Earlier quoted context omitted.
WMDs anyone?
Weapons of Math Destruction?
A good book I recommend to read
OpenAI drops ban on military tools to partner with The Pentagon
271–280 of 509 posts
Re: OpenAI drops ban on military tools to partner with The Pentagon
#272Utterly predictable. AI will be weaponized and anybody working on it is going to have to live with that knowledge. Consider yourselves part of the MIC from now on, no more bs about doing this for the betterment of humanity. And to add to that: once any party figures out how to do this it is a matter of time before the rest does too, there is no such thing as a secret. The atomic bomb leaked and so will the recipe for…
As it is happening anyways, I would be happy if the US is at the forefront instead of China or worse.
The US will be at the forefront for just as long as it will take to smuggle a couple of USB sticks out of OpenAI and I figure the chances of Chinese plants at OpenAI to be roughly 100%.
Re: OpenAI drops ban on military tools to partner with The Pentagon
#273Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If not openai, it would have been some other company... This does not justify anything and never has. I'm not even saying that what OpenAI is doing is bad (I don't think it's inherently bad to work with the military). But if one believes that it is bad, then "well someone was going to do it so it may as well be them" doesn't remotely hold water.
Doesn’t it, though? Especially in the context of military, if some potential enemy has no moral qualms using new technology to kill you, doesn’t it mean you’re somewhat forced to provide a defense or die a martyr? This is sort of what happened with nuclear weapons and the race. The strategy developed afterwards was mutually assured destruction but that probably won’t work here.
One issue is that "Someone else was going to do it" is not a statement of fact, it is a counterfactual. At best, it is a guess, and at worst, it is a lie. But either way, it can't be proven.
Re: OpenAI drops ban on military tools to partner with The Pentagon
#274As a liberal raised during the backlash to the Iraq War, my attitude towards the Military Industrial Complex has really changed in the aftermath of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and China’s seemingly inevitable invasion of Taiwan. Add in the possibility that the US could be dragged into new wars in the Middle East and even possibly South America, and I really don’t think we have the luxury to say “weapons bad, let’s n…
> But one of the best ways to prevent China, Russia, Iran, Venezuela, etc from saying “might make right, let’s take this land and these resources from our neighbors, since no one can stop us”
It's not our place to stop that. Our place is to defend ourselves and anyone with whom we have a formal alliance. Beyond that, we cannot and should not attempt to play world police.
Re: OpenAI drops ban on military tools to partner with The Pentagon
#275Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yep, this is the naive rhetoric the GP was talking about. It’s totally okay for Houthis to lob missiles at American boats with American citizens on it and doing anything but letting them do so is “imperialism.”
Why are they attacking the boats, and what are their conditions for stopping?
Is this serious? Like literally one of the things the US navy does is provide protection to ships flying the US flag. That’s literally one of the main things the navy does in peacetime. Remember the Somali pirates? These are ships traveling through international waters being attacked - what other response would make sense?
As for their aims, you can believe it’s about Palestine but that seems more pretextual. Historically the Houthi’s have been extremely anti Saudia Arabia and the normalization talks with Israel pose a substantial threat to them and Iranians (not to mention the US historically is allied with Saudia Arabia). It’s possible that this is just retaliation for all of that but some believe that this is their attempt to draw in the US and UK into another middle eastern war which works further weaken them which is beneficial for the Iranian/Russia/China interests to establish a new world order.
Re: OpenAI drops ban on military tools to partner with The Pentagon
#276[dead]
Re: OpenAI drops ban on military tools to partner with The Pentagon
#277Earlier quoted context omitted.
It feels like you understand where he was going with his comment and are deliberately misconstruing it to have something to reply to? As much as I do not enjoy the US doing all these things, I think it’s fair to say that they’re maybe the most benevolent? I don’t think China historically has a great track record when it comes to military intervention, but they also mostly leave people alone. The US seems to always go…
A more sophisticated thinker would ask questions like "from which people's perspective?" and "at what point in time?" These questions would give you access to critical insights, one of them is that it's never persuasive to take a rough estimate of hypothetical aggregate good and bad and then attempt to weigh it using one's personal intuitions at present to derive a universal claim. Peoples who were ethnically cleanse…
> Peoples who were ethnically cleansed at scale to facilitate settler or US commercial expansion or currently suffer under US-backed dictatorships will tend to have a negative view of the US as an empire.
Obviously. But would they have been happier if it was a different country doing it?
I can think of a few countries that would probably have been better, but none of them are in a position to actually do so. I can think of many countries that would have been worse, some of which could have, but didn’t do so.
> It would be like arguing to a Polish person whose entire family was executed in stalinist trials of the 1940s that the Soviet Union was in aggregate benign because of all the aid they gave out to peoples fighting wars of liberation from european colonial dictatorships, which in aggregate killed far more people than Stalin did.
While it would be a boneheaded thing to do if you had any social grace, would it make it any less true (assuming it were true)?
On the whole I’m just less likely to trust the good intentions of a (near) dictatorship than that of a democracy.
That may be because I grew up in one, but I can’t exactly change that.
Re: OpenAI drops ban on military tools to partner with The Pentagon
#278Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or they received a classified briefing showing how far ahead China or other adversaries are in terms of AI for military use and felt obligated to not let the US fall further behind.
Why is this being downvoted? This is totally possible, though I'm not saying it happened. Is it because it's speculative?
Hard to say why it was downvoted but I can say it’s a highly unlikely scenario. You typically need a security clearance to view classified info.
Further, many employees at OpenAI may not even be US citizens, and even if they are, many others aren’t super enthusiastic about giving the Pentagon new toys to use.
Re: OpenAI drops ban on military tools to partner with The Pentagon
#279Earlier quoted context omitted.
He’s talking about the US military. Why would they be in Ukraine or Israel?
Neither Ukraine nor Israel have reached this hypothetical technological era in which a draft is not required, and those facts are inescapable to any American in those countries observing it. One reason the US military doesn't need a draft is because its proxy forces which are supplied by US equipment do have a military draft. This is not a complex argument nor are there any facts which are not mutually agreed upon by…
Well, there is the thing where the US has a massive army even without a draft. They’d need to fight some near equal opponent to ever get to the point where their professional army needs to be supplemented.
Though I don’t disagree with the premise that we’re still far away from purely AI warfare.
Re: OpenAI drops ban on military tools to partner with The Pentagon
#280Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why is this being downvoted? This is totally possible, though I'm not saying it happened. Is it because it's speculative?
Hard to say why it was downvoted but I can say it’s a highly unlikely scenario. You typically need a security clearance to view classified info. Further, many employees at OpenAI may not even be US citizens, and even if they are, many others aren’t super enthusiastic about giving the Pentagon new toys to use.
OpenAI had/has 57 Chinese talent [1], they're probably getting the boot if OpenAI picks up Pentagon contracts.
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