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The Commerce Department is considering national security restrictions on AI

nytimes.com

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Re: The Commerce Department is considering national security restrictions on AI

#21

Post by ggggtez »

philipkglass wrote: post #20
Veedrac wrote: post #18

The publication mentioned: https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2018/11/19/2018-25... Relevant excerpt: The representative general categories of technology for which Commerce currently seeks to determine whether there are specific emerging technologies that are essential to the national security of the United States include: (2) Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning technology, such as: (i) Neural ne…

It also names "visualization" and "molecular robotics" as (non-AI) representative technology categories. It includes the specific, the absurdly general, and the so-far-imaginary among its categories. The Federal Register publication is not very enlightening and I can't tell if the NYT story is based on anything more than that publication.

I'm assuming "molecular robotics" is intended to cover CRISPR-like technologies.

Re: The Commerce Department is considering national security restrictions on AI

#22

Post by AnthonyMouse »

bdcravens wrote: post #19
megiddo wrote: post #4

This will work about as well as suing Napster did to prevent the spread of music sharing.

The same is true of most convictions and crimes.

Not really. Most good laws prohibit things most good people wouldn't actually do, and are mostly effective even if a few people don't follow them. So you start off with 80% compliance before you even pass the law, then you get another 15% because the people who might have done it accept that there is a law against and it don't consider it worth breaking the law. So you get >95% compliance, which is generally good enough to be effective even if there is the occasional scofflaw.

Restricting information sharing on the internet is the complete opposite. If there was no law then everybody would do it, many people will fight you on principle to the point of overt civil disobedience, and if even one source is available the whole thing falls apart -- including from other countries you have no jurisdiction over.

Re: The Commerce Department is considering national security restrictions on AI

#24

Post by philipkglass »

ggggtez wrote: post #21
philipkglass wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It also names "visualization" and "molecular robotics" as (non-AI) representative technology categories. It includes the specific, the absurdly general, and the so-far-imaginary among its categories. The Federal Register publication is not very enlightening and I can't tell if the NYT story is based on anything more than that publication.

I'm assuming "molecular robotics" is intended to cover CRISPR-like technologies.

There's a separate section for biotechnology. Molecular robotics is listed under robotics along with smart dust and swarming technology.

Re: The Commerce Department is considering national security restrictions on AI

#25

Post by hahabrew »

ggggtez wrote: post #21
philipkglass wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It also names "visualization" and "molecular robotics" as (non-AI) representative technology categories. It includes the specific, the absurdly general, and the so-far-imaginary among its categories. The Federal Register publication is not very enlightening and I can't tell if the NYT story is based on anything more than that publication.

I'm assuming "molecular robotics" is intended to cover CRISPR-like technologies.

molecular robotics in a colloquial sense would cover any mechanichal process that is implemented at the molecular level of organization, this would include any sort of sequence determination; construction; or modification -- meaning most of any biotech, and nanotech. Seeing that btech is a separate matter is interesting.

Re: The Commerce Department is considering national security restrictions on AI

#27

Post by heyjudy »

Do I really need to dust off my DeCSS Perl "this shirt is a munition" ThinkGeek shirt from way back?

When something is new or "scary" doesn't mean knee-jerk legislation will do anything other than lead a country to missing out and innovation strengthing other countries.

Re: The Commerce Department is considering national security restrictions on AI

#28

Post by nv-vn »

This is what we get for all the stupid fear-mongering done by people with no understanding of "AI". Pop scientists like Neil deGrasse Tyson and Elon Musk weighing in on a field with 0 overlap with their expertise is treated by the media as some kind of prophecy sent from the heavens. Don't get me wrong, there's scary shit happening with AI that we can legitimately talk about, but we are so far from a world with sentient computers that the problem being posed by media figures is no more appropriate to discuss today than it was with the advent of neural networks.

Re: The Commerce Department is considering national security restrictions on AI

#29

Post by magoghm »

logicchains wrote: post #10
gumby wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the 90s it meant open source software (we didn’t use this term back then) like Kerberos were considered munitions and it was illegal to provide them to non-us persons without a license. At Cygnus we generated a version with no cryptography at all and sent it to Switzerland where someone wrote crypto routines (available in the open literature) that interoperated, and the everyone on the planet had access to it (but…

Was publishing cryptography papers in open-access journals also illegal? Without such a ban it seems it would be very hard to stop the export of AI, as it's not particularly difficult to implement an AI algorithm from spec, just tedious; certainly much easier than implementing one's own crypto. >illegal to provide them to non-us persons without a license I wonder if in this case Git{hub|lab} would need the license, o…

You couldn't export software implementing cryptography, but there wasn't any similar restriction on books about cryptography, even if the book contained detailed descriptions of the algorithms and the mathematics!

Re: The Commerce Department is considering national security restrictions on AI

#30

Post by bsaul »

gumby wrote: post #7

What a bunch of maroons. This stupid approach was such a disaster in the days of crypto controls. Lifting them protected Americans and unleashed a huge number of new capabilities.

« Lifting them protected americans and unleashed... »

Source ?

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