[HN Gopher] Germany warns: AI arms race already underway
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Germany warns: AI arms race already underway
Author : Tomte
Score : 54 points
Date : 2021-06-10 10:33 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.dw.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.dw.com)
| z5h wrote:
| When someone finally rules the world, what will they do next?
| mc32 wrote:
| I think what tends to happen is what we saw happen in Soviet
| Russia and Maoist China. "They," at the top, think they know
| what's best for people (hoi polloi) and start "designing" for
| that "utopian" society, history be damned.
| chewz wrote:
| Make prols vanish underground and enjoy empty beaches, clean
| air and unspoiled nature.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Penultimate_Truth
| randomopining wrote:
| Tighten control, extract wealth and live the best life, direct
| humanity towards what it thinks are valuable endeavors.
| officialjunk wrote:
| solar system
| ergot_vacation wrote:
| The interesting (and sinister) thing to consider is how wild this
| will look if fully built out. We're not just talking about some
| machine intelligence shuffling troops around in lieu of a
| general. The advantage of a computer is its vision: it can see
| the "playing field," the reality it's fighting in, much more
| broadly and deeply than a human can. It can hold more things in
| its mind at once. AI warfare isn't computers flying some drones
| or robotic tanks. AI warfare probably looks like a bunch of
| small, odd occurrences as both sides probe each other's
| weaknesses in economics, infrastructure and politics, circling
| each other like two knife fighters. A bunch of weird, disjointed
| bursts of propaganda crop up across various media channels,
| fragmented and often seemingly incoherent, but perfectly
| targeted. Small, isolated incidents of problems at important
| institutions start cropping up, shutting them down for weeks or
| months: Hospitals, minor government agencies, oil pipelines, food
| processing. Never enough to look like a coherent attack. Knife
| jabs and dodges, the fighters probing, learning, a/b testing.
|
| And then one day it isn't a test anymore. The real strike comes.
| It isn't a nuke or an invasion. There's no need. Those things are
| as outdated as tying sharp stones to sticks. The AI knows just
| where to hit, in just the right way, and like a Vulcan death grip
| one pinch sets the whole system collapsing on itself. It will
| take humans a decade to even fully understand what happened. If
| they have that luxury.
|
| The atom bomb changed warfare via incomprehensible destruction.
| AI will change warfare via incomprehensible strategy.
| wcarss wrote:
| That's an interesting idea about a type of AI that we do not
| have yet.
|
| Attributing magical pattern-finding expert-beating behaviour to
| AI is common among those who do not know much about it or how
| it works, or who haven't used it to solve problems. I don't
| want to guess at your experience using AI tools to solve
| problems (maybe you have tons!), but from my own modest
| experience, 'AI' is not very good at the things you are
| painting a picture about.
|
| AI in most contexts today is not a way to replace a scarce
| expensive human expert with a cheap multipliable mechanical
| expert, let alone a cheap multipliable mechanical _super_
| -expert. It is a way to replace a scarce expensive human expert
| with a cheap multipliable mechanical 10 year old. Anyone can
| get AI can do what a thousand reasonably trained 10 year olds
| can do, but it can _not_ out-see or out-intuition most experts
| at most tasks, especially many-factor soft tasks, because
| humans can quickly sort through what to pay attention to among
| many diverse signal types. An expert comedian is still a lot
| better at looking at, say, a tag cloud and coming up with a
| great joke than GPT-3 is.
|
| In some tasks, like chess or go, AI can evaluate many many
| paths and store the results and train on the specific,
| measurable outcomes. This is valuable to it, and allows it to
| outpace experts in these domains. It may apply to many other
| domains in the future.
|
| Is propaganda like those domains? Are exposed networks like
| those domains? Is trading bitcoin like those domains? I agree
| that it _may be possible_ for AI to do very surprising, clever
| things in the future -- it maybe even is likely that it will.
| But today, and for the near future, what you 're discussing is
| _very far_ into the realm of fun science fiction.
| shoto_io wrote:
| This reads really nicely. It's a nice story.
|
| But for me it breaks at a crucial point: how exactly will a
| strike look like that is way more sophisticated than a nuke or
| an invasion?
|
| I think your comment is giving AI a life of its own. Whereas I
| believe that AI is just a continuation of what we have seen for
| the past 70 years:
|
| Computational power will increasingly aid existing attack
| vectors. The nuclear strike will be better planned. The
| invasion much more effective. Through better computer programs,
| that some happen to call AI these days.
| viciousvoxel wrote:
| I would read this novel.
| bargle0 wrote:
| Sometimes I feel like it's already happened.
| mamcx wrote:
| You know what could be actually bad?
|
| The AI _think_ that could do as well as you described...
| mirker wrote:
| For what it's worth, gameplay AI in real time strategy games
| beats humans by performing more actions per minute than humanly
| possible. You can find Starcraft 2 AI that perfectly controls
| every unit while a human can only dedicate time to controlling
| a few groups of units. Nothing intelligent occurs; the human
| loses because they simply fall behind.
| AnonymousPlanet wrote:
| This sounds a lot like the Chinese idea of unrestricted warfare
| [1] but conducted by AI.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unrestricted_Warfare
| AbrahamParangi wrote:
| Watching superhuman AI play games doesn't look like this.
|
| They just look like people that are really stupid in some ways
| and really good in others.
| gurkendoktor wrote:
| I suspect that this is because games have fixed rules: you
| can't use a hammer to smash the enemy's chess king. Reality
| is a lot more flexible.
| allportmi wrote:
| Fixed rules are the reason the AIs do well in games. You
| can't train an algorithm to think outside the box like
| that, because the box is how it's trained.
|
| Since we cannot meaningfully codify, much less rapidly
| simulate, the potential actions and real consequences in
| this supposed global all-fronts war, we cannot train an
| algorithm on it.
| handrous wrote:
| My expectation is that if it turns out to be practically
| possible and significantly beneficial to turn over lots of
| strategic military _and business_ decision making over to AI,
| it soon _won 't be a choice not to_, thanks to competition.
|
| I think AI rule of much of our top-level, super-important
| decision making is either a dead-end that will never work _or_
| inevitable and something we won 't have the practical choice to
| avoid (barring, say, a real and effective world government)
| with little room for anything in between.
|
| And if it pans out, I expect it to be much as you wrote: the
| decisions will seem nonsensical much of the time, but those who
| second-guess the AI will be at a disadvantage against those who
| do not.
| only_as_i_fall wrote:
| I don't think narrow AI is really capable of much of that.
|
| On the other hand if strong/general AI pops into existence
| we're at a singularity point anyway.
| Retric wrote:
| Thinking of AI like this is completely misunderstanding
| complexity. AI isn't going to be able to predict the weather 2
| weeks from now let alone society at the level your suggesting.
| It's going to use the same old tools at best significantly more
| efficiently.
| dzonga wrote:
| I think in general fighting over territory is a lost cause these
| days. since the best resources are people. first world nations,
| have realized that. now they plunder people instead. Unlike
| extractible natural resources, which can be in abundance, brain
| drain is close to irreversible. Syria, will never regain it's
| lost skilled people. And likewise different African countries. In
| that sense the best AI war you can fight is disinformation and
| sow distrust.
| mirker wrote:
| Is there a non-vacuous example of AI being used in this context?
| Is it matrix multiplication, linear regression, same old control
| theory, or deep learning?
| ergot_vacation wrote:
| If you want sense of what real AI warfare will look like, look
| at Cambridge Analytica. Extremely primitive, but still highly
| effective. The key concept is the ability to sift through vast
| piles of data, find previously unknown patterns, and then
| exploit them. Humans have to make one ad for the whole nation.
| AI can micro-target hundreds or thousands of communities with
| custom propaganda, often even contradicting itself, achieving a
| much more powerful result. Now apply this approach to broader
| conflicts.
| randcraw wrote:
| Yeah, I think the point of China's term "Informationized
| Warfare" is to manipulate information flow and content to
| serve your interests more than your enemy's. If you can
| distort the perspective of an opponent country's decision
| makers or twist popular opinion there to foment internal
| dissent (as Russia famously has done in the US in the past
| decade w/o using any AI, so far), then you win.
|
| I also believe this strategy is not only about conducting
| occasional violent hot wars but very much about conducting a
| non-violent day-to-day cold war which is largely invisible to
| the public (both China's and the US's). China has been waging
| such a "cold war" in the US for over a decade in their many
| break-ins onto US computers to steal IP, especially from
| high-tech and military/intelligence sources. In the last 5
| years, they more active in international PR initiatives to
| promote their economic and political interests. China's AI
| and data-driven social engineering techniques will surely
| play an increasing role in daily practices like these.
|
| Info-based warfare isn't about killing the enemy as much as
| weakening them, as Sun Tzu famously wrote, and I believe
| that's a view that China embraces. If you're patient, you
| don't need physical war. You can win simply by helping your
| enemy become more of a dysfunctional loser.
| tpush wrote:
| Cambridge Analytica was largely a nothing burger [0].
|
| [0] https://twitter.com/nickconfessore/status/131385399616835
| 174...
| nradov wrote:
| There is no evidence that Cambridge Analytica was "highly
| effective". How many voters did they convince to change their
| votes? Please provide a number backed by reliable data.
| not_jd_salinger wrote:
| I've worked in Ad Tech for awhile now at many different
| places. While the data and privacy issues that abound are
| mind blowing, this process:
|
| > sift through vast piles of data, find previously unknown
| patterns, and then exploit them.
|
| is much harder to pull of sucessfuly than you think. Having
| worked in the weeds with many projects of this nature, in
| practice these models are wildly less useful and powerful
| than the people buying the output from them believe.
|
| For an individual case, you can exploit this data pretty well
| to find out shocking amount of personal information about a
| person. Doing this at scale in a way that doesn't converge
| into noise is much harder.
| kevinventullo wrote:
| Was Cambridge Analytica highly effective? My understanding
| was that it was only used by Cruz in the 2016 primaries. In
| the main election, the Trump campaign found RNC's data to be
| more useful than CA's.
| wegwe33 wrote:
| Haha. EU will not be able to compete in the AI-area at all,
| because they cannot collect any data due to their GDPR laws. No
| data = no machine learning. Nice shooting to the own leg :D
| lokimedes wrote:
| It's data on the enemy you need for warfare. Only dictators
| need to collect data on its own citizens to win war.
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