[HN Gopher] MIT Committee Report on the Changing Nature of Infor...
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       MIT Committee Report on the Changing Nature of Information (1983)
       [pdf]
        
       Author : iloveburritos89
       Score  : 28 points
       Date   : 2025-04-27 19:29 UTC (3 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (archive.org)
 (TXT) w3m dump (archive.org)
        
       | iloveburritos89 wrote:
       | Found this in MIT's basement archives after Ron Rivest told me
       | he'd helped write it but no digital copy existed.
       | 
       | The 1983 committee was reacting to federal pressure on university
       | cryptography. It warned that "trying to firewall cryptography ...
       | will shrink the talent pool and slow U.S. progress" (p 2) and
       | predicted a labor crunch if non-citizens were barred from
       | cutting-edge VLSI work.
       | 
       | Swap "cryptology & VLSI" for "LLM weights & 3 nm" and it reads
       | like 2025 BIS testimony. Do today's export-control proposals on
       | AI and chips risk the same backfire? Curious to hear from anyone
       | involved in CHIPS-Act workforce planning.
        
         | thyristan wrote:
         | I guess CHIPS-Act might be even worse: where cryptography
         | didn't end up in huge-volume products that brought big bucks at
         | that time, It is different with AI now. Nvidia almost has a
         | monopoly on AI-capable chips. At least for the vast majority of
         | the 'no time to adapt to AMD/Intel/Google chips' researchers.
         | Export controls break that dependence for overseas researchers
         | and they'll look for alternatives, if possible in-country.
         | Meaning that the CHIPS-Act actively hurts American tech
         | companies and induces research spending to build up foreign AI
         | chip capabilities that can undercut any current advantage.
         | 
         | The next Asia-is-cheaper-and-better shock will be AI chips from
         | the likes of Huawei, Samsung, NEC.
        
         | ricksunny wrote:
         | When you say MIT's basement archives, what are you referring
         | to? Archivesspace? Are there other caches of paper documents
         | outside of MIT's Archivesspace scope?
        
           | iloveburritos89 wrote:
           | I visited MIT and dug through their physical archives. They
           | have boxes filled with documents that you can request online.
           | Took me three trips to finally find this report.
        
             | ricksunny wrote:
             | Could I request whether you'd be willing to contact me via
             | my contact in my profile page? While I've enjoyed some luck
             | I would like to engage better with MIT AS, and I think you
             | may have built greater familiarity with their processes,
             | published and otherwise than me to date.
        
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       (page generated 2025-04-27 23:01 UTC)