The military does not need a fleet of cybertrucks, it needs GAS based vehicles. The same idiotic policies that Biden pushed in all other executive areas are in the military too. Trump will cut the budget related to fraud, waste and abuse in the military - and likely increase the budget for sane things.
I’m trying to imagine how you would consider greater excellence in the field of pervasive surveillance of citizens as a measure of a “superior culture”.
What an intensely adolescent take. Even with nuclear weapons, we were able to get to disarmament treaties and start undoing the damage of the arms race.
This time one would hope we don't make the same mistakes again and flirt with disaster. Alas it seems history is poised to repeat itself
Are you daft? We had a major power on the UN Security Council threaten to use nuclear weapons in their currently ongoing war as little as three months ago.
Full disarmament is a myth. Some warheads are going to be maintained going into forever. That's how you deter the other guy from developing and using the same. Literally wrote my undergrad thesis on why complete nuclear disarmament is impossible 20+ years ago.
Countries only wage wars that they think they can win.
And every technology is a potential weapons technology.
What are the limits of this argument? Let's say, entirely hypothetically, that our adversaries have found that weapons testing on prisoners helps them iterate better. Must we copy it? Repeat for every new level of depravity you can think of.
Put another way, how is this not simply an argument that might makes right?
The two worldviews can be reconciled: people are generally good but a relatively few bad people turn the world in a dangerous place that requires counterbalancing in order to bring the stability needed for the majority of good people to thrive
The people are not good, as soon as the shaping circumstances get ugly. If the world decides to run you out of life, because you are poor while the chunk of world society eats every day shrinks (aka resource window aka surplus bribe) very few will accept this.
And as we have spent millenia in this situation,this cycle of strife , our gut instincts have developed to optimize society towards it.
No science, No music, says gut. Just many offspring . No peace upon neighbours says gut, if war dont be civil. No mercy says gut, Gut willz it! And it must be divine, for its still inside and nore than instinctive gametheory with a wig. Imagine, you had a waking moment , stumbling back from the battlefield towards the vally of plenty. About being stuck in eldritch horrors, about how you could make, that good moment last forever if rocks were bread. How you could excise the horror from the history books. How some of home stumblers seem to miss their part of the horror already, adapted in mind towards their part of the loop. Never again says gut, the forever again, a exponential fly, bumping against the glass roof.All is gut with the world!
Idealizations of reality prevents the handling of reality, thus feeds the beast, thus is a retardation .
I wholeheartedly disagree. The VAST majority of people are extremely greedy and will kill if necessary (when things get hard). It's only when things are good that people think people are fundamentally good. Trust me, if the power went out (permanently), it won't be many days before your wife says, ok, you can kill the neighbors and take their food storage. It might be 3 weeks - but in the end you will trust people so little that it will be extremely challenging to decide to come together as a community and grow food - which is the only way that it would work.
Naive people think surveillance is there to keep them safe. Naive people think the ones using these new AI weapons will be the good guys, for good purposes.
Governments and states fall apart all the time . The chilling effect of the panopticon has been found to keep things more "pleasant" even in their absence. Google lynching statistics in africa and then hold the spread of smartphones besides that . Turns out vigilanteism is not so fun, if its recorded for all eternity .
Anyone that thinks that combination of credentials is the kryptonite that our nation's security is vulnerable to should spend some time examining their media intake. Local, State, and Federal law enforcement and the entire intelligence-industrial complex defeated by tweedy academics with social sciences degrees? Sure thing.
If you expect me to take my eyes off the terrorists (foreign and domestic), the Russians, North Koreans and so on, to entertain your fever dream of, I don't know, Barak Obama or whatever being a threat, you're gonna be disappointed.
Look, I'm familiar with the historical debate about whether this is game theory or art. I come down on the art side.
Game theory can deliver success in battle. In some cases, even war. But not in securing a nation. Which is a different matter entirely.
Books through the centuries and millennia from Sun Tzu to Machiavelli
framing it as an art have proven more enduring than those framing it as a game. There is a reason for that.
You don't even have to be good at that art. But like any art you'd better at minimum have a discerning eye if you expect to have any chance of getting anything of importance that you may want. When you don't have a discerning eye, you start going after things that hold neither importance nor permanence. You expend all that well honed knowledge of game theory in the pursuit of foolish objectives.
I was always queasy about mega corps saying "look at us, we are so good, we have outreach/pronouns/ESG", for reasons I couldn't quite put my finger on. I much preferred that companies comply with regulation, without necessarily doing extra, and instead for the regulation to reflect values that the society needs from them.
Well, voila. The wind changed a month ago and this entire system of voluntary goodness seems gone with the wind.
But then again, I suppose, we've also been shown that regulation can be changed on a whim, at least in the current climate. Perhaps my preferred way would work with less extreme illiberals, but not this.
I think it's a serious stretch to say Google is on "our side". They support some efforts that benefit us, and they also support some efforts that harm us.
A single entity that has the world mapped down to the street, that knows your search history, that has a device in your pocket and that owns a number of robotics interests is not one to be trifled with.
The fate of any sufficiently large American company is to become an instrument of American foriegn and domestic policy. More specifically, any big tech company at this point is a defense contractor, no different to Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon or Northron Grumman.
At one point the British Empire controlled a quarter of the globe. The source of Britain's power was that it was a drug dealer empire, first tobacco, later opium.
American empire is arguably larger and more influential than the British Empire but instead of direct colonial control, the influence is economic through puppet regimes. The US is an arms dealer empire. WWI, WW2 and beyond greatly enriched the US.
You want to see what an arms dealer empire does with AI? Look no further than Lavender [1]. You may think you're removed from this, probably being in the imperial core. Unfortunately, the imperial boomerang [2] should make you question that assumption.
48 comments
[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 95.7 ms ] threadGoogle drops pledge not to use AI for weapons or surveillance
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42938125
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2025/02/19/...
The military does not need a fleet of cybertrucks, it needs GAS based vehicles. The same idiotic policies that Biden pushed in all other executive areas are in the military too. Trump will cut the budget related to fraud, waste and abuse in the military - and likely increase the budget for sane things.
I suggest you take a look at FLIR videos from Ukraine, including from targeting IR cameras of various anti-tank, etc. weapons.
Do you believe alignment with russia is what the American electorate thought they were voting for?
This time one would hope we don't make the same mistakes again and flirt with disaster. Alas it seems history is poised to repeat itself
Full disarmament is a myth. Some warheads are going to be maintained going into forever. That's how you deter the other guy from developing and using the same. Literally wrote my undergrad thesis on why complete nuclear disarmament is impossible 20+ years ago.
Countries only wage wars that they think they can win.
And every technology is a potential weapons technology.
Put another way, how is this not simply an argument that might makes right?
Typically the naive people are just sheltered and/or young.
“People sleep peaceably in their beds at night because rough robots stand ready to do violence on their behalf.”
It’s got a bit different of a vibe from “Don’t be evil.”
It's just a few assholes that keep us from having nice things.
We could do this by putting them on the B ark.
It's usually a few assholes that know how to change the definition of what's that "good" and get away with what they want.
No.
A person is fundamentally good.
People are responsible for most of the bad things that happen in human society. Including war.
And as we have spent millenia in this situation,this cycle of strife , our gut instincts have developed to optimize society towards it.
No science, No music, says gut. Just many offspring . No peace upon neighbours says gut, if war dont be civil. No mercy says gut, Gut willz it! And it must be divine, for its still inside and nore than instinctive gametheory with a wig. Imagine, you had a waking moment , stumbling back from the battlefield towards the vally of plenty. About being stuck in eldritch horrors, about how you could make, that good moment last forever if rocks were bread. How you could excise the horror from the history books. How some of home stumblers seem to miss their part of the horror already, adapted in mind towards their part of the loop. Never again says gut, the forever again, a exponential fly, bumping against the glass roof.All is gut with the world!
Idealizations of reality prevents the handling of reality, thus feeds the beast, thus is a retardation .
Typically the naive people are just pseudo-intellectuals and/or young.
These two are not mutually exclusive.
Being fundamentally good as a species doesn't mean that we would never do anything bad, or that psychopaths don't exist.
Norm MacDonald
If you expect me to take my eyes off the terrorists (foreign and domestic), the Russians, North Koreans and so on, to entertain your fever dream of, I don't know, Barak Obama or whatever being a threat, you're gonna be disappointed.
National security sir, is not a game.
Game theory can deliver success in battle. In some cases, even war. But not in securing a nation. Which is a different matter entirely.
Books through the centuries and millennia from Sun Tzu to Machiavelli framing it as an art have proven more enduring than those framing it as a game. There is a reason for that.
You don't even have to be good at that art. But like any art you'd better at minimum have a discerning eye if you expect to have any chance of getting anything of importance that you may want. When you don't have a discerning eye, you start going after things that hold neither importance nor permanence. You expend all that well honed knowledge of game theory in the pursuit of foolish objectives.
Well, voila. The wind changed a month ago and this entire system of voluntary goodness seems gone with the wind.
But then again, I suppose, we've also been shown that regulation can be changed on a whim, at least in the current climate. Perhaps my preferred way would work with less extreme illiberals, but not this.
For example: https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/threat-intelligence/rus...
Imagine the US military being ordered to, let’s say, kill some group X. Think Google is gonna deny them access to their tech?
At one point the British Empire controlled a quarter of the globe. The source of Britain's power was that it was a drug dealer empire, first tobacco, later opium.
American empire is arguably larger and more influential than the British Empire but instead of direct colonial control, the influence is economic through puppet regimes. The US is an arms dealer empire. WWI, WW2 and beyond greatly enriched the US.
You want to see what an arms dealer empire does with AI? Look no further than Lavender [1]. You may think you're removed from this, probably being in the imperial core. Unfortunately, the imperial boomerang [2] should make you question that assumption.
[1]: https://www.972mag.com/lavender-ai-israeli-army-gaza/
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperial_boomerang