China's brightest children are being recruited to weaponize AI
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Re: China's brightest children are being recruited to weaponize AI
#2If I recall correctly, DARPA regularly hosts challenges where university teams try to solve problems that clearly have military applications.
I know this can be seen as whataboutism but I feel the Western world might have gotten desensitized to its own activities in the sector, while looking warily at possible geopolitical competitors.
Re: China's brightest children are being recruited to weaponize AI
#3The US does this with the DARPA Grand Challenge (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_Grand_Challenge). I suspect other countries may be doing this through sponsoring/watching teams from their nation entering international competitions such as the Tech First Challenge (http://business-review.eu/tag/first-tech-challenge-russia-op...).
Re: China's brightest children are being recruited to weaponize AI
#4So when we push our brigtest kids into CS, it's to advance technology/knowledge. When the chinese do it, it's to weaponize it?
Re: China's brightest children are being recruited to weaponize AI
#5If I recall correctly, DARPA regularly hosts challenges where university teams try to solve problems that clearly have military applications. I know this can be seen as whataboutism but I feel the Western world might have gotten desensitized to its own activities in the sector, while looking warily at possible geopolitical competitors.
I feel that whataboutism is a term that gets abused a lot in threads about China.
Pointing out that the US does the very same doesn't necessarily discredit or diminish the problem with China's actions. If anything it shows we should be worried about these things on a global scale.
Re: China's brightest children are being recruited to weaponize AI
#6The US does this with the DARPA Grand Challenge ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_Grand_Challenge ). I suspect other countries may be doing this through sponsoring/watching teams from their nation entering international competitions such as the Tech First Challenge ( http://business-review.eu/tag/first-tech-challenge-russia-op... ).
You don't see a difference between giving prize money to university teams vs recruiting children under the age of 18 and then putting them through a 4 year program where they are expected to enter AI research for military purposes and the candidates are explicitly vetted for loyalty to the government before entrance?
Re: China's brightest children are being recruited to weaponize AI
#7Killer bots will be treated just like nukes: world powers will justify their investment in the technology by saying that the other side is also doing it, and when it becomes clear that there are only two or three powerful countries that can wield the technology, the "international treaties" will come barring everybody else from developing it.
I'm not saying that everyone should have nukes, I'm saying the EU, US, China and Russia should be making those treaties right now instead of later
Re: China's brightest children are being recruited to weaponize AI
#8Killer bots will be treated just like nukes: world powers will justify their investment in the technology by saying that the other side is also doing it, and when it becomes clear that there are only two or three powerful countries that can wield the technology, the "international treaties" will come barring everybody else from developing it. I'm not saying that everyone should have nukes, I'm saying the EU, US, Chin…
The problem is enforcement, not will.
With nukes we can have inspectors and we can lock down uranium. Killbots are too diffuse and too multi-use. I'm all for arms control / non-proliferation, but I really don't see how it works for these things. Also, we already have weaponized AI. We have for decades. We're now talking about a matter of degree.
I'm far, far more worried about the mass weaponization of civilian systems (self-driving car, etc) via cyber attack than I am about killbots, but they're both symptoms of a different problem:
As technological growth continues the space of potential combinations of methods accelerates. This ever expanding search space results in unpredictable threats and increasingly asymmetric attack economies.
I've been meaning to write an article on it, but I'm having trouble pulling together the math because it's so abstract. But that's the general idea.
Re: China's brightest children are being recruited to weaponize AI
#9Killer bots will be treated just like nukes: world powers will justify their investment in the technology by saying that the other side is also doing it, and when it becomes clear that there are only two or three powerful countries that can wield the technology, the "international treaties" will come barring everybody else from developing it. I'm not saying that everyone should have nukes, I'm saying the EU, US, Chin…
Unfortunately I think there's a good chance humanity wipes itself out, or at least destroys civilization in the next several centuries. We are still effectively monkeys but have over time developed weapons that are capable of incredible destruction.
The issue with regulating AI kill bots is that much of the technology that could be used for good like self-driving cars can also be weaponized. There's really no way to progress without risk. The only other option would be to ban AI research.
Might be the Amish and Unabomber were right about technology
Re: China's brightest children are being recruited to weaponize AI
#10And this is why I'm glad Sam and Elon and everyone else started OpenAI. We need more people working towards benevolent AI/AGI to offer competition/opposition to state-funded AI/AGI that will almost certainly be used first and foremost for military applications.