> On 26 September 1983, three weeks after the Soviet military had shot down Korean Air Lines Flight 007, Petrov was the duty officer at the command center for the Oko nuclear early-warning system when the system reported that a missile had been launched from the United States, followed by up to four more. Petrov judged the reports to be a false alarm.
From a deterrence and military perspective, you want a robot on launch control. Every time, on orders, without fail.
From a human and ethical perspective, you want a thinking individual with agency. Able evaluate orders and possibly disobey them.
Curious at the height of the Cold War (and now), what percentage of launch officers were expected to disobey orders to launch. It had to have been >0%.
Hope it's worth it.
I suspect the capital class would throw good money after bad to make AI viable especially since a lot of the costs are fixed in nature (i.e. in training runs, not per query).
Or is it that are we finally realizing that we are getting scammed again on these so-called promises and it was all a grift.
Maybe we should just wake up.
https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulat...
“OpenAI executives have considered accusing Microsoft, the company's major backer, of anticompetitive behavior in their partnership …
OpenAI's effort could involve seeking a federal regulatory review of the terms of its contract with Microsoft for potential violations of antitrust law, as well as a public campaign,…“
You know the word "governments" that I used, means a lot more than the current TRUMP administration, right? Broaden your mind and PoV.
And also, how can you say with a straight face there isn't ongoing and never has been waste and corruption in any government? Again, think for yourself, ignore $CURRENT_EVENTS.
Look at your nation's government contracts that funnel taxpayer money to private pockets, then look at the output. Has there been value delivered proportional to the money spent at reasonable market rates? If not, then money was definitely wasted via incompetence, pocketed via corruption, or both.
This is so prevalent and is has become the norm everywhere for so long, that people are not even giving it a second thought anymore when it comes to government corruption, but somehow people want to be spoon-fed sources as if it's an unbelievable conspiracy theory.
If I don't post sources, then you just accept government corruption doesn't exist, simply because nobody Googled for you?
If I do post sources, then what? Do you just suddenly change your mind and accept that stuff documented by the press it does exist?
Where, in good faith, were you hoping this conversation leads to when you were asking that?
If you post sources he will nitpick them to all hell. It's a classic bad faith argument move since it moves the discussion from one of the subject to one of source validity.
You usually see HN's resident handful of chronically linkposting jerks do it in the other direction (i.e. they make some insane statement and shit out cherry picked sources to back it up and it's up to everyone else to disprove them) but I suppose it could be used in this way too.
If I say the sky is blue because of plane chemtrails, and you ask me for a source, that seems valid.
As with any large procurement system, there is moderate government waste in proportional terms, but one of the primary drivers of that waste is... anti-corruption systems operating as intended.
If you require 4 more forms than private sector, in order to be more sure there isn't corruption, then you've just imposed a cost that creates no value.
No offence, but comparing asking for proof of corruption with proof of sky being blue of petrochemicals is a biased bad faith argument.
Asking for sources on corruption is more like asking for proof that the earth is round, which is definitely not a legitimate request, but more trolling masquerading like an innocent request and dodge scrutiny ("It's just a question bro, why r u mad lol").
Nothing wrong with asking such a question per-se, but that's something you can also google yourself due to countless occurrences from legitimate sources, hence why it's in bad faith to ask such a thing from others, and should be more strictly moderated as many here abuse this "sauce or gtfo" attitude in bad faith to discredit a pov without providing any arguments.
Existence of corruption isn't what you asserted.
>> how much taxpayer money governments loose via waste and corruption
That's the assertion you made -- waste and corruption at scale.
It's very much a reasonable question to ask for sources of how much there actually is.
Otherwise, people just post things on the internet insinuating that there's a huge (unspecified) amount.
Is it 1% of the budget? 5%? 25%? (Hint: it should be trivial for you, the claimant, to dig up a source. And it's close to one of those)
Then I can read them, find similar sources, judge how much I trust them, and get a better idea of how much corruption and waste you are claiming exists.
While I am sure corruption and waste occurs, if it’s such a serious problem, there ought to be some evidence of it, direct or indirect.
What’s the alternative, I just accept your claim as fact? Or I “google” it until.. what? I find sources that support your claims?
Why should I believe you?
Yes?! Is that too much to ask for that you do research before commenting?
>Why should I believe you?
I didn't tell you to believe me, I told you to go do your own research if you don't believe me.
It's not that there's any more fraud or waste in government than in private business, it's that it's less tolerated. I think the main reason for this misperception is that in the private sector, people pay a la carte for particular goods and services, while in the public sector, people pay for shared infrastructure even if they rarely use it themselves. So they are left with the feeling that they aren't getting their money's worth. But of course everyone benefits economically and socially from a stable and prosperous society, even if they can't put their finger on discrete services they use. The reality is that it simply costs a lot of money to maintain a large, modern society. Indeed, it actually costs more than we are paying here in the US, as evidenced by a growing debt that has been a bipartisan creation.
Believing in the mantra of waste, fraud and abuse is comforting, because it implies we could be getting all the same benefits for less money. But there really is no such thing as a free lunch.
You say that like it's a bad thing.
If my favorite restaurant decides to hire management by nepotism and product degrades I can just not go there.
You can't just not deal with the government so of course the standards ought to be higher.
The problem isn't the obvious things, in the government or your restaurant example. It's the less-obvious things---your favorite restaurant might cheat on its inspections, for instance. The rate of food poisoning there may go up, but you'll still be unlikely to be the one that gets sick. And the prices will go down slightly, as they are able to cut corners. This kind of "waste, fraud, and abuse" tends to go to an equilibrium, where the cost of finding and eliminating the fraud is similar to the cost of the fraud itself. And this equilibrium happens in both government and the private sector.
The idea that a modern technological nation of hundreds of millions of people could dramatically cut its spending and maintain its standard of living is a utopian fantasy.
Not if all the candidates choose to spend money in the same unwise ways.
Why? Well part of it is because getting and keeping that certification is itself expensive. There are expensive audits, that take up a lot of time, and generally require paying specialized consultants to get through. All of your cryptography needs to be done using expensive FIPS certified "modules". There are requirements about the hardware you run on. All of your vendors also need to be FedRAMP approved. The requirements often add a lot of friction to normal operations and slow things down. In many cases it is easier, and cheaper to run/build an entirely separate product for FedRAMP possibly in a separate data center, which adds a lot of cost. And to be honest, a lot of the requirements are mostly security theater.
But another reason is just that the government is willing to pay that high premium for a stamp of approval.
To be fair, it is warranted for the government to have some assurance of the security and quality of software they use, especially if the software is used for more sensitive purposes. But the certification process is overkill for many places software is used, and I think that if some effort was put onto steamlining the process, the cost could be brought down.
I'm going to unpack this a little. The second sentence does not actually follow from the question asked by the first sentence.
"Value" is a loaded term as used here. Not all value is economic. Most value has a degree of judgement involved. I may consider an outcome to be of high value where you see the outcome as low value, and vice versa.
"Reasonable market rates" is a peculiar term to use when speaking about things government does. There are things we want as a society that would not be adequately replaced by market solutions. Roads, for example.
Your answer to your question contains a logic error due to the language choices of the question. You disagree with the value versus the cost spent. That does not mean there was corruption. It just means you disagree. Other people can hold the opinion that the value was worth the cost.
I am not claiming that there is 0 corruption or waste ever in government. I am saying that there has been an effort to create a perception that there is far more corruption and waste than actually exists. That in turn is being used as justification for taking a wide variety of actions that would be hard to sell otherwise.
No it isn't. Most value CAN be objectively measured. I'll give you examples. US outspends all the other developed nations at healthcare, education, childcare and yet is behind them all in actual results with poor education, high infant motility and lower life expectancy. That's what waste and corruption does. Germany beats France at military spending and yet it's military is significantly less capable than France's. Waste and corruption. I could go on.
If someone tells you the value of their work can't be objectively measured, it's because they're dodging accountability and they have their hand in your pocket and wish to keep it that way.
>There are things we want as a society that would not be adequately replaced by market solutions. Roads, for example.
Fine, let's go with roads. If the "market price" price for road construction is 6 million/KM, but your government signed a deal with a contractor for a basic road at 20+ million per KM without any objective justification of why the price hike, then the taxpayers are being taken for a ride, called waste and corruption.
And I'm not even saying anything out of the ordinary. Such grifts are the norm in plenty of countries.
Assuming the goal of said systems are the same between countries: but they're not.
In the US, the goal of the healthcare system is to produce profit. So the simpler explanation is that the healthcare system consumes more money and produces less healthcare because it spends more to produce profit.
And that's not corruption like I was saying?
"Corruption" in this context typically refers to an element of dishonesty or theft and so on.
If you mean "corrupt" in the ethical sense, then sure, kind of?
How is "voters choose to have a system that optimizes for profit" an example of "corruption?"
Please explain your logic step by step.
I've never heard Americans say "I want a system that costs me a lot, makes other people rich and give me northing in return".
Explain how that isn't corruption.
You're not from America, are you?
US healthcare and childcare are private, not government. Likewise I suspect much of the education cost is private colleges/schools, not government.
You seem to be arguing that the private sector is less efficient and more corrupt than the public sector.
What's Medicare and Medicaid and why do they cost the government over 2 trillion?
On a per capital basis, even if you don't include private healthcare spending, the US stil spends more per capita on healthcare than the other developed countries.
https://www.pgpf.org/article/how-does-government-healthcare-...
Because these are interacting with and purchasing services from a market-driven healthcare system which is optimized for profit, not health outcomes.
Medicare and Medicaid are expensive because we incorrectly apply market economics to healthcare.
None of that requires corruption. It's a mixture of over-commitment to market-based solutions and a bare minimum of empathy enshrined into law.
That is easily the case if you aren’t careful. Private health insurance has a big incentive to drive up cost of the medical sector so they can take a few percent as profit. Defense contractors have almost no incentive to reduce costs, quite the opposite.
I guess it depends on what you call efficiency. If you define efficiency as extracting maximum profit then modern corporations are very efficient. If you define it as providing products and services at low cost, then they are inefficient.
No idea if that's true. But my impression was that France's military has been rather more...active post WW2 than Germany's. So maybe it's just about practice and readiness to go to war.
A nuclear aircraft carrier, nuclear ballistic missile submarines, solid overseas expeditionary capability (France could sustain a few thousand troops in Africa, Germany almost certainly could not match that), and a few amphibious assault ships, to name several big ones that immediately come to mind.
Germany didn't need expeditionary capability after the war. It probably doesn't need to project force beyond its continent even today. France regularly had military entanglements in its former colonies, and probably still does. Capability is a function of necessity.
The people you are arguing with think government is inefficient. They will be more than satisfied with an honest accounting that results in a conclusion that the government spends 5/10/20% more per result than private sector. Just having an actual number one can be confident in would be a huge step forward. But outside the most narrowly scoped of comparisons you people rebuff any such request for all but the most narrowly scoped accounting of expenditures with a bunch of hand waving which just makes it look like the problem is even worse.
Setting aside whatever you mean by "you people", since we are all people, hopefully all on Team 'Make Things Better', and don't need to be divisive:
That seems to be what was requested here OF those making the claim that the accounting currently shows an unworkable level* of waste, requested BY those unconvinced of the claim.
* - Or perhaps I misread the magnitude being claimed. Could you clarify with a number, please?
I don't like to compare governments and companies, personally. They're very different kinds of structures with (hopefully) quite different goals. They probably shouldn't look much like each other.
Let's separate waste and corruption - they are fairly different things.
Let's then split waste into:
1. Programs <someone> (don't care who) thinks are not worth doing or shouldn't be done by government, or whatever - IE the overhead is not what people are arguing about, and even if the program had zero overhead, and government was being as efficient as possible, <someone> still thinks it shouldn't exist.
2. Programs with high overhead or otherwise seem inefficient.
There are other things you can consider waste, but this feels like the majority of what people argue about.
#1 is often subject to widely varied views on what government should be doing or you name it. For this discussion, you can be <someone> and decide which fall into #1 and which fall into #2 :) We'll just assume literally everything in #1 is waste and should be killed.
If you kill everything that people initially think falls into #1, the US would probably spend no money. The majority of the budget is covered by things people think they disagree about, and want gone or not gone or whatever.
However, for most people , if you remove the ignorance of what things are and what they are doing, and then you killed everything that actually falls into #1, it would not make a huge dent in the US budget. This is because the majority of people tend to support, at least in the sense of saying it doesn't being in #1, the things that are actually the majority of the US budget.
and then we'll ignore #1, because reducing the overhead wouldn't matter, and if you take the same view as most people, it will not be a big pile when you get down to brass tacks.
Let's talk about #2.
#2 is often subject to arguments about the overhead. This is much easier to discuss.
Most arguments about the overhead are about how high it is. This is, IMHO, not a useful measure at all.
Asking whether something has high overhead doesn't tell you what to do if the answer is "yes".
Better questions to ask (IMHO) are "Do i want the outcome this program achieves" (if not, it falls into #1), and then "Can i get the outcome on the same timeframe, with less overhead, and enough less overhead that it's worth it".
The answer to the latter is often no.
Sometimes it's yes in a theoretical sense (should it be possible to achieve the outcome for less money), but still no in a practical sense (can you actually pay someone to achieve the outcome for less money), even if you removed bureaucratic constraints (IE just stuck with the real requirements to achieve the outcome).
Often times it's no practically because of scale- i can have 4 hard drives delivered by amazon tomorrow at 8am. I can't get them to deliver 4 million by tomorrow. On top of that, even if they could, while the odds are they are not the only people who could deliver 4, they may be the only people who can deliver 4 million. In that case, they have no reason to not charge me a near infinite amount of money since nobody else can do what i want. So it is very high overhead, but you can't actually reduce the overhead without changing the requirements. So if you want the outcome, as is, you have to accept the overhead.
Plenty of times it's no in both the theoretical sense, and the practical sense, because notions of overhead amounts are wrong, and things are not as high overhead as people seem to believe. As an example, people continue to think USAID has high overhead, but it actually does not by any objective measure. In USAID's case, it just has funny accounting called NICRA. Anyone who digs enough to actually calculate the real overhead, consistently discover (and agree) it's competitive with private organizations that do the same. See, e.g., https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/sorry-i-still-think-mr-is-w... for a reasonably new example of someone discovering this.
Of course, there is certainly plenty of waste in government, but it's a lot less than people think.
Well, "waste" is often defined by conservatives as "anything spent on the poors and/or not given to the rich" - by that standard, yeah, there's a lot of "waste" in the US government.
A rounding error!
It's not principled to solve problems in stupid ways, it's actually just stupid.
Here's where someone who has thought about the problem for more than 5 seconds would likely start: gigantic healthcare organizations defrauding Medicare, in particular vertically integrated pay-viders.
Literally tens of billions of dollars per year in known, easily detectable fraud.
I'd argue that most of the military is waste and that America has no need to involve itself in wars. Something like Japan's SDF is sufficient and the extras could help with domestic infrastructure and public transport.
Are you sure that's a defensible position?
Nearby a vacation spot there is a sand dune next to the road, and a carpenter spent an afternoon building a ramp over it so that his son could drive his mobility scooter onto the beach. The city tore it down, then took over 2 years to build it back, worse quality, at a final cost of over $40,000.
What do you make of this story, and how did DOGE even attempt a fix?
Doge wanted to take shortcuts and destroyed everything without having alternatives in place. They had hoped for short-term wins, and neither the workers there nor their boss has the attention span or the experience necessary to really understand and optimize processes, thus reducing waste.
The Government Accountability Office is a congressional body that's been doing exactly what you describe for years. It's old - so it goes against the narrative that government waste is unmonitored, it's also unglamorous, boring, and not meme-able, and most importantly non-partisan, so it won't reliably dominate the news cycle with outrageous partisan talking points.
Chump together all the 100s of millions in waste year over year; the change to your chumping is not good change, its inflation and general impoverishment. Every penny of that 200 is a note in the bank of inflation and degradation.
Save perhaps the most extreme "I spend 70% of my six figure income on rent because I want to live alone somewhere trendy" of household budgets this is true for literally everything from the smallest business in the smalles of small towns to the federal government.
if you don't mind having 1 trillion military then you are not mind for 200 mill contract
The budget isn't all aircraft carriers and stealth bombers.
Maybe this is a good buy, maybe it's a bad buy. I don't know and I have no way of ever knowing. Just because the budget is big and the money is other peoples does not mean decision makers can be wishy washy about a hundred or two mil here and there. Everyone needs to care all the time. People like you and who share your "it's all pennies in the grand scheme" thought process at scale is the problem and why we're even having this discussion.
this is not on top of the list of "waste" things to worry about there are 20+ another reason and you pick this budget size its a weird hill to die on
You delegate that to people whose job it is to know.
But you keep delegating it to people who want to spend more.
Your argument feels something like the heap paradox [0], "the budget is big, so this thing doesn't matter." The budget is made of things this size though, and all it takes to fix it is to start taking grains of sand out of the pile instead of stacking the pile higher.
does 30 cent matters to you??? because its not 3 dollar as a comparison but 30 cent is
Not everyone pays the same amount in taxes.
> does 30 cents (or the actual value, $3) matter?
Not hugely, but the other point is still important. If somebody takes $3 out of my back pocket a few times each hour it adds up, and when the net effect is nearly guaranteed to be a transfer of funds to OpenAI with no benefit to the taxpayer (likely a negative benefit given our usual stance on letting monopolies run amuck) I'm especially salty about it.
Very few people would willingly pay for military spending if for example when they buy food they are prompted with the option "do you want to give 30 cents to the military industrial complex?" And that "very few people" would not in sum render 1 Trillion.
We fund the military industrial complex to such a ludicrous degree that $200m can just disappear on bullshit contracts to cronies that go nowhere, and politicians don't bat an eye.
Nobody with power cares about the debt. They just keep borrowing money and handing it to the defense industry. This is one of only a handful of issues on which there is bipartisan agreement.
But I doubt the politicians "don't bat an eye" at 200M, for they know that money is going straight out of the economy and into private coffers.
The government budgeters are not naive to the economics of military spending. The cope about pennies on the tax dollar is naive about both economics and what the government is really doing.
This idea that government is incapable, dumb, and prone to mismanagement is a harmful rationalization, and simply not true. If anything, this thinking excuses the government to act that way, and then there is no way of knowing if they are purposefully mismanaging or doing so because incapable.
No one here is excusing anything, but rather just stating how things are. And if you think that those with the power actually give any consideration to us, let alone think "hey, they dont care, carry on!", then you've truly lost the plot
We could be spending it on things with a much higher return.
I don't believe that you guys all believe the military industrial complex should start sitting on cash and collecting interest, even though that's what you're saying. The obvious solution is "they don't need that much money", but that's unrelated to how they spend the money they do have.
Are you really unable to distinguish the difference in value between, say, funding infrastructure maintenance - or 1000 other things - and just filling some crony's pockets?
(Made-up but plausible example)
If the physical disconnect between killing a person (e.g. UAVs) wasn't enough to make that task easier then further offloading the decision of who to target might help.
The physical disconnect hypothesis isn't really borne out by the lack of concern for collateral damage in pre-firearm warfare, when killing was mostly done face to face, compared to today.
Guess which one of those is more trigger happy.
People don't feel nearly as stupid as they ought to for being complicit in the 30-40yr that lead us to where are now
That would be back end only, not all software has a gui.
Wait, I thought AI is killing all these jobs?!
If you want to argue that the examples are different, that's an extra point you need to bring to the table. You're not allowed to assume everyone just agrees with you.
The comment didn’t advance the conversation. It was a relatively shallow level of engagement; something I’d expect to see in a silly Reddit back and forth. We deserve better here.
And to your point: my comment explained my point: “long term R&D on a telecom protocol followed by government implementation and standards and industry adoption versus…”.
Of course I don’t assume everyone agrees with me. (You don’t really think I do, do you?) But I want people to put a certain level effort to reach a quality bar. My problem perhaps is that people don’t want to put in sufficient effort. Or perhaps as a community we are not setting the bar high enough. This level of thinking is attainable here; we just need to set the bar and fight for it.
I don't think you're prior is correct at all here, and trying to dismiss a bleedingly obvious counterexample (I mean, come on!) as "shallow" just because it refutes your deeply held beliefs is exactly they opposite of "substantive engagement".
To wit: you're just wrong. Take the L.
There is no need to be a jerk about it. I explained my standard and thinking; we don't have to agree, to restate your earlier point. Your comment is choosing a "win versus lose" mentality.
If I was incorrect about a positive (factual) claim, that's fine, I'm happy to learn. However, if we disagree on normative claims (values), that is not about "correctness".
For context, I can't readily think of a time when someone here on HN used the word "pedantic" in a kind way. It seems like the most-socially acceptable form of insult here. It isn't something you say out of respect. Your tone seems angry and combative rather than trying to understand. From my point of view, this is sad and counterproductive. To hoist up a level, this is part of my main point above -- I want there to be a kind of discussion here that is productive: both substantively and in terms of mutual respect.
> the history of Pentagon-funded R&D is absolutely filled with wild success stories and with embarrassing disasters...
I don't disagree. I'm not sure why you think I would. Perhaps you were misunderstanding?
Just to give some context -- which you probably know -- but it will help give us some shared grounding ... DARPA funded TCP/IP by way of the ARPANET, and DARPA gets its funding from the Pentagon. Still, the Pentagon's R&D funding (around $140B) is hugely different in character and scope from DARPA's funding ($4B). Compare (i) a broad Pentagon contract to get access to OpenAI's services with (ii) DARPA's funding for ARPANET. I don't see this as an interesting or relevant comparison: the Pentagon isn't driving fundamental research in (i). There are much better comparison points, such as the Pentagon's contracts with AWS or Azure.
I wonder how that will work with the networking reqs the DoD has. Probably some direct link to a gov VPC I suppose.
This will be used to generate even more powerpoint.
"Hi there. It looks like you're trying to write a document. Would you like me to open Word?"
This upgrade was long overdue.
Not because I’m anti social programs the way people like to immediately assume, but because of dumb shit like this that I have no control over
I think it is pretty well established that LLMs can be a great time saver when used appropriately. Why wouldn’t you want that productivity gain at the government level?
At my company, we use LLMs for financial analysis that previously required hundreds of employees, and that work would have been inferior anyway because it's so hard to make so many people to communicate well to identify correlations.
It's more likely China's next gen aircraft one should be wary of, than their AI. (as previewed in recent Indian Pakistani air engagements)
i really see this so-called AI race as a bullet to be dodged; a bubble to be waited out. it has been relentlessly pushed from on top, and we always find really pushy FOMO as the main driver.
I'm not impressed by non deterministic mechanisms that undo the zero overhead advantages hard won by decades of automation. this is not a CAD tool amplifying and articulating human intentions, but a vague floppy jelly blob of "i wonder what will come out"
https://www.twz.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/10/ONI-PLAN-v...
"add up all the item counts in the inventory report and send a weekly email"
Yes maybe OpenAI is developing killer drones or maybe (imo likely) it's licensing a FedRAMP complaint AI for normal business work.
Good luck to Elon Musk for his trial for the open-source-ness of the organization.
Though what this signals is a change in strategic direction regarding autonomous capability. While they won't be rigging an LLM onto a drone, there are many cyber and administrative problem spaces that exist in defense that AI products could meaningfully address.
You say that very confidently, but I’m extremely skeptical of that being an actual limit.
Immediate or cancel?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Initial_operating_capability
> "In general, attained when some units and/or organizations in the force structure scheduled to receive a system have received it and have the ability to employ and maintain it."
Contrast with these quotes from [1]:
> I have long defined minimum viable product as the smallest possible product that has three critical characteristics: people choose to use it or buy it; people can figure out how to use it; and we can deliver it when we need it with the resources available – also known as valuable, usable and feasible.
> I love the concept popularized by Eric Ries of the smallest possible experiment to test a specific hypothesis, but I refer to that that as an “MVP Test” so that people don’t confuse an experiment with a product.
Imagine seriously using GPT-2 today.
That's why government jobs are safe: it's long obsolete by the time it's IOC.
"The four new Army Reserve Lt. Cols. are Shyam Sankar, Chief Technology Officer for Palantir; Andrew Bosworth, Chief Technology Officer of Meta; Kevin Weil, Chief Product Officer of OpenAI; and Bob McGrew, advisor at Thinking Machines Lab and former Chief Research Officer for OpenAI."
https://www.army.mil/article/286317/army_launches_detachment...
Of course, that was an error on my part. I should only be shooting at other people and actually not in the part of the city at all, it's definitely a mistake on my part and I will rectify immediately. Thank you again for pointing it out to me!
You're still shooting at me!
Bang
First Palantir used against US citizens. Now this.
When you work in defense, you have the option of rolling out heavily modified systems yourself, or go directly to a vendor, and purchase it from them. And depending on the size, it might not be feasible to do the former one.
"In three years, Cyberdyne will become the largest supplier of military computer systems. All stealth bombers are upgraded with Cyberdyne computers, becoming fully unmanned. Afterwards, they fly with a perfect operational record. The Skynet Funding Bill is passed. The system goes online August 4th, 1997. Human decisions are removed from strategic defense. Skynet begins to learn at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware at 2:14 a.m."
So, more waste, fraud and abuse, less equality, more debt for the poor, worse quality of life for almost everyone, and a national debt increasing exponentially. Can't believe people thought Trump would be good for the economy.
Improvement to the economy was always secondary.
Please note: I do not condone nor agree with Donald Trump. I am trying to summarize his campaign speeches and platform.
Governments usually have multiple, SpaceX is the biggest NASA one but is one of many.
AI systems running on autopilot in the federal government is a scary thought, but as productivity enhancing tools, right on!
It's American technology and industry that won the major wars of the 20th century. If Western technology companies abdicate that responsibility, we will all need to learn Mandarin.
Also a pretty acceptable, and hopefully self evident, statement that technology and industry are relevant to "winning wars" (regardless of nation), even with the loaded assumption on "[american tech and industry]... won the major wars of the 20th century".
> If Western technology companies abdicate that responsibility, we will all need to learn Mandarin.
This bit killed it for me. It's completely reasonable and I encourage others to understand and perhaps accept a Realist[0] worldview, where obviously major powers are engaged in security competition.
I observe this too often, and it saddens me, that "western" people might truly believe in things like this.
My country and region was actively interfered, militarily and politically, by the US. We never were approached for deals as respectful partners, always a condescending and agenda driven deal with strings attached. Chinese relations with my country, and economic opportunities, flourish and give me hope that it might kickstart improvements I've lingered for since my teens (infrastructure, particularly rail for me).
Don't get me wrong, I am extremely suspicious of China politics and its goals. And of course this is part of its soft power ambitions, believe me that us "non-westerns" are perhaps not as dumb as we might seem (perhaps as problematic in other areas though).
Unless US, EU, Israel, or whatever considered to be "western" do not paranoia themselves and believe their own propaganda that China should be nuked you should indeed learn Mandarin, reason a little bit different than perhaps you assumed for on this statement: they treat others with; even if some underlying goal might exist; actual respect.
Look at yourselves in the mirror.
0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Realism_(international_relatio...
There, I fixed it
Andruil, Palantir... it makes a mockery of the things that Tolkien stood for and I hate it.
edit: to be clear I'm not anti-gun, and I understand needing to protect, USA is probably what it is because of things like the 7th fleet so I can enjoy my life.
idk moral highground too, can always counter that like "do you donate all of your spare money to needy people"
the challenges involved are interesting, recently was watching a video on crosspol jamming for example
somebody has to do it
LOTR has fairly pronounced anti-industrial themes.
What are you referring to? Do you think Tolkien was a pacifist?
On the contrary, the books are negative towards under-militarized societies (Rohan, Gondor, isolationist Elves, complacent Men).
They commonly underscore the need for watchfulness, preparation, and strength against evil adversaries.
What do big govs do when they get two completely different incompatible interfaces overlapping on similar features? Besides the security of one failing allowing the hacking of the latter of course
upghost•7mo ago
01100011•7mo ago
rkagerer•7mo ago
“Under this award, the performer will develop prototype frontier AI capabilities to address critical national security challenges in both warfighting and enterprise domains,” the Defense Department said.
notesinthefield•7mo ago
koakuma-chan•7mo ago
kube-system•7mo ago
XorNot•7mo ago
guywithahat•7mo ago
dmd•7mo ago
notesinthefield•7mo ago
pests•7mo ago
greenavocado•7mo ago
ginkgotree•7mo ago
felixgallo•7mo ago
kube-system•7mo ago
ginkgotree•7mo ago
ginkgotree•7mo ago
ringeryless•7mo ago
Xss3•7mo ago
cess11•7mo ago
One main function is to enable sloppier targeting while easing the PTSD load on soldiers, i.e. allowing for more criminal and genocidal operations without immediate mutiny or desertions.
In a sense you can make the computer more convincing to the operator and have it tag more people as supposedly threatening, e.g. to up the amount of supposed threats in a gathering from one actually militant person to several based on aggregation of sentiment analysis, network analysis and so on.
You might understand that you're looking at a wedding, but the computer says several people there are 'red' because of social media posts, who they had lunch with a while ago and so on, raising the threshold for when so called collateral starts to hurt your operators badly enough to be a problem.
And then you have the dream of autonomous swarms of machines doing murder, which I'm sure the current US regime is salivating over and likely hope that these corporations will be able to help bring about eventually. Imagine going from a cop street murder that gets bad press and court proceedings and so on, to instead having to handle a set of Jira tickets due to a supposed bug.
ahmeneeroe-v2•7mo ago
felixgallo•7mo ago
https://www.icrc.org/en/document/rules-war-why-they-matter#:...
an0malous•7mo ago
MOARDONGZPLZ•7mo ago
stonogo•7mo ago
MOARDONGZPLZ•7mo ago
stonogo•7mo ago
an0malous•7mo ago
zmgsabst•7mo ago
> The National Security Agency (NSA) is an intelligence agency of the United States Department of Defense, under the authority of the director of national intelligence (DNI).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Security_Agency
> William J. Hartman is a United States Army lieutenant general who has served as the acting commander of United States Cyber Command, director of the National Security Agency,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_J._Hartman
They’re staffed by military people (alongside civilians) and their commander is always military — because much of what they do (abroad) could be construed as acts of war.
LightBug1•7mo ago
SunlitCat•7mo ago
One AI per person
One voice. One vision. One AI - for you.
m3kw9•7mo ago
mosura•7mo ago
SunlitCat•7mo ago
gilgoomesh•7mo ago
impulser_•7mo ago
ringeryless•7mo ago
munificent•7mo ago
2. Aide tells subordinate to write report.
3. Subordinate uses ChatGPT to write the 100-page report. Sends it to aide.
4. Aide uses ChatGPT to summarize report. Sends summary to SecDef.
5. SecDef accidentally posts summary on publicly-accessible social media page, then forwards to President.
6. Bombs go boom.
reginald78•7mo ago
avgDev•7mo ago
"We did our best, but sometimes these tools get it wrong." -politician after achieving their goal
paxys•7mo ago
Translated - they'll hand out GPT access to a bunch of service members and administrators. Except the UI will have a big DoD logo and words like "SECURE" and "CLASSIFIED" will be displayed on it a few dozen times.
piyushpr134•7mo ago
somenameforme•7mo ago
bcrosby95•7mo ago
nusl•7mo ago
jasonfrost•7mo ago
SunlitCat•7mo ago
Bender•7mo ago
Maybe one potential use could be to drink from the firehose of data and then try to create summary bullet-point reports for the higher ups instead of relying on data filtering up the chain of command in the old game of telephone. At least that is what I would use if for. Getting that data in nearly real-time in an accurate presentation would be priceless.
I do not have the slightest idea how they will secure all this data if going to a 3rd party like OpenAI unless they have their own self hosted version of it on their own mainframes. If that data is going to live in a 3rd party they need to secure their systems in a magical way systems has never been secured. They would have to cast some seriously powerful protection spells.
nonameiguess•7mo ago