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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

#111

Post by ng12 »

echevil wrote: post #107
ng12 wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're not wrong, the Chinese government works well for you if you're Han Chinese living near an urban area who doesn't have any problematic political leanings. The problem is the world is the world is not made solely of such people. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/06/world/asia/china-detentio... https://www.forbes.com/sites/ewelinaochab/2018/10/16/organ-h... https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/13/world/asia/liu-xiaobo-d…

Interestingly I just replied to someone else asking about minorities groups in China, you can find it just by searching for my handle. Long story short: It's fine to live in China as a minority group. I've also expressed my opinion about some other issues like Xinjiang in another thread if you're interested: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18439175 I'm not saying there aren't tons of problems with Chinese govern…

> it impacts very few amount of people

To avoid continuing a flamewar we can just agree to disagree. Yes, Uighurs, Tibetians, and Falun Gong practitioners are minorities. The fact that they are minorities does not affect how I feel about the way they are treated.

Re: China's brightest children are being recruited to weaponize AI

#112

Post by natch »

dang wrote: post #106
natch wrote: post #19

China has cultivated in its people a very troubling mental complex centered on national pride and driven by the Century of Humiliation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Century_of_humiliation To say they are fervent about righting the wrongs and perceived wrongs of the past is an understatement. It's pretty much a driving force of life with many people. It's a powerful dynamic. And it's one that's held close to the ches…

> China has cultivated in its people a very troubling mental complex > China drills bitterness into its people about their past humiliations, and uses this to develop racist nationalism I don't believe you meant to, but you crossed into nationalistic and racial flamewar with this comment. Imagine how it must feel to read something like this if you're on the receiving end. It's surprising how many of the replies below…

Point taken, thanks.

Re: China's brightest children are being recruited to weaponize AI

#113

Post by shawn »

dang wrote: post #108
baobrain wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been through 3-8th grade education in Chengdu at a top 100 school. The rest of my education was in the US, so I may be biased in one way or the other. From my perspective, I didn't really see it that way. Like any country, the history curriculum focuses on China's history, focusing primarily on ancient history (pre-Qing dynasty) for 3 semesters with one semester of modern Chinese history (Qing to present). While…

They make me and the other HN moderators uncomfortable too. Unfortunately, I don't know what to do about it at scale. We will continue banning the worst and asking the rest not to do this. But it's a matter of mass trends meeting mass psychology. I feel like Canute commanding the waves to stop, knowing that it won't work. When you notice examples of this, we'd appreciate it if you (or anyone) would email us at hn@yco…

You ban way more than the worst.

Re: China's brightest children are being recruited to weaponize AI

#114

Post by echevil »

ng12 wrote: post #111
echevil wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interestingly I just replied to someone else asking about minorities groups in China, you can find it just by searching for my handle. Long story short: It's fine to live in China as a minority group. I've also expressed my opinion about some other issues like Xinjiang in another thread if you're interested: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18439175 I'm not saying there aren't tons of problems with Chinese govern…

> it impacts very few amount of people To avoid continuing a flamewar we can just agree to disagree. Yes, Uighurs, Tibetians, and Falun Gong practitioners are minorities. The fact that they are minorities does not affect how I feel about the way they are treated.

There're tons of Uighurs, Tibetians living in peace in China. Plenty of them also live in the east part of China, and plenty of Han people live in Xinjiang and Tibet as well. Falun Gong is banned, yeah, and most Chinese would support that. The government has nothing against minority groups, but it would take actions if: they become a threat to public safety; they become extremists and possibly engage in terrorism, no matter which ethnic group they are; they try to separate part of China out of the country (that's a red line for the government); they attempt to overthrown the government (yeah that's another red line). I wouldn't say there're no wrong-doings when the government take actions, but it's certainly not a concern for most Chinese citizens.

Re: China's brightest children are being recruited to weaponize AI

#115

Post by kopo »

natch wrote: post #36
kopo wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

wtf...how many Chinese people do you actually know in real life? I am betting zero.

Quite a few, in a wide range of contexts and places. Hope you didn't put too much money down on that bet.

Divide whatever your number is by 1.4 billion. Labeling and judging people is always tempting in the face of complexity, but it is also always a choice you make.

Re: China's brightest children are being recruited to weaponize AI

#116

Post by sonnyblarney »

yters wrote: post #69
sonnyblarney wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not only do most people not want to be boss, most nations aren't trying to take over the world. One interesting thing: since most nations are tiny, and they are so utterly dependent on playing ninjitsu against others because they have no hard power ... the though doesn't occur to them. It becomes part of the national identity. Canada->US Scotland->England Nordics (i.e. Norwegian)->Germany/France We're a little bit mo…

Right, but there is always someone trying to take over, and without resistance on the part of peacelovers, they succeed.

Sadly it's not the peace-lovers that keep the peace.

Peace is kept through a balance of power.

Re: China's brightest children are being recruited to weaponize AI

#117

Post by yourbandsucks »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #93
yourbandsucks wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's probably based on the fact that they're human beings. Since when does progressivism mean "try to understand and respect other cultures, except the Chinese, fuck them"? When did that last part get added?

When the Soviet Union collapsed and China became the last political power playing on the same level as the US. You'd think that after all the recorded historical examples of populations being duped into believing some other group of people is subhuman - countless cases since the Ancient Rome to the XX century, all of them discussed on history lessons in western schools - you'd think people would be less willing to ac…

The thing that's crazy, though, is the "liberals" are leading the red scare / nationalist charge here.

Re: China's brightest children are being recruited to weaponize AI

#118

Post by 3pt14159 »

Nasrudith wrote: post #17
3pt14159 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 syste…

Sounds a bit like the Fermi Paradox and Drake Equations - while the math technically works out the missing terms make it useless on a practical level. The possibility space is limited by sanity checks of the actors - technically a terror group could start putting live rattlesnakes into snake in a can prank devices on people's doorsteps but it would be logistically difficult and incredibly stupid. Beyond that one inte…

I wouldn't say useless, but I agree with some aspects of your general thrust.

I agree that symbolism seemingly matters more. I was actually once on a podcast years ago arguing that terrorism was essentially a solved or non-existent problem because armed with nothing more than a rented truck terrorist could plow through crowds. And in the US it was even easier! They could buy weapons at gun shows! Why did they need to hijack planes?

Ultimately, though, my arguments didn't hold. The terrorists did exactly what I thought they would do if they really wanted to cause damage.

Just because X could Y (but doesn't) doesn't mean X won't ever Y.

I'm not worried about ISIL style attacks where a couple hundred people die. Frankly cutting out one can of cola a week would probably save more lives in the West.

I'm worried about mass attack. We can skate around it all we like, but we're one bad Windows / Dropbox / Tesla / Linux / Cisco / QNX update from hundreds of thousands or millions of people dying. The Windows worm that preceded the electrical grid blackout in the mid 2000s was the inadvertent cause. If an accidental worm can take out that much we should be much more worried about the scale of the threat.

We've also never been able to secure the boarder. With drones this gets even harder because capture is no longer a real deterrent.

Security is an arms race that favours the offense over time. A theatre that strongly favours the offense requires deterrence and intelligence for dominance, but the deranged can't be deterred and I don't think intelligence will work forever. Ultimately the arms race needs to end.

I don't know the solution, but my intuition points to GATACA and UBI. But even with an optimistic estimate I still consider that a stop-gap.

Re: China's brightest children are being recruited to weaponize AI

#120

Post by yters »

stretchwithme wrote: post #119
yters wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd say that's pretty much everyone.

Is that how you see yourself? Do you want to be a tyrant?

Not especially, but it appears to be a common trait, especially higher up in power you go.
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