Having worked on one of these projects two years ago, back then the waiving of hands for dealing with hallucinations and risks was a bit offputting and at times scary. Hopefully as we deploy these tech stacks we take serious time to do it slow and steady and working out the edge cases and failures.
That's literally how you get Skynet, and that's what everyone claims to be worried about, right? Or are they just full of shit
It's the latter. They're full of shit both about our current approach to this being capable of becoming Skynet, and about their caring. I mean a handful of individuals might not be, but broadly, that's the state of things.
Painting it as so advanced that even the companies building it are scared has been an excellent sales technique, though.
Everyone would need to agree in tandem to nonproliferation similar to how nukes are handled.
Edit: Do you want your sons and daughters to fight an evenly matched (or better equipped) enemy? Fuck no! Because our adversaries show no sign of stopping. I want the odds as overwhelmingly in my favor as possible.
Then they should promptly exit the space and go into, I don’t know, gardening.
Economics will force them to anyway. Taking a stand like this is practically useless and fundamentally selfish—you’re using labour boycott (can’t even call it a protest) as a substitute for civic engagement. And it’s naïve—AI is being pursued by multiple militaries. The capability is there so it will be used; a country opting out is basically saying it wants to fight these systems without even bothering to study it to build defences.
I’m not saying someone has to do it. I’m saying if you work on AI it’s delusional to think you can keep it from being applied militarily. If you’re opposed to military AI stop building AI. (But don’t pretend you made a difference. You’re absolving yourself. Nothing more.)
Or maybe you already did that and realized there isn't a danger of AGI, and so are pivoting to a for-profit cash grab before the hype bubble bursts.
Which technology and expertise, if you choose not to consider its military implications, will be repurposed by someone else.
If you build militarily relevant technology, it will be used militarily. Even if you pretend while you do it that it won’t. And if technology has military potential, the nature of war and global anarchy is such that it will be exploited for it. That’s just game theory. The game only changes if war, politics through violence, becomes obsolete.
China, Russia, and Iran are already experimenting with AI in their drones and missiles.
Liability and regulatory scrutiny are factors. They’re liable about offensive speech but military use cases are an effective shield against liability given that deaths are expected.
The goals for a chatbot assistant are to be useful, correct, and not insult people. The goals for a defense AI are to extract correct features, provide useful guidance, and not kill the wrong people. If you are working in defense you already have a belief that your work is morally correct: most of those justifications are either that your work will kill bad people more effectively, and so save friendly lives, or will pick who to kill most correctly, and so save innocent lives. Having an AI that is better aligned towards those goals are better.
You may disagree that working in defense is ever morally justified! But Palantir dont't share those beliefs, and want to do as good of a job as they can, and so want the most aligned AI model they can.
Collateral damage. Same thing that happens in any war when an analyst or soldier misreads the battlespace.
War is hell. We won’t change that by making it pleasant. We can only avoid it by not going to war.
We have already changed it. Acts like firebombing of Tokyo or bombing of Dresden or atomic bombing don't happen now.
We still raze cities and drop incendiaries. America hasn’t gone to war with a near-peer nonnuclear power like Japan since WWII. To the extent we were faced with the prospect in the Cold War, both we and the Soviets were committed to MAD, i.e. using nukes. (Do you think unilateral disarmament in the Cold War would have lead to peace?)
There has been no militarily useful technology that was voluntarily abandoned. Just constrained. You can’t constrain a technology you don’t bother understanding.
Only during the firebombing of Tokyo the US murdered 100,000 civilians. [0] That's twice as many as the number of civilian deaths in the Ukraine in ten years from 2014 to 2024. [1]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Tokyo
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Russo-Ukrain...
Are you arguing there was a war in which firebombing would have been useful but someone decided it was too mean?
Since WWII we invented better high explosives and stand-off precision weapons. If there were a strategic case for firebombing in a future war, have no delusions: it will happen. (Last year, incendiary weapons were used in “ in the Gaza Strip, Lebanon, Ukraine, and Syria” [1].)
[1] https://www.hrw.org/news/2024/11/07/incendiary-weapons-new-u...
That's literally 'making war different'.
>Last year, incendiary weapons were used
But civilians weren't murdered on the same scale. I don't understand why you are conflating the use of certain types of weapons and willingness inflict enormous collateral damage.
What? Who argued war hasn’t changed with technology?
> civilians weren't murdered on the same scale
War wasn’t conducted on the same scale.
> why you are conflating the use of certain types of weapons and willingly allowing enormous collateral damage
I’m not. Nobody in this thread is. The point is the weapons are still stockpiled and used. We have never agreed to ban a useful military technology. Just contained or surpassed it.
AI will be used by militaries as long as it’s useful, even if it causes collateral damage. We will obviously try to reduce collateral damage. But in part because that makes the weapon more useful.
You argued that war is the same hell as it was 80 years ago and it can't be changed by making war different.
When I pointed at smaller scale of civilian deaths (and therefore it's at least a different circle of hell) you dismissed that by saying that's because we made the war different by inventing new weapons.
If you say that all hells are made equal, I won't agree.
>War wasn’t conducted on the same scale.
The question is why. Maybe it's because something changed.
Where? I certainly did not. War is hell and always has been, but it's obviously a different hell than it was in earlier eras.
Going back on piste: if AI has military applications, it will be developed and use for them.
> If you say that all hells are made equal, I won't agree
Not how a discussion works.
> question is why. Maybe it's because something changed
Yes. Nukes and precision stand-off weapons.
>Not how a discussion works.
So you do say that? Can I ask you something? Where would you rather be: in the fire-bombed Tokio or anywhere in the Ukraine now?
Really the collateral damage in Ukraine is still ongoing, not in Tokyo for quite some time.
So it's tragically possible that Ukraine could end up worse than Tokyo by the time hostilities finally cease.
Maybe with Tokyo a closer equivalent might be if Ukraine attacked Moscow using a comparable approach, with a degree of disregard for collateral damage figured in. Although Russian strategy already seems to target any part of Kiev that can be hit, civilian or not.
Plus no two things like this are really on the same scale and it's never a direct comparison, but there's some common undercurrent that is either predatory or vengeful which sometimes can grow until it can't get much worse.
So what about prehistoric tribes, even pre-humans, who surely had occasionally completely massacred victim tribes from time to time, not much differently than pack animals have always been known to do.
Total extermination like that could be rapidly completed with no weapons of mass destruction or even gunpowder.
Isn't there some possibility that this tendency has been retained evolutionarily or culturally to some extent today, even though most people would say that's just the opposite of "humanity".
Passed down in an unbroken chain in some way?
Disclaimer: when I was a teenager I worked one summer with a German machinist who had survived the bombing of Dresden. Ironically the project we were on was components for the the most advanced projectile of its caliber, yet to come. Both of us would have liked to build something else, but most opportunities across-the-board affecting all ages had already evaporated due to inflation of the 1970's, and the runaway years hadn't even gotten there yet.
I seriously doubt that.
>Although Russian strategy already seems to target any part of Kiev that can be hit, civilian or not.
Not really, but one can get that impression from reading the NY Times and the likes.
Here is a good example of the Western atrocity propaganda: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/06/world/europe/russia-ukrai...
See the big picture at the top? Clearly it's some kind of mall damaged by senseless and cruel Russian strike that cannot have any other purpose but to terrorize population of Kharkiv into submission.
Next look at the first video here: https://t.me/ASupersharij/28133
The place should look familiar, only now you can see destroyed MLRS vehicle (there were two, but the second one got evaporated: https://t.me/aleksandr_skif/3150)
>Isn't there some possibility that this tendency has been retained evolutionarily or culturally to some extent today
Sure, but there is an opposite tendency too and it's not going anywhere barring catastrophic changes like famine due to global warming.
For the time being... Humanity's leaders are increasingly as insane (sometimes more-so) as their worshipers. I feel it's only a matter of time before atrocities and crimes against humanity skyrocket again. :(
Not even. We haven’t avoided nuclear war by not building nukes. And we still raze cities and manufacture incendiary weapons.
Yes, since WWII things have been relatively peaceful, but the key term there is relatively. As we speak a pretty awful war is happening in Gaza, in the last twenty years we've had multiple wars with pretty severe casualties, and if you go a little farther back you get to things like Vietnam.
It's true that specifically atomic bombs haven't been used.
Or you don't care about morals. Or you are evil.
Which, when you unpack it, is even more interesting. If you do embrace the emotional aspect of war you end up with situations like the my lai massacre. Does AI have the ability to prevent war crimes while engaging in "legal" killings feels like an interesting philosophical question.
Same reason we don’t excuse bad manners because someone is a soldier. It’s easy to be polite, and the damage is done at home. It’s harder to accept subordination to a foreign power that pursued an obvious military direction. And the damage of your own system will hopefully happen elsewhere.
Sam probably wants that automation to be very robust to abuse, and avoid entangling the company in any sort of nonsense -- legal, cultural, or otherwise. Do the job, do it well, and stay on script. Don't insult the customer. Take abuse with a smile in your face. You know, the sort of stuff that the human people doing those roles now are trained on and understand.
To the extent that Sam can get woke-y extraordinarily cheap faculty/phd students to do enthusiastic labor for his customer service automation by calling it "alignment" or "AI Safety", well, all the better!
Not sure what any of that has to do with whether Sam or his company supports the use of automated weaponry.
As for how faculty and students characterize this type of research? There are a few kinds o things going on, not least of which is ego. But the most important, from Sam's perspective, is "academia-washing". But using a university as his contractor and calling his contractors' junior employees "students", Sam gets to skirt the whole visa thing!!! This for the small price of a faculty member "academia-washing" his internal R&D problem statement.
This hasn’t been true in a long time. (Some countries took longer to learn it than others.)
Who knows tomorrow we might be the enemy.
https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell...
The only reason they are loudly announcing "Hey our military is using YOUR open source models" is to trigger fearmongering and overzealous regulation in the West and make us less competitive in AI.
This was used by Tencent for their SOTA open source model (Hunyuan).
Jokes aside; All frontier model AI companies were closely associated with US big tech companies that were facing threats about breakup from the Democrats (OpenAI/Microsoft, Anthropic/AWS, and Google). They really didn't want AI anxiety to be one more reason they were disliked by Washington.
* https://www.theverge.com/2024/11/7/24290268/microsoft-copilo...
It really brought home for me the real, existing harms this type of technology is already doing in the "defense" space.
Hell even your comment and mine have great chances of being flagged to death soon.
but unforuntately true.
Any participation in the economy (in?)directly contributes to the MIC, SV, and other giga-corp that are constantly engaged in the arms race to create something we know we shouldn't.
Every ad you scroll past, or slightly pause to scroll past, every metric they've vacuumed, can now be used to infer more valuable data, and entrench the players.
"Every day we stray further from God's light"
Every minute that passes, the first commandment (of any religion) gets closer to being incorrigibly broken.
There is of course the safety & morality of AI in military, the potential issues for hallucinations, environmental concerns, etc. But I'm more worried about the ability to defer accountability for terrible acts to a software bug.
Meta Permits Its A.I. Models to Be Used for U.S. Military Purposes
U.S. military makes first confirmed OpenAI purchase for war-fighting forces
- Claude, before selling out to Defense
"unless you pay for it"
Why is anyone surprised that soul-less corporations that exists only to make money for its investors have no morals? Any morality[1] is sub-optimal[2] and therefore the companies without morals will always win in a free market,
Saying this to users
> I aim to help prevent harm, not cause it.
Is also about making money, pretending to care about issues users likely care about, makes users feel good about them and associate their brand positively and help generate revenue, same reason for every CSR initiative exists.
[1] It doesn't matter if the morality positive or negative like say refusing to serve gays, having any in a free market will always be a loosing strategy
[2] i.e. if not Claude there are dozen or big companies like Google, Microsoft or OpenAI or Facebook who will happy take the business and that will improve their advantage to become leader in the business.
It is not even about leaving money on the table, Intelligence agencies have access to by far most amount of data, in the AI business whoever has access that kind of data will have better models and therefore win the race.
Self regulation cannot solve any of these problems for this reason. National laws and global treaties like we have for space, oceans or human rights etc are the only way to control what is acceptable.
War is inevitable absent a global monopoly on violence. We have never outlawed a useful military technology through treaties.
If there's even a half percent chance that a mistake is made, it could be irreversibly destructive. Doubly so if "trusting the AI" becomes a defacto standard decades down the road. Even scarier is that "the AI told us to do it" is basically a license to cause chaos with zero accountability.
Yes, that’s war. And soldiers with scopes have a hell of a higher error rate than 0.5%.
> scarier is that "the AI told us to do it" is basically a license to cause chaos with zero accountability
Only to the extent following orders is. (Which is, to be clear, pretty unconstrained.)
I'd humbly suggest the slogan: Military applications are PhilAnthrophic!
[0] https://www.anthropic.com/news/core-views-on-ai-safety
> Furthermore, rapid AI progress will be disruptive to society and may trigger competitive races that could lead corporations or nations to deploy untrustworthy AI systems. The results of this could be catastrophic, either because AI systems strategically pursue dangerous goals, or because these systems make more innocent mistakes in high-stakes situations.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40802334
Yet another "conspiracy theory" came true.
Is the thinking here that they’ll use it to read and somehow act (warnings systems, notifications) on highly classified information that can’t be disseminated? I don’t have a good grasp of what this looks like.