If a government 1) wants to acquire a geospatial imagery recognition program; 2) does not have the tech themselves; 3) can import the underlying tech without interface; I highly doubt a restriction on GUI export will stop them.
3) will stop them from buying an off the shelf commercially-ready product. Yes, they can develop one from scratch, but only at enormous cost and difficulty relative to simple dollars.
It'll stop them from buying it from the US. They can just buy it from China instead.
As other commenters have stated, this export ban seems both very narrow and an extremely good idea.
My interpretation of the meaning & intent of the ban is that it is banning GUI-based tools for training CNN's to automatically identify specific types of objects in aerial imagery (e.g. distinguishing a limousine from a different type of car). These CNN's being trained are almost certainly intended for use in autonomous targeting of airstrikes by fully-autonomous weaponized UAV's.
Here is the text of the specific ban:
https://s3.amazonaws.com/public-inspection.federalregister.g...
Here is a really good book for background on this topic:
https://www.amazon.com/Army-None-Autonomous-Weapons-Future-e...
1. Provides a graphical user interface that enables the user to identify objects (e.g., vehicles, houses, etc.) from within geospatial imagery and point clouds in order to extract positive and negative samplesof an object of interest; 2.Reduces pixel variation by performing scale, color, and rotational normalization on the positive samples; 3. Trains a Deep Convolutional Neural Network to detect the object of interes…
Probably anything taken from a satellite or aircraft
Additional details are present in the unpublished rule (document 2019-27649 [1][2]). -- cut -- Geospatial imagery “software” “specially designed” for training a Deep Convolutional Neural Network to automate the analysis of geospatial imagery and point clouds, and having all of the following: 1. Provides a graphical user interface that enables the user to identify objects (e.g., vehicles, houses, etc.) from within geo…
For me as a non-US person, this reads like a spec sheet for “here’s something you should build, because there’s customers waiting”.
It's funny: it reminds me of "strong cryptography export ban" in the 2000's (btw, Oracle java still have it: you must download strong crypto package separatly)... Obviously, it failed! You can stop a single vendor with unique technology to provide hardware components with bans, but you can't stop a whole field spreading knowledge!!! People come and go, meet, talk, write, exchange knowledges... so sooner or later (and…
They can prevent NVidia from selling their GPUs abroad, I suppose.
It's funny: it reminds me of "strong cryptography export ban" in the 2000's (btw, Oracle java still have it: you must download strong crypto package separatly)... Obviously, it failed! You can stop a single vendor with unique technology to provide hardware components with bans, but you can't stop a whole field spreading knowledge!!! People come and go, meet, talk, write, exchange knowledges... so sooner or later (and…
They can prevent NVidia from selling their GPUs abroad, I suppose.
Other countries/companies will thank for the economic opportunity.
My initial instinct exactly, because major corps are global now, which means they can easily set up shop anywhere on Earth: subsidiaries, but also quasi-independent structures which might only be related through distant funding or meta-agreements. So you can be an American company with tons of "friends" in the EU, Asia, Latin American and now Africa, doing stuff (research, product) and you would just happen to buy/se…
I don't understand why you mention ETFs. If Google said it was meaningless that they were in a total market index fund with almost every other public company, then they would be right. But whether they were or weren't they could do business with somebody just the same. Did you think that companies can't interact if they're not subsidiaries of the same organization? Not only can they do whatever they want bilaterally, but often companies or other organizations set up a joint board or company or something with representatives to work on something of common interest. It probably has to be done the right way to avoid antitrust, but it's done a lot, and by government agencies too. This is not a mutual fund or ETF; the joint entity is controlled by the members, not vice versa.
I don't think the government actually wanted to stop math [1] from leaving the border. It was just a tool to use against people they suspected being involved espionage. Just another reason to put you in a cell. https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSA_algorithm
> It was just a tool to use against people they suspected being involved espionage. Just another reason to put you in a cell. https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSA_algorithm The wiki link you provided does not have the words "export" or "espionage". Are you trying to imply that R,S, and A were suspected of espionage? You'll need a real source for that..
The link is for simple English Wikipedia, which does not use those words. Perhaps the standard English Wikipedia article would be a better reference:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSA_(cryptosystem)
It's funny: it reminds me of "strong cryptography export ban" in the 2000's (btw, Oracle java still have it: you must download strong crypto package separatly)... Obviously, it failed! You can stop a single vendor with unique technology to provide hardware components with bans, but you can't stop a whole field spreading knowledge!!! People come and go, meet, talk, write, exchange knowledges... so sooner or later (and…
As a person in the US who is not a PR or citizen and has worked on things the US Government likes to know are being exported, even exposure of the knowledge to a citizen of a target country is "deemed export." Google will probably have to reorganize its research center to comply with this and bring AI research that falls under this restriction back to the US. I don't disagree that it's futile though.
I sold AI software (for building expert systems) for Xerox Lisp Machines from 1982 to 1985 and the lawyers at my company complained that the $5K license price did not make up for the hassle for foreign sales (I sold to customers in Japan, Norway, and Germany). So, export controls are not such a new things.
Oh that sounds interesting. What problems did your AI software solve in the 80s?