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Where things stand with the Department of War

anthropic.com

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Re: Where things stand with the Department of War

#101

Post by fwip »

randerson wrote: post #88
jmward01 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, and even their two exceptions, only one is on moral grounds. They don't want to provide tools for autonomous killing machines because the technology isn't good enough, yet. Once that 'yet' is passed they will be fine supplying that capability. Anthropic is clearly the better company over OpenAI, but that doesn't mean they are good. 'lesser evil' is the correct term here for sure.

Hypothetically if we had a choice between sending in humans to war or sending in fully autonomous drones that make decisions on par with humans, the moral choice might well be the drones - because it doesn't put our service members at risk. Obviously anyone who has used LLMs know they are not on par with humans. There also needs to be an accountability framework for when software makes the wrong decision. Who gets fi…

I think it's the opposite. The human cost of war is part of what keeps the USA from getting into wars more than it already is - no politician wants a second Vietnam.

If war is safe to wage, then it just means we'll do it more and kill more people around the globe.

Re: Where things stand with the Department of War

#102

Post by tedd4u »

6thbit wrote: post #22

> Our most important priority right now is making sure that our warfighters and national security experts are not deprived of important tools in the middle of major combat operations. > we had been having productive conversations with the Department of War over the last several days, both about ways we could serve the Department that adhere to our two narrow exceptions, and ways for us to ensure a smooth transition i…

What’s a “warfighter?” Do they come from the “Gulf of America?” We used to call them servicemen or service members. Emphasizing they served the people. I guess that’s too effeminate for our roided up and ironically hyper-insecure Secretary of Defense.

Re: Where things stand with the Department of War

#103

Post by asveikau »

bradleyjg wrote: post #90
hglaser wrote: post #18

It is incredible how far the overton window has moved on this issue. When I graduated in 2007, it was common for tech companies to refuse to let their systems be used for war, and it was an ordinary thing when some of my graduating classmates refused to work at companies that did let their systems be used for war. Those refusals were on moral grounds. Now Anthropic wants to have two narrow exceptions, on pragmatic an…

If you graduated in 2007, your classmates were born around 1985. Their parents were mostly born in the mid 50s to the mid 60s and came to political consciousness either during the Vietnam War or immediately thereafter. No war since has been even close to as unpopular or frankly as salient. It’s the passing out of cultural relevance of that war that you are noticing.

> No war since has been even close to as unpopular or frankly as salient.

Iraq.

Spoiler alert, a bunch of the current ones are going to be seen similarly too.

Also keep in mind when making comparisons that the Vietnam war was not unpopular with Americans at the beginning, and many people justified it all throughout, using language that will be similar to observers of later wars.

Re: Where things stand with the Department of War

#105

Post by saulpw »

randerson wrote: post #88
jmward01 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, and even their two exceptions, only one is on moral grounds. They don't want to provide tools for autonomous killing machines because the technology isn't good enough, yet. Once that 'yet' is passed they will be fine supplying that capability. Anthropic is clearly the better company over OpenAI, but that doesn't mean they are good. 'lesser evil' is the correct term here for sure.

Hypothetically if we had a choice between sending in humans to war or sending in fully autonomous drones that make decisions on par with humans, the moral choice might well be the drones - because it doesn't put our service members at risk. Obviously anyone who has used LLMs know they are not on par with humans. There also needs to be an accountability framework for when software makes the wrong decision. Who gets fi…

The danger is that we won't be sending these fully-autonomous drones to 'war', but anytime a person in power feels like assassinating a leader or taking out a dissident, without having to make a big deal out of it. The reality is that AI will be used, not merely as a weapon, but as an accountability sink.

Re: Where things stand with the Department of War

#106

Post by tw04 »

jmyeet wrote: post #72
hglaser wrote: post #18

It is incredible how far the overton window has moved on this issue. When I graduated in 2007, it was common for tech companies to refuse to let their systems be used for war, and it was an ordinary thing when some of my graduating classmates refused to work at companies that did let their systems be used for war. Those refusals were on moral grounds. Now Anthropic wants to have two narrow exceptions, on pragmatic an…

When people (myself included FWIW) warn about the dangers of American imperialism, it's because: 1. As President Eisenhower said in his farewell address in 1961 [1], every dollar spent on the military-industrial complex is a dollar not spent on schools or houses or hospitals or bridges; 2. Every American company with sufficient size eventually becomes a defense contractor. That's really what's happened with the tech…

> I really what Steve Jobs would've done were he still alive. Tim Apple has bent the knee and kissed the ring. Would Steve Jobs have done the same? I'm not so sure. He may well have been ousted (again) because of it.

Given that Steve Jobs was best friends with Larry Ellison, I’d say he wouldn’t have bent the knee because he would’ve been standing hand in hand with Trump, just like Larry.

Re: Where things stand with the Department of War

#107

Post by iugtmkbdfil834 »

unethical_ban wrote: post #94
randerson wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hypothetically if we had a choice between sending in humans to war or sending in fully autonomous drones that make decisions on par with humans, the moral choice might well be the drones - because it doesn't put our service members at risk. Obviously anyone who has used LLMs know they are not on par with humans. There also needs to be an accountability framework for when software makes the wrong decision. Who gets fi…

Isn't this the moral hazard of war as it becomes more of a distance sport? That powerful governments can order the razing of cities and assassinate leaders with ease? We need to do it because our enemies are doing it, in any case.

It came later than I anticipated, but it did come after all. There is a reason companies like 9mother are working like crazy on various way to mitigate those risks.

Re: Where things stand with the Department of War

#108

Post by tedd4u »

hglaser wrote: post #18

It is incredible how far the overton window has moved on this issue. When I graduated in 2007, it was common for tech companies to refuse to let their systems be used for war, and it was an ordinary thing when some of my graduating classmates refused to work at companies that did let their systems be used for war. Those refusals were on moral grounds. Now Anthropic wants to have two narrow exceptions, on pragmatic an…

[flagged]

Re: Where things stand with the Department of War

#109

Post by moron4hire »

jiggawatts wrote: post #48
ryandrake wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it was an ordinary thing when some of my graduating classmates refused to work at companies that did let their systems be used for war. Those refusals were on moral grounds. (spoiler alert) Wasn't this one of the plot points of the Val Kilmer movie Real Genius ? They had to trick the students into creating a weapon by siloing them off from each other and having them build individual but related components? How far…

Reminds me of the story of someone's woman working for a research lab to improve the computer-controlled automatic emergency landings of planes with total power failure. ... or so she was told. She was unknowingly designing glide-bomb avionics.

I feel like these stories are apocryphal. I mean, I can't say for certain that no US DoD research program used subterfuge to trick the performers into working on The Most Racist Bomb. But I can say that in 20 years I've never seen a dearth of people ready, willing, able, and actively participating with full knowledge that they are creating The Fastest Bomb and The Sneakiest Bom and The Biggest Bomb Without Actually Going Nuclear.

IDK, maybe it's different outside the National Capitol Region. But here, you could probably shout "For The Empire" as a toast in the right bars and people wouldn't think you were joking.

Re: Where things stand with the Department of War

#110

Post by tw04 »

DesaiAshu wrote: post #53
simonw wrote: post #12

Raised an eyebrow a little at this sentence: "Anthropic has much more in common with the Department of War than we have differences."

The Department of Defense was named as such after the detonations of the atomic bomb in Hiroshima and Nagasaki We - as a humanity - collectively recognized the weight of our creation, and decided to walk back Discussing “AI alignment” in the same breadth as aligning with a “Department of War” (in any country) is simply not an intellectually sound position None of the countries we’ve attacked this year pose an existen…

> Why aren’t there more dissidents among the researcher ranks?

Because they’ve likely all lost faith in humanity watching Trump get reelected and now just want to get rich and hope to insulate their families from the reality we’re all living in.

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