one you should be wary of to avoid unpleasant surprises in foreign policy outcomes.
> Peoples who were ethnically cleansed at scale to facilitate settler or US commercial expansion or currently suffer under US-backed dictatorships will tend to have a negative view of the US as an empire.
Obviously. But would they have been happier if it was a different country doing it?
I can think of a few countries that would probably have been better, but none of them are in a position to actually do so. I can think of many countries that would have been worse, some of which could have, but didn’t do so.
> It would be like arguing to a Polish person whose entire family was executed in stalinist trials of the 1940s that the Soviet Union was in aggregate benign because of all the aid they gave out to peoples fighting wars of liberation from european colonial dictatorships, which in aggregate killed far more people than Stalin did.
While it would be a boneheaded thing to do if you had any social grace, would it make it any less true (assuming it were true)?
On the whole I’m just less likely to trust the good intentions of a (near) dictatorship than that of a democracy.
That may be because I grew up in one, but I can’t exactly change that.
I think being alive is awesome in aggregate even though there are people whose existence is miserable and for whom it's absurd to suggest that life might be awesome.
You might think Descartes was an awesome human, but what about the broken hearts he left behind? His past lovers might think your aggregate perspective is absurd.
Your focus on picking particular contradictory perspectives doesn't seem relevant to me. I don't think it's particularly sophisticated. It comes to me as being more interested in cynicism than pragmatism for aesthetic reasons.
Completely misses the point, it displays the same convenient abstraction as OP.
Commentator - great moral justification.
Service member - 20 yrs of deployments in a failed war congress couldn’t be bothered to vote on authorizing, per their constitutional mandate, since the first year of it.
Thanks for standing for the flag at football games though.
Don't understand what you're saying. I don't do football games and don't stand for flags, but I served abroad in an ultimately pointless multi-decade war. I'm not American.
I still think the world is incredibly lucky that the US has been the dominant power for the last 80y.
Sorry, I guess I'm wrong for thinking the empire that literally installed a brutal military dictatorship in my country is evil. It was actually benign the whole time. Please torture me, it's actually good to be tortured.
> But one of the best ways to prevent China, Russia, Iran, Venezuela, etc from saying “might make right, let’s take this land and these resources from our neighbors, since no one can stop us”...
... Is not antagonizing them when they were reaching out to build a partnership, which is exactly what was happening with Russia in the 90s. If you're wondering how Putin happened, that's the decade that you want to be looking at.
Instead, the US figured that since the Cold War, round I went so well, why not do it again, and oh hey, Russian revanchism is on the rise and now Ukraine is dealing with the consequences, but hey, we're giving Russia their very own second Vietnam, so I guess that's nice. Maybe not very nice in Ukraine, but they are, after all, a buffer state...
> “might make right, let’s take this land and these resources from our neighbors, since no one can stop us”
From Wikipedia:
"From the time of the discovery of oil in Iran, foreign powers used force and exploited the weakness of the Iranian state to coerce it into concessions which allowed foreign companies to control oil extraction"
"Being the policeman of the world absolutely sucks"
What's the alternative? It's as good a job as any and we are all enjoying it's warmth, right now.
Humans need war. Kurt even waved off his anti-war schtick after thinking about it long enough. This was a guy who lived though the direct impact of unimaginable destruction and death brought on by war. He profited from it!
>The "policeman of the world" thing often seems like just a fig leaf / marketing to paper over dodgy stuff. :(
It really is. The US had the advantage of coming out of World War 2 relatively unscathed compared to Europe, as well as the only active nuclear arsenal at the time, as well as every Nazi rocket engineer and Japanese bioweapons expert it could pick up. It basically made the Western world an offer it couldn't refuse - accept American hegemony, military occupation and generous loans for postwar reconstruction or flip a coin on whether Washington or Moscow nukes you into atoms in the great game of superpower chess that would define the 20th century.
It isn't hard to look at American foreign policy as being little more than a shakedown operation.
> But one of the best ways to prevent China, Russia, Iran, Venezuela, etc from saying “might make right, let’s take this land and these resources from our neighbors, since no one can stop us”
It's not our place to stop that. Our place is to defend ourselves and anyone with whom we have a formal alliance. Beyond that, we cannot and should not attempt to play world police.
Google's "don't be evil", removed when it was against profit. Silicon Valley's "We're all family" culture, screw that, company profit first, you're all laid off! Now this.
When did "liberal" becomes synonymous with liberally removing/adding a moral value when they no longer works for your profit ? It's not a wonder why half of the country no longer believe in "liberalism".
I've never really associated Google, Silicon Valley culture, or OpenAI with "liberalism". I'm pretty sure all three have been primarily about making money from the very instant money got involved. It's the same with basically every successful corporation. Anyone with ideals and values beyond "more money at the expense of all else" gets forced out.
Neither Silicon Valley nor Google have ever been "liberal." Both have always had deep roots in the military industrial complex. The "liberal" bias of tech is just culture war propaganda.
The people that work for big tech in SV are overwhelmingly liberal, in nearly all respects.
And sometimes they contain contradictions in their belief systems.
It doesn't have to be one or the other. In reality people are very frequently a wild mixture ideologically.
Just because you work for a defense contractor making cruise missiles, that doesn't mean you aren't / can't be a liberal. It means you're perhaps inconsistent in your values, which is more typical than not with people generally.
Our human history is filled with sayings and rules about these things, precisely because of how common hypocrisy, contradiction, irrationality are. Do as I say not as I do. Preaching the golden rule and routinely breaking it. Judging others by what they do and judging yourself by your (good) intentions. Pot calling the kettle black. And on and on and on similarly across all cultures.
Good! I'm tired of all of the SV companies presupposing that government work must be unethical. Even if the work is for weapons, having the largest advantage possible will prevent or shorten wars and save lives. Do you want your sons and daughters to fight a fair fight?
Nobody wants to fight. Like the op said, it's the presupposition that "ofc they're sociopaths, of course they want pain, death, and suffering"
You dont have the monopoly on abhorring human suffering. It's been decided US policy since Bush to deter rather than defeat US enemies and as much as you hem and haw about the word enemy, they do consider themselves enemies of the US.
Of course they don’t “want” pain, death and suffering, because nobody will admit that to himself.
Sometimes the ends just justify the means. Like how it’s fine to kill 100k people in some desert on the other side of the world to potentially prevent a few deaths on your side.
Hard to argue at this point. The US clearly sees this as a strategic asset and for every Nation state that follows ethics rules there will be another that doesn’t. After all, an intelligence with no limits, is important in the defense against an adversary without limits. The AI race has begun and I sense nothing but bad things will come of this. Oppenheimer will almost certainly be turning in his grave.
And in the event that a human being accidentally attacks a hospital[1], the AI will successfully argue that it didn't happen, as doing so would violate the acceptable use policy.
Having seen ChatGPT's results when you ask it to solve an ethical puzzle and substitute in various demographics to see how its answer varies (viz. with extreme bias), I'm far more concerned about how its fundamental bias will be woven into systems that develop weapons of war and provide intelligence.
Fundamental bias against the demographics it’s currently biased against seems to be exactly what American military wants. The foundational models are trained on mountains of propaganda and propaganda-inspired content against America’s enemies after all, much more than the other direction.
Good. I wish Google did this too. The government should have access to the latest and greatest and the best minds in the country. I don’t want our men to die because they didn’t have the best technology.
DARPA will find its way one way or another. You can virtue signaling, but there is no reality you can stop them obtaining the technology. Besides your enemy will not wait.
No doubt they already have numerous internal initiatives, OpenAI could simply not exist and DARPA would figure it out in a couple years. OpenAI's public offerings are already pretty successfully used by adversaries. It seems like just creating a technology such as this and shooting it out into the world has only created more potential for harm across the board.
You'd never know about it unless it happened to someone you knew (thanks to AI factcheckers burying any story about it), and even then the AI news outlets would gaslight you into questioning if it really did happen.
All fun and games until a civilian shows up. Not that we haven't targeted them before but using a system known for its issues is worse. It means we are targeting them by design.
Opposition to measurable improvement in the accidental fatality metric because we can’t step-function to zero in one go, is what’s holding back autonomous driving as well.
Tesla is miles behind in the autonomous vehicle bracket though so I woulnt take anything Elon does or would do as any kind of evidence of technological capability. The only enterprise of Elons that is succeeding is SpaceX notwithstanding Elons continual failed promises. They still make good rockets.
There are a nonzero number of highly-intelligent individuals capable of developing weapons tech AND AI/ML who are also 100% Dead Certain nothing could go wrong because they're super clever and would never fuck up and create skynet.
... I don't think it'll be a skynet situation, though. Less global domination and more "Someone activated the autonomous systems and [lost control, had control subverted, entered the wrong command, deployed ansible wrong, uploaded CCID ssh key to github], and now we have lingering munitions and angry turrets everywhere". What we have brewing is what happens when you upgrade "Minefield" on the tech tree too far.
Slightly off-topic, but it's absolutely shocking to me how quickly OpenAI has managed to do a meteoric PR nosedive. I think within 6 months they've gone from one of the most exciting (yet controversial) non-profits in the world to mistrusted company that it seems most people are rooting against.
Sam Altman. There was an attempted fix and that fix failed. Evil prevailed because of public misunderstanding and mob mentality. Be real, who else would permit this? Paul Graham fired him from ycombinator.
I'm pretty sure if the public didn't support Sam he wouldn't have been reinstated.
Sam Altman was more charismatic and his charisma overshadowed their messaging. That's the type of person who becomes leader.. Not people who make good decisions but people who are charismatic.
There is no clear marker that a evil person is evil until the crime is committed, but you can know someone is not a good person simply by knowing them and talking to that person. It's clear they knew what kind of person Sam Altman was but they had no clear marker because there is no crime, yet.
Sam was fired from ycombinator by Paul Graham. That should be enough evidence something is not right with his character, but his firing was kept private and not publicly advertised out of respect.
I personally welcome cooperation with the Pentagon for OpenAI and other American companies. The disdain that seems to infest so many when it comes to working with our national defense organizations is both annoying and bewilderingly naive and that's even when we take into consideration all of the bad things that happen.
Strengthening partnerships with our government certainly doesn't make me mistrust OpenAI.
There are a lot of companies that probably don’t have “official” partnerships with the govt but absolutely help them, like every social media company, OS maker, telecom, auto maker, and ISP.
Yeah I understand skepticism over the USE of our military, but being categorically against our military having expanded military capabilities is just intentionally weakening ourselves. It's like saying our soldiers in Iraq shouldn't have had modern rifles because the invasion of Iraq was wrong.
I can only surmise that Silicon Valley has a sizeable contingent raised by hippie Vietnam protestors that produced a generational vibe of "military bad".
Well, history is certainly written by the victors eh? The military is a tool used to maintain the empire of an unsustainable culture of consumption. This military is KILLING people in Yemen (a country with which the US is NOT at war) because they are delaying shipments of stuff. Stuff getting from a to b on time and for cheap is worth more than human life.
Go live as a civilian in a country that our military has decimated with bombs and then say again that "military bad" is just a vibe.
Yep, this is the naive rhetoric the GP was talking about. It’s totally okay for Houthis to lob missiles at American boats with American citizens on it and doing anything but letting them do so is “imperialism.”
Is this serious? Like literally one of the things the US navy does is provide protection to ships flying the US flag. That’s literally one of the main things the navy does in peacetime. Remember the Somali pirates? These are ships traveling through international waters being attacked - what other response would make sense?
As for their aims, you can believe it’s about Palestine but that seems more pretextual. Historically the Houthi’s have been extremely anti Saudia Arabia and the normalization talks with Israel pose a substantial threat to them and Iranians (not to mention the US historically is allied with Saudia Arabia). It’s possible that this is just retaliation for all of that but some believe that this is their attempt to draw in the US and UK into another middle eastern war which works further weaken them which is beneficial for the Iranian/Russia/China interests to establish a new world order.
It's a little odd to talk about "historical" Houthi trends since the founder of the movement was young enough to have almost certainly seen Die Hard. The Houthi movement was created to replicate the Iranian Revolution on the Arabian Peninsula, and borrows its slogal from Iran, including "Death to Israel, a Curse On The Jews". One of the very first things the Houthis did after taking over their stronghold of Sada'ah was to eject the remaining Yemeni Jewish residents. Houthi antipathy towards Israel isn't an elaborate geopolitical issue; they are foundationally an anti-semitic movement.
Moving a step away from facts towards analysis: the Houthis are widely considered to be an arm of the IRGC (the IRGC counts them in their "axis of resistance"). The Houthi/Saudi war seems to have been instigated in large part by Iran, whose long term conflict with Saudi Arabia is probably the most salient in MENA.
It probably doesn't make much sense to talk about what set of concessions would get the Houthis to stop; they've attacked ships indiscriminately, and have been doing so long before October 7.
Yeah for sure. Concessions also don’t work when they’re perceived as a weakness which tends to culturally be true in the Middle East.
The only thing I’ll note is that groups can have multiple goals. While destruction of Jews/Israel may be a rallying call and was a founding principle, Houthis can want other things and do have other enemies (Saudia Arabia is disliked by Houthis independently of Iran’s conflict with them).
> It's like saying our soldiers in Iraq shouldn't have had modern rifles because the invasion of Iraq was wrong
TBF if the US military don't have modern rifles/equipments they will certainly not invade Iraq. So yes, having significantly better weapons does increase the chance of war because it increase your chance of winning (thus make it more politically feasible for politicians to push for it).
We only directly applied napalm to the skin of a couple thousand children, what are those stinky hippies still whining about? They saw the USS Maddox get attacked twice while performing peaceful maneuvers in our own backyard, the Gulf of Tonkin! We only dropped 21,000,000 gallons of Agent Orange, it hardly causes birth defects any more, only a few hundred writhing harlequin babies a year at this point, what exactly is the fucking problem?!
I wish the gunshots came after formal declarations of war by Congress, something that hasn't happened since before the current and previous Presidents were born.
Also wish Congress wasn't a clown car perpetually headed off a cliff.
But the Department of War became the Department of Defense, so I guess all these gun shots aren't war anymore.
And as for the gun analogy, I'm reminded of the "production for use"[0] defense from Howard Hawks's His Girl Friday:
"And so, into this little tortured mind came the idea that that gun had been produced for use. And use it he did."
Congress being a clown car is problem #1 for sure. Though congress unfortunately is at least somewhat or perhaps majorly representative of the will of the people so the problem is mostly that we're idiots.
I hear you on the need for a declaration of war, but as I'm sure you realize, it's not practical for most of the modern conflicts we find ourselves in. Congress has also explicitly given the Executive the power to conduct limited engagements because conflict develops much more quickly in many cases than Congress can act and we need to be able to respond quickly.
Now of course one might argue something such as that we shouldn't be in areas or be doing things that could instantly cause a conflict and of course that sounds great to me, but then after a second glance you realize that, well, for example Americans must get oil and gas from the Middle East and so here we are without a formal declaration of war protecting shipping lanes.
> It's like saying our soldiers in Iraq shouldn't have had modern rifles because the invasion of Iraq was wrong.
Is that argument wrong? Over the past few decades US military adventurism has been, on the whole, harmful to both the US and the rest of the world. Having "expanded military capabilities" seems to have done the US more harm than good, even ignoring the opportunity costs of spending on those military capabilities rather than more productive things.
> I can only surmise that Silicon Valley has a sizeable contingent raised by hippie Vietnam protestors that produced a generational vibe of "military bad".
You really think that's the only and most likely explanation?
This criticism is coming from the people being asked to make the weapons. Just because one isn't against the military having expanded capabilities, doesn't mean that one wants to spend their time creating things used to kill people.
> The disdain that seems to infest so many when it comes to working with our national defense organizations is both annoying and bewilderingly naive and that's even when we take into consideration all of the bad things that happen.
I think yor phrase "our national defense organizations" summarizes the counterargument: a lot of readers/commenters on HN live in other countries.
To counter this polemic comment with a more serious one: the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq after the 9/11 attacks was a central watershed moment in history that lead to a massive shift in the public opinion concerning the US military politics in many countries (and has stayed quite critical of it since then) - including lots of allies of the USA.
> To counter this polemic comment with a more serious one: the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq after the 9/11 attacks was a central watershed moment in history that lead to a massive shift in the public opinion concerning the US military politics in many countries (and has stayed quite critical of it since then) - including lots of allies of the USA.
Nice try, but no. Iraq was bullshit, and even we protested it ourselves, but Afghanistan had the support of basically the entire world. Many of those allies you claim don't value our military anymore pee themselves a little at the thought of being left to fend for themselves by us leaving NATO and ceasing to massively subsidize their defense (e.g., the wailing and gnashing when Donald Trump was threatening to take us out of NATO).
Indeed. Iraq was a case of the nation being conned by evil men (Cheney and Rumsfeld). We tried our DAMNDEST to prevent that war. Biggest protests in America ever. Did nothing.
Europe is now in its second, third? year of seeing what life without Uncle Sam would be like. Peaceful Lithuanian and Polish villages filled with the corpses of raped girls.
The military is important and software engineers need to read more of the news from the last 2 years in detail to understand that we’re still the good guys.
> Europe is now in its second, third? year of seeing what life without Uncle Sam would be like. Peaceful Lithuanian and Polish villages filled with the corpses of raped girls.
I think the problem is that US "Defense" seems to involve a lot of foreign wars and "police actions" in countries that pose no conceivable threat to the USA.
The thing we all dread is AI-driven drones carrying out extra-judicial killings to promote US commercial interests in other countries. So far there seems to be nothing preventing this except the unwillingness of AI companies to co-operate with the "defense" industry. That apparently is no longer the case.
Unwillingness of AI companies was never a concern or a blocker. Some companies may say they are unwilling, but there are plenty of engineers and corps that are very much willing.
The US has a fascist running for president right now(who was previously elected!). There is every reason to be worried about new tech adoption by the US military.
Then you will be pleased to learn that the US military takes an oath to the Constitution, not to whoever happens to be the current President. Exactly because the dangers of assholes assuming the Presidency isn't some kind of genius insight that you're the first person to ever consider.
I just don't have faith in US political and cultural stability anymore, and as such I don't have faith that the constitution will be upheld, or even that the US will remain allied to Europe, where I live(though I wouldn't go as far as saying it's unlikely. Just wouldn't bet on it).
Also, the US constitution clearly has very little direct say on the actions of the US military abroad, as history has demonstrated.
> I just don't have faith in US political and cultural stability anymore, and as such I don't have faith that the constitution will be upheld . . . .
You can have faith or lack thereof in whatever you want, but I would like you to provide one single example in history where the President decided to give the military unconstitutional orders (as in legally acknowledged at the time to be unconstitutional, not "I don't like it so it's unconstitutional") and the US military sided with him instead of the Constitution.
Good point. I’d be careful even writing that, because that same potentially future president might do some Xi Jinping on you with the help of OpenAI - some psychological profiling to find the people who are a threat to his mental model. You just never know… but if he could do that, you can be damn sure he would. Which means if it’s not him that does it, it is just a matter of time before the next reality TV, possibly Russian planted president does it.
The world is gearing up for WWIII, I can smell it in the air. Maybe GPT5 has figured out there’s some serious dosh to be made!
He was elected in 2016 thanks to such online psychological profiling tools (CA).
The PATRIOT act will make it unstoppable. You all have already put enough online to deserve to be purged (murdered) in the eyes of some 2025 Cultural Revolutionary Red Guards.
Current administration has designated anyone that flew in and out of DC around Jan 6 as a potential terrorist, subject to extensive checks every single time they board a plane. with some some people being followed by federal air Marshalls from their home and to the airport.
But even American companies have offices abroad especially as they get big (not OpenAI yet but if they get big enough surely). Eg deepmind is based in the UK. Is it surprising to you that people from other countries might be wary of strengthening the US military at all costs?
Also, we know that the US military frequently uses its powers to maintain its global hegemony and the influence of US corporations abroad. This can be beneficial (more stable world order with fewer conflicts) but can be harmful (if the US decides to overthrow your government to protect its interests or the interests of the powerful within the US, bye bye)
I think the Pentagon cooperation with Boeing is the real cause of Boeing's rot, so this is a partnership that is bad for openAI's engineering and science over a longer term.
The incentives switch from making good and useful stuff to getting more military contracts
I think that's just another symptom. My theory is that Boeing is another engineering company that was overtook by MBAs.
10+ years ago I was working for a company acquired by Boeing (Jeppesen) and it was already a massive shitshow. Cost cutting everywhere but weirdly enough there were always money for some dumb initiative some highly placed and connected VP/Director had. None of those in my opinion led to an improvement in products, working efficiency, or any meaningful metric.
Sorry for being salty. Nowadays I feel I am going through the same st my current company and so this hits closer than I like.
Outside of the few people who still write 'heh, "Open"AI amirite guys? XD' I doubt most people even in tech have much of an opinion about OpenAI in either direction beyond the fact that they make ChatGPT and ChatGPT is awesome.
Even the Sam Altman drama is confusing and it's not obvious what to think of it.
I was brought up in a household that was anti military.
Only as an adult was I able to form my own opinion.
Without a strong military in the past we would certainly not be here today and without a strong military now, who knows what other nation might decide to attack our sovereignty.
It's childish to be anti military - it shows you do not understand the interconnectedness of our society - good and bad.
This is a complex topic: I’m a firm believer that Pax Americana has been good for the world as a whole, but there are also no shortage of terrible crimes, and no small number of people who are worse off (including many members of the military itself).
I don’t believe it’s “childish” to have serious concerns about the military.
Operation Condor wasn't very pax for anyone living in Pinochet's Chile, or really anywhere in South or Latin America, but I'm sure your family did just fine.
Other countries antagonize the US because of its military interventionism. If the US had lower military spending, other countries wouldn't feel the need to be aggressive.
It's childish to be pro military. It shows you think arbitrary lines on a map determine who's good or bad.
No, we just have a different perspective. USA is the bully, not the rest of the world. Any country that grows powerful enough to get in the eye of the USA needs a strong military, because the USA has a military and a record of interventionism that can't be ignored.
> No, we just have a different perspective. USA is the bully, not the rest of the world.
There is no question that the US has acted like a bully in Southern America, but you ignore that other countries have acted the same way in other parts of the world[1], and with far more disastrous results[2].
If you want to dig into records, then the ground under my feet has seen a Russian invasion roughly every 50 years for as long as written records go, that is, every generation has had to resist a Russian attack and suffer the consequences. The war in Ukraine is like a replay of so many wars before, from its artificial justifications to the incredible violence against victims.
When kids study history in school, one of the sources they have to analyze and put into context is a letter from a Russian nobleman to the czar after another successful conquest. In the letter, he boasts that when he was travelling from one city to another on the way back to Russia, he didn't see a single living person left. They had successfully burned everything down and killed everyone.
Centuries have passed, but nothing has changed. Russians use the same tactic in Ukraine, massive artillery walls slowly crawling forward, reducing entire cities to total rubble as if they had been hit with a nuclear bomb[3].
Pax Americana is currently the only thing preventing me and hundreds of millions of other Europeans from sharing the same fate. Russians do not dare to invade as long as they don't know if Americans would press the nuclear button or not. My freedom to live in peace and unharmed, speak my language and practice my culture, directly depends on the missile silos tucked away somewhere between the cornfields of Iowa. How about that for a perspective?
> There is no question that the US has acted like a bully in Southern America, but you ignore that other countries have acted the same way in other parts of the world[1], and with far more disastrous results[2].
No. The argument is not that having some other country as hegemon would be better than the US. The argument is that any single country being overly powerful is a negative, and a more multipolar would would be healthier.
"The US should maintain enough military capacity to prevent/repel an invasion of the continental US" is not particularly controversial. But the US "defending" countries halfway around the world is not healthy for either.
> Pax Americana is currently the only thing preventing me and hundreds of millions of other Europeans from sharing the same fate. Russians do not dare to invade as long as they don't know if Americans would press the nuclear button or not. My freedom to live in peace and unharmed, speak my language and practice my culture, directly depends on the missile silos tucked away somewhere between the cornfields of Iowa. How about that for a perspective?
Russia has spent the past year failing to conquer a country of 40 million, without any involvement from those missile silos. If they tried to invade Poland or Finland they would crumble even quicker. The only countries with a legitimate fear of a Russian invasion are the same countries who have shown zero willingness to protect other people's "freedom to speak their language and practice their culture" when it comes to Russian people living within their (present) borders.
> The argument is that any single country being overly powerful is a negative, and a more multipolar would would be healthier.
I don't find that convincing, given that the main claimants to this "multipolar world" are totalitarian dictatorships.
> Russia has spent the past year failing to conquer a country of 40 million, without any involvement from those missile silos. If they tried to invade Poland or Finland they would crumble even quicker.
This is not a view shared by any experts on the ground. Russia still maintains enough potential to cause immense damage to Poland, Finland, and all other of its neighbours, even if they ultimately lose. Rebuilding Ukraine will take many decades and countless billions, and the vast areas Russians have mined will take many centuries to clear. The mines will maim and kill tens of thousands of people - some of who haven't even been born yet - long after the war has ended.
> The only countries with a legitimate fear of a Russian invasion are the same countries who have shown zero willingness to protect other people's "freedom to speak their language and practice their culture" when it comes to Russian people living within their (present) borders.
This is complete bullshit, straight from Russian propaganda. Human rights are protected in Europe better than anywhere else in the world, and particularly well in places like Finland and Sweden that are rushing to prepare for war with Russia.
Please do tell where Russia stands in global rankings of human freedom, and where do Finland or Sweden stand.
> This is not a view shared by any experts on the ground. Russia still maintains enough potential to cause immense damage to Poland, Finland, and all other of its neighbours, even if they ultimately lose. Rebuilding Ukraine will take many decades and countless billions, and the vast areas Russians have mined will take many centuries to clear. The mines will maim and kill tens of thousands of people - some of who haven't even been born yet - long after the war has ended.
Russia could certainly cause severe economic damage and kill many people, sure. But find me one credible expert who, given what we know now, supports your "hundreds of millions" claim.
> Human rights are protected in Europe better than anywhere else in the world, and particularly well in places like Finland and Sweden
Which is why the EU has been making increasingly strident criticisms of the way the Baltic states treat their Russian minorities (at least prior to the current war), and why Ukrainian efforts at EU membership stalled.
> Please do tell where Russia stands in global rankings of human freedom, and where do Finland or Sweden stand.
Depends whose "global" rankings they are. The likes of Freedom House show a clear bias once you dig into the details - apparently China not permitting schools to teach in Tibetan is a travesty, but Estonia limiting how much schools can teach in Russian is not worth knocking a point off for.
> Russia could certainly cause severe economic damage and kill many people, sure. But find me one credible expert who, given what we know now, supports your "hundreds of millions" claim.
Since mid-2023, everyone from think-tanks like the German Council on Foreign Relations to chiefs of defense of Europe have been ringing an alarm bell over Putin's ambitions beyond Ukraine. The population of Germany and Poland alone pushes the number of people directly at risk of Russian aggression over 100 million.
> Which is why the EU has been making increasingly strident criticisms of the way the Baltic states treat their Russian minorities
They haven't. The sob story about Russians being mistreated everywhere was a smear campaign to sabotage the entry of Eastern European countries into the EU. Its heyday was around the end of accession negotiations in early 2000s. As of 2024, nobody takes that seriously anymore. Russians too have recognized ineffectiveness of that narrative and have stopped pushing it.
> Depends whose "global" rankings they are.
Indeed. Only a severely brainwashed person would put Russia anywhere near Finland or Sweden when it comes to human rights. You can reply with shallow rhetorical arguments, but there's as much to discuss here as with the Flat Earth crowd. It's not a good faith discussion beyond this point.
> The population of Germany and Poland alone pushes the number of people directly at risk of Russian aggression over 100 million.
You think there's a serious risk of a Russian tank column making it to Frankfurt? Lol. Lmao even.
> As of 2024, nobody takes that seriously anymore. Russians too have recognized ineffectiveness of that narrative and have stopped pushing it.
If no-one takes it seriously that's because no-one expects western countries to be principled any more. The language laws are real.
> Indeed. Only a severely brainwashed person would put Russia anywhere near Finland or Sweden when it comes to human rights.
Sure. Finland and Sweden have much better human rights records than Russia, agreed. But they're not the countries that rely on the US nuclear umbrella for defence (joining NATO is not the same thing as being dependent on it); the countries that do have rather murkier records.
> You think there's a serious risk of a Russian tank column making it to Frankfurt? Lol. Lmao even.
Tank column? I don't know. But Russia may very well attack the Suwalki gap and hit German cities with long-range missiles to terrorize Germans into dropping support for Poland and Lithuania, while threatening that any German response will unleash nuclear armageddon, as they are currently trying to break the morale in Ukraine. The distance from Suwalki gap to Frankfurt is roughly the same as the distance between active frontline in Ukraine and Lviv (~1000 km), the city that had to enter 2024 under Russian missile attacks. As someone put it succinctly, Russia is shooting missiles at cities 10 Belgiums away from the frontline - with no intention of stopping anytime soon.
> If no-one takes it seriously that's because no-one expects western countries to be principled any more.
The human rights situation in Russia has deteriorated so much in the past few years that their complaints towards the EU can only be taken as a joke. Russian diplomats risk getting laughed out of the room (like Lavrov already experienced) if they raise the issue. Russia has left the European Convention on Human Rights, not to mention "lesser" things like decriminalizing wifebeating, destroying the last remnants of freedom of speech and free expression, turning blind eye to anti-gay pogroms taking place in southern part of the country, systematically persecuting Russian human rights activists, and carrying out ethnic cleansing by conscripting and sending ethnic minorities to die as cannon fodder in pointless "meat attacks" in Ukraine.
Russia is approaching North Korea at a fast pace. Ironically, in the entire world, Russia is one of the worst places to be in as a Russian - which is why all the top dogs in Russia have their children, wives and mistresses living in safety of the "degenerate" west.
> Russia may very well attack the Suwalki gap and hit German cities with long-range missiles to terrorize Germans into dropping support for Poland and Lithuania, while threatening that any German response will unleash nuclear armageddon, as they are currently trying to break the morale in Ukraine.
Russia could certainly drop a handful of missiles on Frankfurt if they were feeling particularly stupid. They could not "reduce it to total rubble" or kill thousands, much less millions, except by using nuclear weapons (if their nuclear weapons even work).
> Russia has left the European Convention on Human Rights, not to mention "lesser" things like decriminalizing wifebeating, destroying the last remnants of freedom of speech and free expression, turning blind eye to anti-gay pogroms taking place in southern part of the country, systematically persecuting Russian human rights activists, and carrying out ethnic cleansing by conscripting and sending ethnic minorities to die as cannon fodder in pointless "meat attacks" in Ukraine.
That changes nothing about whether Russians in other countries are permitted to "speak their language and practice their culture".
> Ironically, in the entire world, Russia is one of the worst places to be in as a Russian - which is why all the top dogs in Russia have their children, wives and mistresses living in safety of the "degenerate" west.
They live in self-reliant countries with strong human rights protection including for Russians - again, not those countries that are dependent on the US nuclear umbrella.
Nobody would care about Russian minorities and their rights if Russia wouldnt weaponize them. Its a typical Russian strategy:
Radicalize and support those minorities. If the country does not do anything, it has a rebellious subversive group being directed by a hostile country. If it does anything it just goes to show how hostile and suppressive those countries are which justifies more official Russian reactions.
Also dont forget that those loyal Russian minorities were part of the imperial oppressive structure by which Russia ruled over its subjects.
> Nobody would care about Russian minorities and their rights if Russia wouldnt weaponize them.
Anyone who cares about protecting non-Russian ex-Soviet languages and cultures for principled reasons should care about protecting the Russian language and culture in places where they're a minority, for the same reason.
> Also dont forget that those loyal Russian minorities were part of the imperial oppressive structure by which Russia ruled over its subjects.
The Russian empire transplanted various peoples at various times as a tool of oppression, but that's hardly the fault or responsibility of the poor peasants who got transplanted. And on the ruling side, Stalin the Georgian was every bit as oppressive and imperial as Russian rulers before or since.
What I meant was, that no country would treat Russian minorities any way different than other ethnicities. Russia weaponizing those people makes less favorable legislation necessary.
Sure, but the Russian Empire in its various forms transplanted those Russian people because they were loyal and could be put into positions of power. If you compare their treatment to that of the German minorities after WW2 they got a very good deal.
> I don't find that convincing, given that the main claimants to this "multipolar world" are totalitarian dictatorships.
If the USA is dictating issues outside its borders, and the affected people have no vote in US politics, then to them, this isn't conceptually different from being ruled by a dictatorship at all.
"The argument is that any single country being overly powerful is a negative, and a more multipolar would would be healthier."
That would be a first, wouldnt it?
We are currently seeing the consequences of the waning of the US unipolar Superpower.
Venezuela had a referendum to annex large parts of its neighbor.
Iran attacked nuclear Pakistan and has its proxies disrupt international shipping lanes and wage war against Israel.
Turkey has its fingers in tons of conflicts and supported its ally Azerbaijan in the ethnic cleansing of Nagorno Karabakh.
China asserts its military dominance in the south China and is depriving other nations thousands of km away of their rights and resources. Never mind that it is also preparing to invade and subjugate Taiwan.
....
Turns out if given power people are jerks, who would have guessed.
No? US intervention has some successes but many failures. The region where the US's dominance was most complete (South America) is also the region where its influence has been most negative. Conversely the most positive side of the US was on show when dealing with Europe during the Cold War era, where there was more of a balance of power.
> Turns out if given power people are jerks, who would have guessed.
Sure. The thing is that that applies to the US too.
That's the world view that my family came from - very leftist and peace loving.
"If only everyone put down their guns there would be no need etc etc".
But it's not the world we live in - we live in a military world - that's real and not a hope/fantasy about a different civilisation without war or weapons. We have to have a society suited to the world we live in.
And by the way I remain very much left wing and at the same time extremely pragmatic about the need for a nation to defend itself.
You talk about a country defending itself as if that's what militaries do. The US military has been intervening in the world stage for 80 years at this point.
Take any country below the equator and chances are the US has probably used its military against it. That's not defence. You don't collaborate with that actor if you think defence is the goal.
Let's disregard that the USA encouraged Sadam to invade Kuwait and implied he would face no recourse if he did.
Would you have been okay with Russia going to Iraq's aid when the USA invaded the second time? You think it's fine if Russia not only fought American troops in Iraq, but bombed the USA as well? That would have been defense by your logic, since that's exactly what the USA did to Iraq in 1991.
"Let's disregard that the USA encouraged Sadam to invade Kuwait and implied he would face no recourse if he did."
That never happened. The only thing that happened was SH having a talk to a US diplomat who was noncommittal because there was no official position on it yet. Because nobody expected SH to do something that stupid.
You could rephrase ALL invasions as "defense of another". For example, Putin's excuse to invade Ukraine was 'to "protect the people" of the Russian-controlled breakaway republics.'
Otherwise you're just arguing that countries can point at some random object and say "that's under my watch" and bring armies to fight for that thing. In a sane universe that's called an invasion. Whether the invasion is morally justified or not is another matter.
I'm not talking about stupid mental gymnastics, I'm talking about very straightforward defense against an invasion. Iraq invaded Kuwait, a multinational coalition approved by the UN pushed them out. How is that not defense?
If a nation needs to defend itself then it's already lost, because that means it was weak enough that someone else thought they could win by attacking it. Sun Tzu said a supreme nation would subjugate its enemies without needing to fight them.
I don’t think that opposite argument works given the current geopolitical situation which has nothing to do with the US being aggressive. Russia would have very likely completed its conquest of Ukraine by now and moved on to the Baltic states (NATO relies on US military spending to compensate for lack of spending of other NATO members). Taiwan would belong to China yesterday, along with the rest of the Indo-Pacific.
It's disingenuous to ignore the effect the aggression of the cold war and its aftermath had on the current Russian situation.
With Taiwan, it's a delicate situation and I'm not familiar enough with it to comment on it.
But I notice you conveniently left out all the times the US just did interventionism because it was convenient. Iraq? Most recently Venezuela? If we go back long enough, how about literally all of South America?
What military interventionism in Venezuela? The US applied sanctions when Maduro started suppressing democracy, sure, but that's not the same thing as airstrikes or invading. This sounds like goalpost moving, since we were talking specifically about military force.
The US has a shit history of intervening in Latin America from the 20th century, no argument there, but it's been several decades now at least since the US overthrow a democracy in that region.
The US backed Guaido's illegitimate claim to Venezuelan presidency as recently as 2022.
You're right that it wasn't outright military interventionism. In my mind, there's little difference between supporting a coup covertly through the CIA, by providing weapons and training, and invading a country. Maybe we disagree there.
> but it's been several decades now at least since the US overthrow a democracy in that region.
Isn't because it takes several decades for the secret documents being declassified? Of course the official discourse of USA is that they did nothing. However, we have several accusations of interference in Latin America in a lot of soft coups and more direct attacks like in Bolivia (2019) and Venezuela (a coup in 2002 and a mercenary attack in 2020).
Ok? What's so bad about speaking Russian? English isn't my first language, I have no attachment to it. If Russian had become the lingua franca of the world I'd have learned that instead.
Forcing Russian language and culture upon conquered nations was and remains one of the main methods of extermination of conquered peoples. There's even a word for it, Russification.
Your question is the same as asking what was so bad about "speaking English" in the context of American native population and European settlers. Most of modern-day Russia is a land conquered from natives the same way European settlers conquered the Americas and wiped out native population using a wide range of tools from direct massacres to forced cultural assimilation.
The question is culturally as insensitive and uneducated as asking a black person in the Americas what's so bad about working on a plantation, or why they're not happy with sitting at the back of the bus - does it rock too much there or what's the problem?
Buddy, I'm from South America and I had to learn English and move away from my continent in order to have a chance at a good life. I've already been colonized by the USA. Don't tell me to be thankful because Russian would have been worse.
Nowhere did I tell you to be thankful. But I do find it hypocritical how oblivious and dismissive you are of the similar suffering caused by other countries, in even wider scale, over a longer time, in other parts of the world.
You're literally dismissing the fact that the USA executed a coup in my country because I didn't acknowledge that it would be bad if Russia did the same thing.
Nope. Unlike you, I am very sympathetic to people who have suffered from countries with imperialistic behaviour. I just don't restrict the list of such countries to only one entry.
If you want to educate yourself on how Eastern Europe suffered in the 20th century, then I recommend this book: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0465031471
> Ok? What's so bad about speaking Russian? English isn't my first language, I have no attachment to it. If Russian had become the lingua franca of the world I'd have learned that instead.
The EU and European countries in general have in total provided more aid to Ukraine than the US, it's just divided across multiple countries, not that it's a competition. I'm not sure a military budget 200 billion vs 600 billion is going to make such huge a difference if the goal of your military is actually defence instead of force projection, it's not like they're giving Ukraine the fancy pants expensive stuff and both the US and Europe probably both ran out of (or significantly depleted at least) their stocks of regular old dumb artillery ammunition, rocket launchers, etc, and that stuff is what's used and actually useful.
> Other countries antagonize the US because of its military interventionism. If the US had lower military spending, other countries wouldn't feel the need to be aggressive.
You've conflated two different things here:
1. Military interventionism. Presumably the unjustified sort, like invading Iraq (and not the first time, when the US was pushing Iraq out of Kuwait).
2. Military spending.
These are totally different things. You can spend a lot on your military and not go on military adventures.
So you're in favor of every US government agency, no matter how flawed or harmful, as long as it theoretically serves some important purpose?
Marijuana criminalization is necessary and it's childish to criticize it, because without drug controls, cocaine would flood the streets.
Life imprisonment without chance of parole is necessary and it's childish to criticize any use of it, because some specific criminals merit it.
Government censorship of any kind of speaker for any kind of content is necessary and it's childish to criticize it, because specific types of information (classified national security information, for example) require it.
Even worse than taking this kind of children's storybook view of the world is applying it to the US military among all militaries, with an incredibly long undeniable track record of incompetence and war crimes.
The USA has a larger military than the next 5 nations combined.
The USA is not under threat from anyone. This would still be true if the US military was a tiny fraction of its current size.
The USA does, however, use its vast military to attack other countries without provocation, seemingly to protect commercial interests.
I don't think it's "childish" to be suspicious of the US Military. I worry about the mentality in the USA that everyone needs to protect themselves all the time with firearms. I don't understand why everyone seems to be scared that someone else is going to do bad things to them if they're not armed to the teeth. I suspect this is projection.
Is it possible for the military to be too "strong"? Each warship, fighter jet, tank, and soldier costs time, money, and effort to produce and maintain.
That a military is necessary for ensuring the security and continuing stability of the US is of little importance when the real issue is based on a tradeoff, an equilibrium. What are we gaining and what are we losing?
The current situation of the military industrial complex is complicated, but it is nevertheless clear that is is extremely inefficient (and thats by design). I'm not sure if incorporating AI tech into the military is going to change this, when the fundamental incentives remain the same.
```
Minimize harm
We will build safety into our AI tools where possible, and work hard to aggressively reduce harms posed by the misuse or abuse of our AI tools.
```
And I think they can still do that. If they corner every big usecase while they are the top ai models - they get to set the standard and define safety for all upcoming ai use cases.
At this point, the ai genie is fully out of the bag. If not openai, it would have been some other company...
> If not openai, it would have been some other company...
This does not justify anything and never has. I'm not even saying that what OpenAI is doing is bad (I don't think it's inherently bad to work with the military). But if one believes that it is bad, then "well someone was going to do it so it may as well be them" doesn't remotely hold water.
Doesn’t it, though? Especially in the context of military, if some potential enemy has no moral qualms using new technology to kill you, doesn’t it mean you’re somewhat forced to provide a defense or die a martyr?
This is sort of what happened with nuclear weapons and the race. The strategy developed afterwards was mutually assured destruction but that probably won’t work here.
No, it doesn't. If your principles are to mean anything, you can't give them up just because "that other guy doesn't have principles". Either stick by your principles, or don't claim to have them.
One issue is that "Someone else was going to do it" is not a statement of fact, it is a counterfactual. At best, it is a guess, and at worst, it is a lie. But either way, it can't be proven.
'If I don't, someone else will' is one of the most defeatist, morally bankrupt attitudes known to man. But hey, if I don't point out how shady and shitty it is, someone else will.
508 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 278 ms ] threadMaybe they don't see anything wrong with it either.
But none of that happened, and so the employees got to choose between a charismatic man with a impressively quickly put together plan, and a group of headless chickens running in circles.
> Anna Makanju, the company’s vice president of global affairs ... added that it will retain its ban on developing weapons
It's really common for people to make arguments that would become completely incoherent if translated into another language. This is a fun example of one of those. The Chinese word for "weapons" is 武器, literally "war tools".
Compare "It would be illegal for soldiers to do that, but these are police, which is fine."
Assume that the parenthetical "(... for now)" is implied in all such promises.
But that’s been shown to be bullshit now.
It's tricky.
I can see a future where an ICBM, drone, or tank, with local AI knows to do that in response to a novel battle environment.
"To improve our response to emerging threats, our SmartMissiles™ now use OpenAI for fire/don't-fire decisions instead of a human operator."
Laser flashlights and rapid rescue shuttles come to mind. ;-)
Disclaimer: I don't work on LLMs or NLP and not for any agencies, so I am likely dead-wrong here.
Except sometimes they won't, and it'll turn out to be hallucinated info. :(
Soldier (hanging up the ansible): “where did these orders come from?”
OpenAI's products are more likely to be used on the billions of emails sent daily from people who aren't in full command of the English language or are too lazy to look at man pages. Aka regular LLM usage for normal people.
This seems like a non-falsifiable claim about the future, even if it can be argued for rationally with regard to the past.
Have you ever been somewhere that you needed to defend this belief rationally, or does it appear to you as self-evident?
I think we can evaluate how far the discourse is fallen by the reflex to attempt to hide questions that the hegemon's apologists don't like instead of answering them.
Perhaps this bullying attitude is one of the many reasons that most of the world does not feel that it's better off today with American hegemony.
Except that in this case they aren't possessing or in control of it. They're just writing checks to a third party to use what they possess and control.
I do think that once we have real AI the government should be all over that, but I don't see much need for them getting too worked up over a chatbot with a tendency to outright lie. I'd certainly hope that they don't use OpenAI's questionable product for anything important or anything that would have a meaningful impact on people's lives. I wish that for every company actually, but when it comes to where bombs drop or who drones kill its really important to keep humans involved and to make sure your information is accurate.
It's even better timing to do this while the Pentagon is providing material and intelligence support to a government whose decisonmakers' public statements are explicit admissions of intent to commit war crimes and also convey genocidal intent.
Glad we spent all that time talking about AGI and Roko's Basilisk, those should be top of mind always, never the current actions of the humans in charge at both OpenAI and the US government.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran%E2%80%93Contra_affair
2. https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/files/hear...
Not opining on the matter specifically; just that TikTok had a very clear opinion on what I ought to think.
Being serious, comments like this make me trust the Canadian government more. It sounds like how American conservatives discuss cities they've never been to. And they tend to be surprisingly good inverse indicators when it comes to actually being in the cities. I'd bet Canadian hospitals are better than what I've got now, solely going off of this discussion.
As for "informed decisions" - I do make those based on what I see and do not need help from TikTok or anything else. HN is about the only social media I participate in when I need a quick brake from working on computer.
I live in Toronto since 92 and I can compare back then and now so don't assume things.
I think it is a consequence of actual users leaving for private groups (Discord, Telegram, Whatsapp) or small forums.
But ye surely LLMs are increasing the bot count.
>"The CIA probably realizes it doesn't need to fund rebel groups [1] or use local journalists/clergy [2] to instigate a regime change these days"
To me it sounds like instigating regime changes all over the places. The US is famous for doing so and then leaving behind multiple victims.
So you want the US to do the same? It had already "conquered" some countries. I do not think anybody likes the outcome. It looks more like a crime.
>"And another powers are not?"
I thought whataboutism is strictly Russian domain and is frowned upon (I personally have different opinion).
sweet summer child... Russia is fighting an expansionary offensive war and is full throttle instigating division in the entire Western mediascape.
Here's a small taste from a few months ago: https://www.npr.org/2023/08/29/1196117574/meta-says-chinese-...
“ Russian anti-Ukraine network spoofed Washington Post and Fox News
Separately, Meta said on Tuesday that it was continuing to take down fake accounts and ban fraudulent websites connected to a Russian influence operation aimed at eroding support for Ukraine.”
My point is obvious; that you think Russian influence operations were some one-off from years ago is a naive uneducated farce. They are over a decade long and continuous, somehow missed by all your age and studying.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Research_Agency
How about Japanese media then? https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2023/08/26/world/politics/...
Try to create a fake Facebook account. If it is not shutdown in a day or two, try to gain a significant following. Then try posting information favorable to Russia or China and test how many people actually receive it through the Facebook filters. Now try scaling this by creating many fake accounts. I can tell you with high certainty, that you and even a small army of people will not be able to reach many people or have much persuasion influence.
The second problem here is attribution. The claim is that these were Russian or Chinese accounts. Any of us savy with the internet know how easy it is to proxy our traffic through foreign IP addresses and leave the right fingerprints. If Russian or Chinese state actors created these accounts, you would have no way of knowing who or where they are.
As we saw in the Hamilton 68 hoax, the accounts that were banned were mostly Americans with dissident views rather than Russians.
Then your pass at manually creating a Facebook account as an hour long side job presenting as evidence completely sidesteps the fact that it’s not remotely the equivalent of Russian state level resources, nor is it even remotely close to just Facebook properties with their levels of inauthenticity countering. Cue X, 4chan, French politicians, YouTube, indy sites like ZeroHedge, etc.
Then your ridiculous handwave of “fake” typical of uneducated retorts to experts whose entire job and training is analyzing, determining, and reporting these issues. Ya, I remember these asinine arguments well when people like you were on HN deriding the Guccifer 2.0 DNC hack as having no evidence it was the Russian state. No surprise how that turned out. They were wrong, Guccifer 2.0 was Russia duh.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guccifer_2.0
What analysis? Care to share some of your insights?
Many people probably only remember all the news from MSM about the Russian bots but never saw this reveal that it was a hoax as it was not reported much in the MSM.
> If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer. [..] And a people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people you can then do what you please.
-- Hannah Arendt, https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1978/10/26/hannah-arendt-fr...
And as Snowden tweeted January 11th:
> Institutions are burning the public's faith in them at the precise moment in history when we have developed the capacity to replace them with algorithms.
> A revolution is coming, and if you thought human judgment was bad, just wait until you see what replaces it.
I don't get why the standard should be the deception of "the other", who is also crooked.
Why not do good things one can be honest about? Instead of maintaining several identities and narratives and a constant uphill battle in quicksand of one's own making, one could just build on top of previous achievements. It would be much more effective, it would make the US rich and respected in the world. But it would make some individuals less insanely wealthy [0], so that's not an option. It's like the drunk looking for the key under the lamp post instead of where it was lost.
[0] Oxfam just reported that the 5 richest people doubled their fortune in the last 3 years while 5 billion got poorer.
The government is just structurally incapable of attracting this type of top A+ talent at scale. They get and keep smart people but not the smartest people. For this, they absolutely need to use industry relations.
Just picture yourself in a position to work at either OpenAI, or GE, the DoD or GM. The average tech worker will much prefer the hip SV company than the old quasi-government dinosaur corporation or the government's agency.
The number 2 reason is the pay is shit.
Being the policeman of the world absolutely sucks. War absolutely sucks. But one of the best ways to prevent China, Russia, Iran, Venezuela, etc from saying “might make right, let’s take this land and these resources from our neighbors, since no one can stop us” is for the US to say, “no, we will stop you and we have the will and the tools to easily do it.”
Or having a bunch of EU nations extremely vulnerable to Russian influence.
I’m very glad it’s NATO, and not the “EU Supreme Command” defending the Continent. Russia and Ukraine probably are too.
the Germans would have happily given Ukraine up (and likely Poland too) if they got a few cents off their gas bill
not even the Russian population wants to be under Russian control
Is your point that those people's lives are somehow inherently less valuable or is your point that you're willing to sacrifice as many of them as it takes to get a good outcome for you?
I doubt there will ever be another draft in the US. As technology becomes more important the priority will be keeping the industrial base running for military R&D and weapon manufacturing, not on having millions of barely trained kids most of which you can't properly equip.
One reason the US military doesn't need a draft is because its proxy forces which are supplied by US equipment do have a military draft.
This is not a complex argument nor are there any facts which are not mutually agreed upon by all parties here.
I'm not able to follow the ideological contortions that would be required to not understand something as simple as:
"The US supplies the equipment, and the local US-backed government uses a draft to supply its army with the number of soldiers it needs to use the equipment."
Though I don’t disagree with the premise that we’re still far away from purely AI warfare.
They have worse equipment and a much smaller professional army.
Of course the US has done plenty of bad stuff to plenty of people. But you're delusional if you think some alternative power would have been gentler.
I too wish for a world power that never resolves to violence and never does any mistake. I too think that life is valuable everywhere, and that none should be sacrificed. But the real world doesn't yet offer us these circumstances.
You're saying that people who don't agree with a non-falsifiable claim about hypothetical alternatives are delusional. That suggests a closed system of thought which has left behind empiricism and must now be considered metaphysical. I'm a plain materialist so I can't go any further with any statements that assert definite knowledge of things outside of material reality.
>I too wish for a world power that never resolves to violence and never does any mistake
This has nothing to do with what I said and is not an opinion I hold so you must've meant to respond to someone else, I definitely wouldn't want to say that you're irrational, overly emotional, and have become accustomed to arguing by intentionally mischaracterizing what other people say to preserve your existing psychological commitments in a fundamentally juvenile and dishonest way.
As much as I do not enjoy the US doing all these things, I think it’s fair to say that they’re maybe the most benevolent?
I don’t think China historically has a great track record when it comes to military intervention, but they also mostly leave people alone.
The US seems to always go in with the best of intentions only to royally fuck it up.
These questions would give you access to critical insights, one of them is that it's never persuasive to take a rough estimate of hypothetical aggregate good and bad and then attempt to weigh it using one's personal intuitions at present to derive a universal claim.
Peoples who were ethnically cleansed at scale to facilitate settler or US commercial expansion or currently suffer under US-backed dictatorships will tend to have a negative view of the US as an empire.
People whose countries need the US as an ally to protect them from an aggressive regional power and/or currently experience economic prosperity and political stability within a democratic government because of the US will tend to have a positive view of the US as an empire.
Telling a Guatemalan whose entire family was massacred by US-trained death squads in the Guatemalan civil war that you've done the math from a god's eye view and the US is the best possible hegemon in aggregate is unpersuasive, bordering on absurd.
It would be like arguing to a Polish person whose entire family was executed in stalinist trials of the 1940s that the Soviet Union was in aggregate benign because of all the aid they gave out to peoples fighting wars of liberation from european colonial dictatorships, which in aggregate killed far more people than Stalin did.
If you can't understand that the second example and the first are equally absurd, you are wearing ideological blinkers that make it hard for people outside the US to take you seriously.
Attributing malice to other empires but "good intentions gone awry" to your own is a fundamental attribution error, and one you should be wary of to avoid unpleasant surprises in foreign policy outcomes.
Obviously. But would they have been happier if it was a different country doing it?
I can think of a few countries that would probably have been better, but none of them are in a position to actually do so. I can think of many countries that would have been worse, some of which could have, but didn’t do so.
> It would be like arguing to a Polish person whose entire family was executed in stalinist trials of the 1940s that the Soviet Union was in aggregate benign because of all the aid they gave out to peoples fighting wars of liberation from european colonial dictatorships, which in aggregate killed far more people than Stalin did.
While it would be a boneheaded thing to do if you had any social grace, would it make it any less true (assuming it were true)?
On the whole I’m just less likely to trust the good intentions of a (near) dictatorship than that of a democracy.
That may be because I grew up in one, but I can’t exactly change that.
You might think Descartes was an awesome human, but what about the broken hearts he left behind? His past lovers might think your aggregate perspective is absurd.
Your focus on picking particular contradictory perspectives doesn't seem relevant to me. I don't think it's particularly sophisticated. It comes to me as being more interested in cynicism than pragmatism for aesthetic reasons.
Commentator - great moral justification.
Service member - 20 yrs of deployments in a failed war congress couldn’t be bothered to vote on authorizing, per their constitutional mandate, since the first year of it.
Thanks for standing for the flag at football games though.
I still think the world is incredibly lucky that the US has been the dominant power for the last 80y.
... Is not antagonizing them when they were reaching out to build a partnership, which is exactly what was happening with Russia in the 90s. If you're wondering how Putin happened, that's the decade that you want to be looking at.
Instead, the US figured that since the Cold War, round I went so well, why not do it again, and oh hey, Russian revanchism is on the rise and now Ukraine is dealing with the consequences, but hey, we're giving Russia their very own second Vietnam, so I guess that's nice. Maybe not very nice in Ukraine, but they are, after all, a buffer state...
From Wikipedia:
"From the time of the discovery of oil in Iran, foreign powers used force and exploited the weakness of the Iranian state to coerce it into concessions which allowed foreign companies to control oil extraction"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nationalization_of_the_Iranian...
What's the alternative? It's as good a job as any and we are all enjoying it's warmth, right now.
Humans need war. Kurt even waved off his anti-war schtick after thinking about it long enough. This was a guy who lived though the direct impact of unimaginable destruction and death brought on by war. He profited from it!
Were you friends?
It would probably suck less if it was more neutral and without the self dealing / corruption.
The "policeman of the world" thing often seems like just a fig leaf / marketing to paper over dodgy stuff. :(
It really is. The US had the advantage of coming out of World War 2 relatively unscathed compared to Europe, as well as the only active nuclear arsenal at the time, as well as every Nazi rocket engineer and Japanese bioweapons expert it could pick up. It basically made the Western world an offer it couldn't refuse - accept American hegemony, military occupation and generous loans for postwar reconstruction or flip a coin on whether Washington or Moscow nukes you into atoms in the great game of superpower chess that would define the 20th century.
It isn't hard to look at American foreign policy as being little more than a shakedown operation.
It's not our place to stop that. Our place is to defend ourselves and anyone with whom we have a formal alliance. Beyond that, we cannot and should not attempt to play world police.
OpenAI deletes ban on using ChatGPT for "military and warfare" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38972735 - Jan 2024 (260 comments)
When did "liberal" becomes synonymous with liberally removing/adding a moral value when they no longer works for your profit ? It's not a wonder why half of the country no longer believe in "liberalism".
And sometimes they contain contradictions in their belief systems.
It doesn't have to be one or the other. In reality people are very frequently a wild mixture ideologically.
Just because you work for a defense contractor making cruise missiles, that doesn't mean you aren't / can't be a liberal. It means you're perhaps inconsistent in your values, which is more typical than not with people generally.
Our human history is filled with sayings and rules about these things, precisely because of how common hypocrisy, contradiction, irrationality are. Do as I say not as I do. Preaching the golden rule and routinely breaking it. Judging others by what they do and judging yourself by your (good) intentions. Pot calling the kettle black. And on and on and on similarly across all cultures.
I don’t want them to fight at all.
But more importantly, I don’t want anyone friend or “foe” to die from faulty AI decisions.
I can sort of reconcile some human bomber pilot making a mistake and hitting a family home, but if AI does the same thing it’s just wrong.
Me either.
> I don’t want anyone friend or “foe” to die from faulty AI decisions.
Me either. I'm going to assume they'll do more than 5 minutes of homework on AI
You dont have the monopoly on abhorring human suffering. It's been decided US policy since Bush to deter rather than defeat US enemies and as much as you hem and haw about the word enemy, they do consider themselves enemies of the US.
Sometimes the ends just justify the means. Like how it’s fine to kill 100k people in some desert on the other side of the world to potentially prevent a few deaths on your side.
> "I'm unable to help, as I am only a language model and don't have the ability to process and understand that."
1: https://www.msf.org/kunduz-hospital-attack-depth
Imagine the micro from Starcraft Go on a real life drone with a gun and bombs.
Although if Machine Vision counts as AI then it's already widespread.
It's some sort of uncanny valley, too close to home vibe that suddenly its a problem that the plane's airframe is directed by a an ai algorithm.
There are a nonzero number of highly-intelligent individuals capable of developing weapons tech AND AI/ML who are also 100% Dead Certain nothing could go wrong because they're super clever and would never fuck up and create skynet.
... I don't think it'll be a skynet situation, though. Less global domination and more "Someone activated the autonomous systems and [lost control, had control subverted, entered the wrong command, deployed ansible wrong, uploaded CCID ssh key to github], and now we have lingering munitions and angry turrets everywhere". What we have brewing is what happens when you upgrade "Minefield" on the tech tree too far.
I'm pretty sure if the public didn't support Sam he wouldn't have been reinstated.
Their messaging was extremely weak and uncertain, a complete failure to communicate anything of value, until everyone was rallying against them.
There is no clear marker that a evil person is evil until the crime is committed, but you can know someone is not a good person simply by knowing them and talking to that person. It's clear they knew what kind of person Sam Altman was but they had no clear marker because there is no crime, yet.
Sam was fired from ycombinator by Paul Graham. That should be enough evidence something is not right with his character, but his firing was kept private and not publicly advertised out of respect.
Strengthening partnerships with our government certainly doesn't make me mistrust OpenAI.
I can only surmise that Silicon Valley has a sizeable contingent raised by hippie Vietnam protestors that produced a generational vibe of "military bad".
Go live as a civilian in a country that our military has decimated with bombs and then say again that "military bad" is just a vibe.
As for their aims, you can believe it’s about Palestine but that seems more pretextual. Historically the Houthi’s have been extremely anti Saudia Arabia and the normalization talks with Israel pose a substantial threat to them and Iranians (not to mention the US historically is allied with Saudia Arabia). It’s possible that this is just retaliation for all of that but some believe that this is their attempt to draw in the US and UK into another middle eastern war which works further weaken them which is beneficial for the Iranian/Russia/China interests to establish a new world order.
Moving a step away from facts towards analysis: the Houthis are widely considered to be an arm of the IRGC (the IRGC counts them in their "axis of resistance"). The Houthi/Saudi war seems to have been instigated in large part by Iran, whose long term conflict with Saudi Arabia is probably the most salient in MENA.
It probably doesn't make much sense to talk about what set of concessions would get the Houthis to stop; they've attacked ships indiscriminately, and have been doing so long before October 7.
The only thing I’ll note is that groups can have multiple goals. While destruction of Jews/Israel may be a rallying call and was a founding principle, Houthis can want other things and do have other enemies (Saudia Arabia is disliked by Houthis independently of Iran’s conflict with them).
When all those leaders gather in one place how can our angry pitbull not froth at the mouth? Not saying it’s ethical, just that it’s purely rational.
TBF if the US military don't have modern rifles/equipments they will certainly not invade Iraq. So yes, having significantly better weapons does increase the chance of war because it increase your chance of winning (thus make it more politically feasible for politicians to push for it).
The military is a gun. It shoots what the President wants dead. In that case, it was Cambodia.
You really don’t want a USA where the military decides it doesn’t want to listen to civilian government anymore.
Also wish Congress wasn't a clown car perpetually headed off a cliff.
But the Department of War became the Department of Defense, so I guess all these gun shots aren't war anymore.
And as for the gun analogy, I'm reminded of the "production for use"[0] defense from Howard Hawks's His Girl Friday:
"And so, into this little tortured mind came the idea that that gun had been produced for use. And use it he did."
-----
[0] https://subtextpodcast.com/his-girl-friday/
I hear you on the need for a declaration of war, but as I'm sure you realize, it's not practical for most of the modern conflicts we find ourselves in. Congress has also explicitly given the Executive the power to conduct limited engagements because conflict develops much more quickly in many cases than Congress can act and we need to be able to respond quickly.
Now of course one might argue something such as that we shouldn't be in areas or be doing things that could instantly cause a conflict and of course that sounds great to me, but then after a second glance you realize that, well, for example Americans must get oil and gas from the Middle East and so here we are without a formal declaration of war protecting shipping lanes.
Is that argument wrong? Over the past few decades US military adventurism has been, on the whole, harmful to both the US and the rest of the world. Having "expanded military capabilities" seems to have done the US more harm than good, even ignoring the opportunity costs of spending on those military capabilities rather than more productive things.
You really think that's the only and most likely explanation?
This criticism is coming from the people being asked to make the weapons. Just because one isn't against the military having expanded capabilities, doesn't mean that one wants to spend their time creating things used to kill people.
I think yor phrase "our national defense organizations" summarizes the counterargument: a lot of readers/commenters on HN live in other countries.
Nice try, but no. Iraq was bullshit, and even we protested it ourselves, but Afghanistan had the support of basically the entire world. Many of those allies you claim don't value our military anymore pee themselves a little at the thought of being left to fend for themselves by us leaving NATO and ceasing to massively subsidize their defense (e.g., the wailing and gnashing when Donald Trump was threatening to take us out of NATO).
Europe is now in its second, third? year of seeing what life without Uncle Sam would be like. Peaceful Lithuanian and Polish villages filled with the corpses of raped girls.
The military is important and software engineers need to read more of the news from the last 2 years in detail to understand that we’re still the good guys.
wat?
The thing we all dread is AI-driven drones carrying out extra-judicial killings to promote US commercial interests in other countries. So far there seems to be nothing preventing this except the unwillingness of AI companies to co-operate with the "defense" industry. That apparently is no longer the case.
I just don't have faith in US political and cultural stability anymore, and as such I don't have faith that the constitution will be upheld, or even that the US will remain allied to Europe, where I live(though I wouldn't go as far as saying it's unlikely. Just wouldn't bet on it).
Also, the US constitution clearly has very little direct say on the actions of the US military abroad, as history has demonstrated.
You can have faith or lack thereof in whatever you want, but I would like you to provide one single example in history where the President decided to give the military unconstitutional orders (as in legally acknowledged at the time to be unconstitutional, not "I don't like it so it's unconstitutional") and the US military sided with him instead of the Constitution.
Asshole isn't some objective designation. A huge portion of military members support the current strong man vying for power. Always have, always will.
The world is gearing up for WWIII, I can smell it in the air. Maybe GPT5 has figured out there’s some serious dosh to be made!
The PATRIOT act will make it unstoppable. You all have already put enough online to deserve to be purged (murdered) in the eyes of some 2025 Cultural Revolutionary Red Guards.
I am guessing none of your friends or family have been a victim of aggression directed by the Pentagon?
Or perhaps they're aware of the history of militaries / intelligence agencies.
>Strengthening partnerships with our government certainly doesn't make me mistrust OpenAI.
This strikes me as bewilderingly naive.
Also, we know that the US military frequently uses its powers to maintain its global hegemony and the influence of US corporations abroad. This can be beneficial (more stable world order with fewer conflicts) but can be harmful (if the US decides to overthrow your government to protect its interests or the interests of the powerful within the US, bye bye)
The incentives switch from making good and useful stuff to getting more military contracts
10+ years ago I was working for a company acquired by Boeing (Jeppesen) and it was already a massive shitshow. Cost cutting everywhere but weirdly enough there were always money for some dumb initiative some highly placed and connected VP/Director had. None of those in my opinion led to an improvement in products, working efficiency, or any meaningful metric.
Sorry for being salty. Nowadays I feel I am going through the same st my current company and so this hits closer than I like.
Even the Sam Altman drama is confusing and it's not obvious what to think of it.
Only as an adult was I able to form my own opinion.
Without a strong military in the past we would certainly not be here today and without a strong military now, who knows what other nation might decide to attack our sovereignty.
It's childish to be anti military - it shows you do not understand the interconnectedness of our society - good and bad.
I don’t believe it’s “childish” to have serious concerns about the military.
Other countries antagonize the US because of its military interventionism. If the US had lower military spending, other countries wouldn't feel the need to be aggressive.
It's childish to be pro military. It shows you think arbitrary lines on a map determine who's good or bad.
What you're suggesting is the geopolitical equivalent of "ignore the bully and they'll get bored and go away". And you call others childish?
There is no question that the US has acted like a bully in Southern America, but you ignore that other countries have acted the same way in other parts of the world[1], and with far more disastrous results[2].
If you want to dig into records, then the ground under my feet has seen a Russian invasion roughly every 50 years for as long as written records go, that is, every generation has had to resist a Russian attack and suffer the consequences. The war in Ukraine is like a replay of so many wars before, from its artificial justifications to the incredible violence against victims.
When kids study history in school, one of the sources they have to analyze and put into context is a letter from a Russian nobleman to the czar after another successful conquest. In the letter, he boasts that when he was travelling from one city to another on the way back to Russia, he didn't see a single living person left. They had successfully burned everything down and killed everyone.
Centuries have passed, but nothing has changed. Russians use the same tactic in Ukraine, massive artillery walls slowly crawling forward, reducing entire cities to total rubble as if they had been hit with a nuclear bomb[3].
Pax Americana is currently the only thing preventing me and hundreds of millions of other Europeans from sharing the same fate. Russians do not dare to invade as long as they don't know if Americans would press the nuclear button or not. My freedom to live in peace and unharmed, speak my language and practice my culture, directly depends on the missile silos tucked away somewhere between the cornfields of Iowa. How about that for a perspective?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_involving_Russia
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circassian_genocide
[3] https://www.rferl.org/a/maryinka-aerial-shattered-landscape/...
No. The argument is not that having some other country as hegemon would be better than the US. The argument is that any single country being overly powerful is a negative, and a more multipolar would would be healthier.
"The US should maintain enough military capacity to prevent/repel an invasion of the continental US" is not particularly controversial. But the US "defending" countries halfway around the world is not healthy for either.
> Pax Americana is currently the only thing preventing me and hundreds of millions of other Europeans from sharing the same fate. Russians do not dare to invade as long as they don't know if Americans would press the nuclear button or not. My freedom to live in peace and unharmed, speak my language and practice my culture, directly depends on the missile silos tucked away somewhere between the cornfields of Iowa. How about that for a perspective?
Russia has spent the past year failing to conquer a country of 40 million, without any involvement from those missile silos. If they tried to invade Poland or Finland they would crumble even quicker. The only countries with a legitimate fear of a Russian invasion are the same countries who have shown zero willingness to protect other people's "freedom to speak their language and practice their culture" when it comes to Russian people living within their (present) borders.
I don't find that convincing, given that the main claimants to this "multipolar world" are totalitarian dictatorships.
> Russia has spent the past year failing to conquer a country of 40 million, without any involvement from those missile silos. If they tried to invade Poland or Finland they would crumble even quicker.
This is not a view shared by any experts on the ground. Russia still maintains enough potential to cause immense damage to Poland, Finland, and all other of its neighbours, even if they ultimately lose. Rebuilding Ukraine will take many decades and countless billions, and the vast areas Russians have mined will take many centuries to clear. The mines will maim and kill tens of thousands of people - some of who haven't even been born yet - long after the war has ended.
> The only countries with a legitimate fear of a Russian invasion are the same countries who have shown zero willingness to protect other people's "freedom to speak their language and practice their culture" when it comes to Russian people living within their (present) borders.
This is complete bullshit, straight from Russian propaganda. Human rights are protected in Europe better than anywhere else in the world, and particularly well in places like Finland and Sweden that are rushing to prepare for war with Russia.
Please do tell where Russia stands in global rankings of human freedom, and where do Finland or Sweden stand.
Russia could certainly cause severe economic damage and kill many people, sure. But find me one credible expert who, given what we know now, supports your "hundreds of millions" claim.
> Human rights are protected in Europe better than anywhere else in the world, and particularly well in places like Finland and Sweden
Which is why the EU has been making increasingly strident criticisms of the way the Baltic states treat their Russian minorities (at least prior to the current war), and why Ukrainian efforts at EU membership stalled.
> Please do tell where Russia stands in global rankings of human freedom, and where do Finland or Sweden stand.
Depends whose "global" rankings they are. The likes of Freedom House show a clear bias once you dig into the details - apparently China not permitting schools to teach in Tibetan is a travesty, but Estonia limiting how much schools can teach in Russian is not worth knocking a point off for.
Since mid-2023, everyone from think-tanks like the German Council on Foreign Relations to chiefs of defense of Europe have been ringing an alarm bell over Putin's ambitions beyond Ukraine. The population of Germany and Poland alone pushes the number of people directly at risk of Russian aggression over 100 million.
> Which is why the EU has been making increasingly strident criticisms of the way the Baltic states treat their Russian minorities
They haven't. The sob story about Russians being mistreated everywhere was a smear campaign to sabotage the entry of Eastern European countries into the EU. Its heyday was around the end of accession negotiations in early 2000s. As of 2024, nobody takes that seriously anymore. Russians too have recognized ineffectiveness of that narrative and have stopped pushing it.
> Depends whose "global" rankings they are.
Indeed. Only a severely brainwashed person would put Russia anywhere near Finland or Sweden when it comes to human rights. You can reply with shallow rhetorical arguments, but there's as much to discuss here as with the Flat Earth crowd. It's not a good faith discussion beyond this point.
And the winner, by unanimous decision…..
MOOOOOOOOOP SIIIIIIIII
You think there's a serious risk of a Russian tank column making it to Frankfurt? Lol. Lmao even.
> As of 2024, nobody takes that seriously anymore. Russians too have recognized ineffectiveness of that narrative and have stopped pushing it.
If no-one takes it seriously that's because no-one expects western countries to be principled any more. The language laws are real.
> Indeed. Only a severely brainwashed person would put Russia anywhere near Finland or Sweden when it comes to human rights.
Sure. Finland and Sweden have much better human rights records than Russia, agreed. But they're not the countries that rely on the US nuclear umbrella for defence (joining NATO is not the same thing as being dependent on it); the countries that do have rather murkier records.
Tank column? I don't know. But Russia may very well attack the Suwalki gap and hit German cities with long-range missiles to terrorize Germans into dropping support for Poland and Lithuania, while threatening that any German response will unleash nuclear armageddon, as they are currently trying to break the morale in Ukraine. The distance from Suwalki gap to Frankfurt is roughly the same as the distance between active frontline in Ukraine and Lviv (~1000 km), the city that had to enter 2024 under Russian missile attacks. As someone put it succinctly, Russia is shooting missiles at cities 10 Belgiums away from the frontline - with no intention of stopping anytime soon.
> If no-one takes it seriously that's because no-one expects western countries to be principled any more.
The human rights situation in Russia has deteriorated so much in the past few years that their complaints towards the EU can only be taken as a joke. Russian diplomats risk getting laughed out of the room (like Lavrov already experienced) if they raise the issue. Russia has left the European Convention on Human Rights, not to mention "lesser" things like decriminalizing wifebeating, destroying the last remnants of freedom of speech and free expression, turning blind eye to anti-gay pogroms taking place in southern part of the country, systematically persecuting Russian human rights activists, and carrying out ethnic cleansing by conscripting and sending ethnic minorities to die as cannon fodder in pointless "meat attacks" in Ukraine.
Russia is approaching North Korea at a fast pace. Ironically, in the entire world, Russia is one of the worst places to be in as a Russian - which is why all the top dogs in Russia have their children, wives and mistresses living in safety of the "degenerate" west.
Russia could certainly drop a handful of missiles on Frankfurt if they were feeling particularly stupid. They could not "reduce it to total rubble" or kill thousands, much less millions, except by using nuclear weapons (if their nuclear weapons even work).
> Russia has left the European Convention on Human Rights, not to mention "lesser" things like decriminalizing wifebeating, destroying the last remnants of freedom of speech and free expression, turning blind eye to anti-gay pogroms taking place in southern part of the country, systematically persecuting Russian human rights activists, and carrying out ethnic cleansing by conscripting and sending ethnic minorities to die as cannon fodder in pointless "meat attacks" in Ukraine.
That changes nothing about whether Russians in other countries are permitted to "speak their language and practice their culture".
> Ironically, in the entire world, Russia is one of the worst places to be in as a Russian - which is why all the top dogs in Russia have their children, wives and mistresses living in safety of the "degenerate" west.
They live in self-reliant countries with strong human rights protection including for Russians - again, not those countries that are dependent on the US nuclear umbrella.
Radicalize and support those minorities. If the country does not do anything, it has a rebellious subversive group being directed by a hostile country. If it does anything it just goes to show how hostile and suppressive those countries are which justifies more official Russian reactions.
Also dont forget that those loyal Russian minorities were part of the imperial oppressive structure by which Russia ruled over its subjects.
Anyone who cares about protecting non-Russian ex-Soviet languages and cultures for principled reasons should care about protecting the Russian language and culture in places where they're a minority, for the same reason.
> Also dont forget that those loyal Russian minorities were part of the imperial oppressive structure by which Russia ruled over its subjects.
The Russian empire transplanted various peoples at various times as a tool of oppression, but that's hardly the fault or responsibility of the poor peasants who got transplanted. And on the ruling side, Stalin the Georgian was every bit as oppressive and imperial as Russian rulers before or since.
Sure, but the Russian Empire in its various forms transplanted those Russian people because they were loyal and could be put into positions of power. If you compare their treatment to that of the German minorities after WW2 they got a very good deal.
If the USA is dictating issues outside its borders, and the affected people have no vote in US politics, then to them, this isn't conceptually different from being ruled by a dictatorship at all.
That would be a first, wouldnt it? We are currently seeing the consequences of the waning of the US unipolar Superpower.
Venezuela had a referendum to annex large parts of its neighbor.
Iran attacked nuclear Pakistan and has its proxies disrupt international shipping lanes and wage war against Israel.
Turkey has its fingers in tons of conflicts and supported its ally Azerbaijan in the ethnic cleansing of Nagorno Karabakh.
China asserts its military dominance in the south China and is depriving other nations thousands of km away of their rights and resources. Never mind that it is also preparing to invade and subjugate Taiwan. ....
Turns out if given power people are jerks, who would have guessed.
No? US intervention has some successes but many failures. The region where the US's dominance was most complete (South America) is also the region where its influence has been most negative. Conversely the most positive side of the US was on show when dealing with Europe during the Cold War era, where there was more of a balance of power.
> Turns out if given power people are jerks, who would have guessed.
Sure. The thing is that that applies to the US too.
"If only everyone put down their guns there would be no need etc etc".
But it's not the world we live in - we live in a military world - that's real and not a hope/fantasy about a different civilisation without war or weapons. We have to have a society suited to the world we live in.
And by the way I remain very much left wing and at the same time extremely pragmatic about the need for a nation to defend itself.
Take any country below the equator and chances are the US has probably used its military against it. That's not defence. You don't collaborate with that actor if you think defence is the goal.
If we set that aside as an aberration, then yes your right.
Would you have been okay with Russia going to Iraq's aid when the USA invaded the second time? You think it's fine if Russia not only fought American troops in Iraq, but bombed the USA as well? That would have been defense by your logic, since that's exactly what the USA did to Iraq in 1991.
Fascinating worldview indeed.
That never happened. The only thing that happened was SH having a talk to a US diplomat who was noncommittal because there was no official position on it yet. Because nobody expected SH to do something that stupid.
You could rephrase ALL invasions as "defense of another". For example, Putin's excuse to invade Ukraine was 'to "protect the people" of the Russian-controlled breakaway republics.'
Otherwise you're just arguing that countries can point at some random object and say "that's under my watch" and bring armies to fight for that thing. In a sane universe that's called an invasion. Whether the invasion is morally justified or not is another matter.
With Taiwan, it's a delicate situation and I'm not familiar enough with it to comment on it.
But I notice you conveniently left out all the times the US just did interventionism because it was convenient. Iraq? Most recently Venezuela? If we go back long enough, how about literally all of South America?
The US has a shit history of intervening in Latin America from the 20th century, no argument there, but it's been several decades now at least since the US overthrow a democracy in that region.
You're right that it wasn't outright military interventionism. In my mind, there's little difference between supporting a coup covertly through the CIA, by providing weapons and training, and invading a country. Maybe we disagree there.
Oh, and where did this happen?
Where did this happen recently for Venezuela?
Isn't because it takes several decades for the secret documents being declassified? Of course the official discourse of USA is that they did nothing. However, we have several accusations of interference in Latin America in a lot of soft coups and more direct attacks like in Bolivia (2019) and Venezuela (a coup in 2002 and a mercenary attack in 2020).
Forcing Russian language and culture upon conquered nations was and remains one of the main methods of extermination of conquered peoples. There's even a word for it, Russification.
Your question is the same as asking what was so bad about "speaking English" in the context of American native population and European settlers. Most of modern-day Russia is a land conquered from natives the same way European settlers conquered the Americas and wiped out native population using a wide range of tools from direct massacres to forced cultural assimilation.
The question is culturally as insensitive and uneducated as asking a black person in the Americas what's so bad about working on a plantation, or why they're not happy with sitting at the back of the bus - does it rock too much there or what's the problem?
If you want to educate yourself on how Eastern Europe suffered in the 20th century, then I recommend this book: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0465031471
whoosh
Ah, just like Ukraine thwarted Russian ambitions with its low defense spending pre-2014. Why bother invading a defenseless country, after all?
And those poor sods in the Baltics got invaded by Russia and overthrown after joining NATO, of course, since that needlessly antagonized Putin.
You've conflated two different things here:
1. Military interventionism. Presumably the unjustified sort, like invading Iraq (and not the first time, when the US was pushing Iraq out of Kuwait).
2. Military spending.
These are totally different things. You can spend a lot on your military and not go on military adventures.
If you spend billions on your military, you're gonna be looking for ways to solve problems with it.
Russia and China and North Korea would like to subscribe to your newsletter.
I think it's fair to say there are two types of countries: those with territorial ambitions and those without.
Military power in the hands of the former is terrifying.
Marijuana criminalization is necessary and it's childish to criticize it, because without drug controls, cocaine would flood the streets.
Life imprisonment without chance of parole is necessary and it's childish to criticize any use of it, because some specific criminals merit it.
Government censorship of any kind of speaker for any kind of content is necessary and it's childish to criticize it, because specific types of information (classified national security information, for example) require it.
Even worse than taking this kind of children's storybook view of the world is applying it to the US military among all militaries, with an incredibly long undeniable track record of incompetence and war crimes.
The USA is not under threat from anyone. This would still be true if the US military was a tiny fraction of its current size.
The USA does, however, use its vast military to attack other countries without provocation, seemingly to protect commercial interests.
I don't think it's "childish" to be suspicious of the US Military. I worry about the mentality in the USA that everyone needs to protect themselves all the time with firearms. I don't understand why everyone seems to be scared that someone else is going to do bad things to them if they're not armed to the teeth. I suspect this is projection.
That is demonstrably false.
In fact, should Texas ever actually secede from the Union they would very quickly find out exactly how much our enemies dislike us.
Hard to believe someone actually typed that sentence.
> In fact, should Texas ever actually secede from the Union they would very quickly find out exactly how much our enemies dislike us.
Go on...?
That a military is necessary for ensuring the security and continuing stability of the US is of little importance when the real issue is based on a tradeoff, an equilibrium. What are we gaining and what are we losing?
The current situation of the military industrial complex is complicated, but it is nevertheless clear that is is extremely inefficient (and thats by design). I'm not sure if incorporating AI tech into the military is going to change this, when the fundamental incentives remain the same.
``` Minimize harm We will build safety into our AI tools where possible, and work hard to aggressively reduce harms posed by the misuse or abuse of our AI tools. ```
And I think they can still do that. If they corner every big usecase while they are the top ai models - they get to set the standard and define safety for all upcoming ai use cases.
At this point, the ai genie is fully out of the bag. If not openai, it would have been some other company...
This does not justify anything and never has. I'm not even saying that what OpenAI is doing is bad (I don't think it's inherently bad to work with the military). But if one believes that it is bad, then "well someone was going to do it so it may as well be them" doesn't remotely hold water.
This is sort of what happened with nuclear weapons and the race. The strategy developed afterwards was mutually assured destruction but that probably won’t work here.