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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

#611

Post by sillyfluke »

greybcg wrote: post #553
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…

Ever since I was young I was fairly divided on the subject. I've dealt with some highschool students affected by the downed aircraft MH17 and that lead to lots of grief among students. It usually lead to strong anti-war sentiments but some also felt a need to "do" something with it. If no one works on defence systems then all the things we have could become jeopardized, perhaps not this week but in 5 years. Therefore…

No one should apologize for feeling conflicted while giving an issue considerable thought. Constantly reassessing your position based on the changing nature of the world should be encouraged to be the default approach.("Constantly" within reason of course).

I can imagine some Americans making a decision based on the threat of other authortarian states and being left completely bewildered when they have to grapple with the notion that their government may be the bigger threat to their own security.

Re: Where things stand with the Department of War

#612

Post by gzread »

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…

Our drones will fight their drones, and then whichever side loses, will have their humans fighting the other side's drones, and if the humans somehow win, they will fight the other side's humans. War doesn't have an agreed ending condition.

Re: Where things stand with the Department of War

#613

Post by jfaat »

ap99 wrote: post #542
DesaiAshu wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Nazi Germany and Hitler didn't pose an existential threat to Europe until they did pose a threat. And even then you had politicians like Chamberlain in the UK who wanted to make peace because the UK wasn't directly threatened (this is after much of Europe was under siege).

Which of the countries that the US has recently attacked are you comparing to Nazi Germany?

Re: Where things stand with the Department of War

#614

Post by bayindirh »

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 project management book we used in the university noted that if a person refused to work on weapons/military systems and similar, there's no other choice than to respect that, and even asking for its reasons would be borderline unacceptable (depending on your closeness with said person).

Now the only reason models trained on any and every public data can't be attached to autonomous weapons is that we didn't fed enough data to these systems to carry this tasks reliably yet.

You said the overton window is moved, yet there's no window to discuss about in today's world. As a human being you either get exploited or get exploded. In either case human is the product. We just serve machines at this point.

Re: Where things stand with the Department of War

#616

Post by dotancohen »

adrian_b wrote: post #463
dotancohen wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> War is not moral. It may be necessary, but it is never moral. This is the right answer. When war becomes inevitable, we are forced to choose between morality and survival. I pass no judgement on those who choose survival.

The problem in modern wars is that those who start them claim that they do this for survival, but the claim is not based on any real action of the adversary or on any evidence that the adversary is dangerous, but on beliefs that the adversary might want to endanger the survival of the attacker some time in an indefinite future, and perhaps might even be able to do that. Nobody who starts a war today acknowledges that…

[flagged]

Re: Where things stand with the Department of War

#617

Post by Planktonne »

kortilla wrote: post #436
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…

> Moderator responded that they couldn't find them qualified enough to take part in the discussion. With a gate keeping attitude like that, are you really surprised engineers don’t want to participate?

The problem as stated isn't finding interested engineers, but qualified ones. Reframing it as just about appeal is disingenuous.

Re: Where things stand with the Department of War

#618

Post by gzread »

komali2 wrote: post #313
dotancohen wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your post reads as if you would rather those aggressors who threaten America to not be disposed of. How is the world a better place with the aggressors than without?

We're talking about Americans. What genuine threat did Venezuela or Iran pose to Americans ? Corporate interests don't count.

What about Red Scare interests? Venezuela traded with Cuba.

Re: Where things stand with the Department of War

#619

Post by [deleted] »

greybcg wrote: post #553
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…

Ever since I was young I was fairly divided on the subject. I've dealt with some highschool students affected by the downed aircraft MH17 and that lead to lots of grief among students. It usually lead to strong anti-war sentiments but some also felt a need to "do" something with it. If no one works on defence systems then all the things we have could become jeopardized, perhaps not this week but in 5 years. Therefore…

[deleted]

Re: Where things stand with the Department of War

#620

Post by gzread »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #443
regularization wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

China looks like the good guy now, but if Xi decided to “reassert control” over Taiwan, it would quickly become an international pariah and everyone would forget about Trump immediately, the country would immediately be isolated from everyone other than their closest (geographically speaking) allies. Is China ready to do that? Not today, maybe in a decade or two (when they’ve replaced the USA as the top economic/mili…

We'd just cut off all of our goods manufacturing and leave the shelves empty? I don't think it's likely.
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