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Putin: Leader in artificial intelligence will rule world

washingtonpost.com

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Re: Putin: Leader in artificial intelligence will rule world

#31

Post by ma2rten »

adventured wrote: post #25
nopinsight wrote: post #15

In another piece of news: China to add AI courses in primary education https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15154289 Where does the US stand? Any serious plans by its leaders and the government?

> Where does the US stand? Any serious plans by leaders and the government? The US Government does not need to mandate student course on artificial intelligence. Just as they did not need to mandate courses on the transistor, micro-processor, dozens of programming languages, html, TCP/IP, or how to be a database admin. Tensorflow (prev DistBelief) - which helped provide the spark for this AI boom - was not derived fr…

I don't think tensorflow sparked the AI Boom. Maybe AlexNet did.

Re: Putin: Leader in artificial intelligence will rule world

#32

Post by [deleted] »

adventured wrote: post #25
nopinsight wrote: post #15

In another piece of news: China to add AI courses in primary education https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15154289 Where does the US stand? Any serious plans by its leaders and the government?

> Where does the US stand? Any serious plans by leaders and the government? The US Government does not need to mandate student course on artificial intelligence. Just as they did not need to mandate courses on the transistor, micro-processor, dozens of programming languages, html, TCP/IP, or how to be a database admin. Tensorflow (prev DistBelief) - which helped provide the spark for this AI boom - was not derived fr…

[deleted]

Re: Putin: Leader in artificial intelligence will rule world

#33

Post by nopinsight »

nopinsight wrote: post #15

In another piece of news: China to add AI courses in primary education https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15154289 Where does the US stand? Any serious plans by its leaders and the government?

Giving a large majority of a population exposure to a field from a young age means that there will be a large number who find out they enjoy it, who might otherwise choose another field in college.

There are more than 9 million Chinese who take Gaokao university entrance examination each year. Even if 1% choose to major in AI or a closely related field, that is 90,000 per annum. Among this mass, there will be some future inventors of breakthrough algorithms who could have chosen to major in physics or math without the policy.

Moreover, most of future AI workforce will focus on applying it to various domains rather than inventing whole new algorithms or frameworks. For that purpose, having more people is a clear advantage.

Re: Putin: Leader in artificial intelligence will rule world

#34

Post by adventured »

0xbear wrote: post #24
adventured wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a very fair point. Question however: is there a leader on the planet that has a greater, almost intuitive sense about threats to their position of power than Putin? Who would that be? Authoritarian survivors like him tend to have an extremely well tuned grasp of threats to their power. Whether those are technology based or people, and whether they are domestic or foreign based. The small group of people running…

None of this is a threat to his survival, or indeed to Russia's survival. When you have nukes and the means to deliver them anywhere on the globe in 9 minutes, you don't have to care about aggression from other countries. The biggest (and only) threat to Putin's survival is a coup.

Putin's only interest isn't just his survival though. He's a hyper nationalist Russian. There's no question he views the two as connected: in his mind what's good for Russia is good for him, what's good for him is good for Russia; that's typical of authoritarian types. That doesn't change that he's pretty big about the premise of the return of the Russian Empire in one form or another.

AI as a military technology can threaten Russia. It can cripple their economy. It can cripple their military technology (depending). Over decades it will likely lead to faster advances in both the economic and military spheres (including nuclear weapons and missile defenses), which would net weaken Russia. The winner accelerates, which is exactly what happened to the US vs the USSR when it came to the massive tech economy the US built out post WW2 (now our economy is ~16x the size of Russia's).

Re: Putin: Leader in artificial intelligence will rule world

#35

Post by adventured »

drewmol wrote: post #28
adventured wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a very fair point. Question however: is there a leader on the planet that has a greater, almost intuitive sense about threats to their position of power than Putin? Who would that be? Authoritarian survivors like him tend to have an extremely well tuned grasp of threats to their power. Whether those are technology based or people, and whether they are domestic or foreign based. The small group of people running…

>Question however: is there a leader on the planet that has a greater, almost intuitive sense about threats to their position of power than Putin? Who would that be? Kim Jung-un?

Maybe his father. It's a little early to see if he's a long-term survivor. In the scheme of things, he's an authoritarian infant. Not to mention, North Korea is more likely being operated by a military cabal right now than by Kim Jong-un.

Re: Putin: Leader in artificial intelligence will rule world

#37

Post by johnchristopher »

aub3bhat wrote: post #16

Artificial intelligence == ML/CV/NLP (not the AGI) will transform the world over the next two decades. People vastly underestimate importance of recent advances in detection/recognition/NLU tasks. Sure it sounds boring by some sci-fi standards but when it comes to warfare ability to deploy cheap drones that can do near real time enemy identification will transform not just the battelfield but the entire society. Look…

I might believe in the advent of AI once my phone alarm disables itself instead of ringing when I have been travelling at 75miles per hour for 30 minutes, obviously awake and going to work.

Re: Putin: Leader in artificial intelligence will rule world

#39

Post by staunch »

Iv wrote: post #27
bhollan wrote: post #13

Don't get me wrong, I fully subscribe to the school of thought that he's a murderer, but honestly, drones fighting drones sounds pretty good.

It terms of life saved, I totally agree. In terms of social progress, this causes a big problem: military power, until now, depended in big parts on having military people on your side. So sure, they can be corrupt, swayed by a more or less evil ideology or just plain racist, but in order to be a leader, you needed to at least satisfy a big group of people. And it was easier if it were the majority. Automated warfare…

This already happened in the 2003 Iraq invasion. It was wildly unpopular, so Cheney & Gang crafted a bullshit strategy around using very few troops and a lot more technology. It never made sense. They just wanted a war and knew they had to placate members of the military and people concerned about a Vietnam-style draft.

The next time their strategy might actually succeed. Once the U.S. military has a drone army capable of patrolling every street in Iraq 24/7/365.

> In a January 2003 CBS poll, 64% of Americans had approved of military action against Iraq; however, 63% wanted Bush to find a diplomatic solution rather than go to war, and 62% believed the threat of terrorism directed against the U.S. would increase due to war.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2003_invasion_of_Iraq

Re: Putin: Leader in artificial intelligence will rule world

#40

Post by nopinsight »

nickrio wrote: post #23
nopinsight wrote: post #15

In another piece of news: China to add AI courses in primary education https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15154289 Where does the US stand? Any serious plans by its leaders and the government?

I'm a Chinese. I wounder how China would carry it out. From my experience with my elementary && high school teacher, I can safely assume that they can't even program a complex stuff, let alone understand what AI is. It could be really interesting to see my future son/daughter ask me something I'm also interested in and probably working on.

I suspect they will use AI to help teach AI:

"Seven-year-old Chen Jiahao has a problem sum he can’t solve and he can’t wait to get home from school to pose the question to his all-knowing maths tutor.

His tutor is amazing, the boy says. Just snap a photograph of the question and the tutor will provide every possible approach to solve the problem, step by step – all in a split second.

Jiahao’s tutor is inside his mother’s smartphone. It is, in fact, an app that draws on artificial intelligence (AI) technology to solve challenging maths problems for primary school children.

And it’s just one of many AI-enabled apps Jiahao uses daily on his mother’s phone. When the boy started primary school in Beijing, his teachers recommended that his parents install the apps on their phones. The software give out school assignments, grade pupils’ work and even generate unique sets of exercises for each child based on their areas of weakness.

“Jiahao likes his AI teachers,” said his mother, Yu Ting, adding that her son spends at least two hours on the AI apps every day. “He greets my phone as eagerly as he greets me.”"

Inside the AI revolution that’s reshaping Chinese society http://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/2100427/china...

Interestingly, it seems Jiahao is not allowed to bring a smartphone to school for now. That could change in the future.

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