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Statement from Dario Amodei on our discussions with the Department of War

anthropic.com

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Re: Statement from Dario Amodei on our discussions with the Department of War

#141
post #86
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't a one-election thing. It's going to be a generational effort to fix what these people are breaking more of every day. I hope I live to see it come to some kind of fruition - I recently turned 50.

Some people are calling it the "American century of humiliation" No other country that went through a phase like this has ever recovered. Not even in a century.

That’s just historically inaccurate. You had massive upheavals across numerous countries throughout time, this is small in comparison to the civil war’s impact on the USA for instance. You think this is worse than half the government rebelling and revolting and killing an amount of young men that today would be equivalent to 6 million deaths? It’s bad now but your comment lacks historical evidence.

Re: Statement from Dario Amodei on our discussions with the Department of War

#142

The Sinophobic culture at Anthropic is worrying. Say what you will about authoritarianism, but China’s non-imperialist foreign policy means their economy is less reliant on a military-industrial complex. All they have to do is continue to pump out exponentially more solar panels and the petrodollar will fall, possibly taking our reserve currency status with it. The U.S. seems more likely to start a hot war in the nam…

> China’s non-imperialist foreign policy

Really? Is China non-imperialist regarding Taiwan and Tibet?

Re: Statement from Dario Amodei on our discussions with the Department of War

#143

I have read the whole thing but I nonetheless want to focus on the second paragraph: > Anthropic has therefore worked proactively to deploy our models to the Department of War This should be a "have you noticed that the caps on our hats have skulls on it?" moment [1]. Even if one argues that the sentence should not be read literally (that is, that it's not literal war we're talking about), the only reason for calling…

Warfighters is a pretty common term though. There's a fair bit of nuance in when and how you'd use it.

Re: Statement from Dario Amodei on our discussions with the Department of War

#145
post #86
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't a one-election thing. It's going to be a generational effort to fix what these people are breaking more of every day. I hope I live to see it come to some kind of fruition - I recently turned 50.

Some people are calling it the "American century of humiliation" No other country that went through a phase like this has ever recovered. Not even in a century.

China seems to have recovered pretty well.

Re: Statement from Dario Amodei on our discussions with the Department of War

#146
post #62

I was reading halfway thru and one line struck a nerve with me: > But today, frontier AI systems are simply not reliable enough to power fully autonomous weapons. So not today, but the door is open for this after AI systems have gathered enough "training data"? Then I re-read the previous paragraph and realized it's specifically only criticizing > AI-driven domestic mass surveillance And neither denounces partially a…

What else would you expect? The military is obviously going to develop the most powerful systems they can. Do you want a tech company to say “the military can never use our stuff for autonomous systems forever, the end”? What if Anthropic ends up developing the safest, most cost effective systems for that purpose?

Re: Statement from Dario Amodei on our discussions with the Department of War

#147

All of these problems are downstream of the Congress having thoroughly abdicated its powers to the executive. The military should be reigned in at the legislative level, by constraining what it can and cannot do under law. Popular action is the only way to make that happen. Energy directed anywhere else is a waste. Private corporations should never be allowed to dictate how the military acts. Such a thought would be…

> The technology can just be requisitioned

During a war with national mobilization, that would make sense. Or in a country like China. This kind of coercion is not an expected part of democratic rule.

Re: Statement from Dario Amodei on our discussions with the Department of War

#148

It's not named the Department of War because Congress didn't rename it. Other than that, good on ya.

It's really not the right thing to be bikeshedding. The people calling the shots call themselves the Department of War. No need to die on hills that don't matter.

TIL of Bikeshedding, or Parkinson’s Law of Triviality.

Defined as the tendency for teams to devote disproportionate time and energy to trivial, easy-to-understand issues while neglecting complex, high-stakes decisions. Originating from the example of arguing over a bike shed's color instead of a nuclear plant's design, it represents a wasteful focus on minor details.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_triviality

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I deal with this day in and day out. Thank you for informing me of the word that describes the laughable nightmares I deal with on the regular.

Re: Statement from Dario Amodei on our discussions with the Department of War

#149

Props to Dario and Anthropic for taking a moral stand. A rarity in tech these days.

A moral stand? ... What? Did we read the same statement? It opens right out the gate with: >I believe deeply in the existential importance of using AI to defend the United States and other democracies, and to defeat our autocratic adversaries. >Anthropic has therefore worked proactively to deploy our models to the Department of War and the intelligence community. We were the first frontier AI company to deploy our mo…

I feel like the deepest technical definition of autocratic is “fully autonomous weapons”?
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