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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

#291

Post by jmyeet »

FpUser wrote: post #205
lp4v4n wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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; This humanist view unfortunately doesn’t hold anymore in the modern world. Boomers will be happy as long as not a single dollar is spent on housing, so that their own homes can appreciate in value. Republicans would rather burn…

>"Boomers will be happy as long as not a single dollar is spent on housing" Not sure what boomers you are talking about. I for one am disgusted at what is happening with the things in general and with the housing in particular. I do not want my house to appreciate Ad infinitum. I do not want to have ever growing class of have-not's so that few jerks can own the governments and half of the world.

Just so we're on the same page, the GP was reeferring to "baby boomers", as in people born 1945-1965. Maybe you know that and that's when you were born. I don't know. But "boomer" has taken on a slang meaning the latest few years for someone who's simply not tech-savvy or is otherwise out-of-touch.

Generational politics has definite limits and isn't absolute but it's also true that the Baby Boomer generation as a whole enjoyed the great opportunities and wealth generation opportunities in history. They fled to the suburbs, subsidized by the government every step of the way, and then basically pulled up the ladder behind them. They also refuse to quit.

And then when crime receded (and there are multiple theories for why this happened), they moved back into the city, bought up all the real estate and then blocked building affordable housing there too.

I personally have a theory that the parting gift of the Baby Boomer generation will be to get rid of Social Security and Medicare since they don't need it anymore.

Re: Where things stand with the Department of War

#292

Post by wyldfire »

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…

> the world has changed.

It's the effect of a cult of personality. People don't feel like they want or need this. But they're on board with the cult.

Re: Where things stand with the Department of War

#293

Post by atoav »

agigao wrote: post #140

Around 10 years ago, in college, in Calculus class I had a very ambitious classmate, wanted to go to DARPA and work on Robotics. I asked if he was thinking it through solely from technical perspective or considering ethics side as well. Clearly, he didn't understand the question and I directly inquired - what if the code you write or autonomous machine you contribute to used for killing? His response - that's not my…

Which is why on a human level I have zero respect for many CEOs. The world would be a better place without them and they are actively working on making it worse. In fact I believe the rest of the tribe should punish them for this anti-social behavior to disincentivize it in the future.

Re: Where things stand with the Department of War

#294

Post by margalabargala »

regularization wrote: post #250
fwipsy wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Attitude towards war depends on context. In 2007 "war" meant "Iraq" which was extremely unpopular, pointless, and had an imperialist flavor. Today "war" means Gaza, Iran, and Venezuela, but it also means Ukraine and Chinese aggression, possibly ramping up to an invasion of Taiwan. I suspect Amodei and many Anthropic employees are thinking of the latter.

> Chinese aggression, possibly ramping up to an invasion of Taiwan. It's amusing amidst the US bombing Iran, incarceration the president of Venezuela and his wife after slaughtering everyone who was in the room with him, seizing oil tankers off Cuba, continuing the siege of Gaza and on and on to start getting sanctimonious about China. Taiwan is Kinmen island in Xiamen harbor, so a mainland invasion of Taiwan would b…

Actually dinosaurs existed in China before there were people. And their descendents, the birds, are still around. We should all consider it our moral duty to continue what was begun in Tiananmen Square in 1989 and overthrow the CCP and replace them with the true historical rulers, the chicken.

Re: Where things stand with the Department of War

#295

Post by JumpCrisscross »

regularization wrote: post #250
fwipsy wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Attitude towards war depends on context. In 2007 "war" meant "Iraq" which was extremely unpopular, pointless, and had an imperialist flavor. Today "war" means Gaza, Iran, and Venezuela, but it also means Ukraine and Chinese aggression, possibly ramping up to an invasion of Taiwan. I suspect Amodei and many Anthropic employees are thinking of the latter.

> Chinese aggression, possibly ramping up to an invasion of Taiwan. It's amusing amidst the US bombing Iran, incarceration the president of Venezuela and his wife after slaughtering everyone who was in the room with him, seizing oil tankers off Cuba, continuing the siege of Gaza and on and on to start getting sanctimonious about China. Taiwan is Kinmen island in Xiamen harbor, so a mainland invasion of Taiwan would b…

> Also mainland China does not recognize Taiwan

By this logic, America not recognising by the sovereignty of Venezuela, Iran and Cuba—and Israel of Palestine, as well as vice versa—makes everyone an a-okay actor!

> there's absolutely nothing those western powers can do about it. Just like Russia's assertion over the West tring to nove it's NATO armies to its western borders in the Ukraine

Russia is a spent power and geopolitical afterthought because of Ukraine. Its borders with NATO have increased massively, all while reducing its security, economy and demography.

Even Xi couldn’t fuck over China as thoroughly as Putin has Russia. But Xi going on a vanity crusade into Taiwan would essentially write off China’s ascendancy as a military and economic superpower this generation.

> if mainland China did choose to reassert it's rightful authority in Taiwan against the colonial powers

An aging dictator invading a democracy. At least Deng chose a quarry he could crush [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1989_Tiananmen_Square_protests...

Re: Where things stand with the Department of War

#296

Post by komali2 »

hax0ron3 wrote: post #287
BryantD wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also in Good Will Hunting , when Will (Matt Damon) delivers a scathing job rejection to the NSA. 1997. The War on Terror has a lot to answer for. https://youtu.be/tH0bTpwQL7U

The late 90s were full of media that questioned reality and authority - like X-Files, The Matrix, Dark City, all sorts of websites about conspiracy theories and UFOs, etc. The zeitgeist was full of speculation about hidden truths. The cultural mood was defiant and sardonic. There was rap, rap-rock, Beavis and Butthead, Fight Club, Office Space... One of the most popular pro wrestlers in the world played a character w…

No, you're right, and I distinctly remember the conspiracy theorists and counter culture thinkers immediately circling around "this is going to be used to restrict our freedom." And of course they were absolutely right.

I also remember it was the worse possible cultural faux paux to indicate you thought invading foreign nations wasn't a good response to 9/11. I mean go look at the votes for invasion of Iraq, damn near 2/3 of both the house and Senate in favor. Every radio blaring patriotic songs, every school doing patriotic projects, every brown kid living in hell.

It sucked, bad.

Re: Where things stand with the Department of War

#297

Post by sirnicolaz »

arczyx wrote: post #283
sirnicolaz wrote: post #244

"fully autonomous weapons and mass domestic surveillance" I still don't buy this discussion. How exactly do they want to use an llm for autonomous weapons, given it's not even possible to reliably have a piece of code written without having to review it? And how is a 1M token window model suppposed to be useful for mass surveillance? Honest questions, I am sure I am missing some details. Because so far it looks like…

> How exactly do they want to use an llm for autonomous weapons Probably the same way Claude can play Pokemon: give it a bunch of informations and let it make a decision by itself to achieve a specified goal.

One thing is playing Pokemon, one thing is decide who to kill. Also: if they are planning to use it on the field, there is going to be a velocity issue. Claude and any other LLM require a non negligible amount of time to ingest the input and spit the output.

Re: Where things stand with the Department of War

#298

Post by tedd4u »

senectus1 wrote: post #124
tedd4u wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

my understanding that it was an Israeli missile that hit that school. i doubt we'll get to know anything about that.

Read the article. NY Times develops several facts that support it being part of a US volley, not Israel.

Re: Where things stand with the Department of War

#299

Post by jadar »

fadesibert wrote: post #214
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…

If you are waiting until undergraduate level to take ethics, it's far too late to matter anyways. Doubly so for "business ethics" classes which became à la mode in the post-Enron era. They attempt to teach fundamental ethics, when at most it should be a very thin layer on top of a well founded internal moral framework and well-accepted ethical standards inculcated from day 1 of kindergarten. Morals are taught 0-9 [0]…

[flagged]

Re: Where things stand with the Department of War

#300

Post by JumpCrisscross »

mrs6969 wrote: post #252
qsera wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>But don't tell me you can be so naive as to believe that the U.S. military is a defensive I am not. Every country is corrupt, and war makes a lot of money for powerful people, but does it justify sabotaging your own existence?

Literally yes. If you justify harming others out of nowhere by ‘sabotaging your own existence’ then yes. ‘Sabotaging your own existence’ is a magic sentence that can justify everything. Israel can kill children more than any other nation in the world, and justify it by ‘not sabotaging their own existence’ Anyone can do anything with this perspective. This is the exact point gere. Pull yourself back, if you are about…

> Anyone can do anything with this perspective

Not really. Not unless one is thinking in absolutes, at which point one is by definition an extremist.

The rational dialogue that emerges is the proper size of a military for defensive—but not continuous offensive—purposes. I’d guess, for America, that is half its current size at most. (The wrong answers are zero and $1.4tn.)

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