Well golly-gee WP, are you saying that tools can do “good” and “bad” things?
6 Likes
Drones don’t kill people. AIs with drones kill people.
8 Likes
Indeed. Do you want Skynet? Because this is how we get skynet.
On the more realistic front, this needs to be heavily regulated quickly and internationally, because drone AI regulatory controls will be highly variable from country to country, and this war has shown how likely it is that we’ll end up with equipment from a ton of different countries all jumbled together in the same conflict. Very bad things will happen if all involved don’t agree on minimum safeguards.
13 Likes
Do you think there’s any chance that when Ukraine rebuilds, they switch to the EU gage train tracks? It would be so poetic.
7 Likes
There are people calling for that, forgetting that Ukraine has a massive railway network, it has sustained remarkably little damage and regauging would be very disruptive and time-consuming, no matter how much money was thrown at it.
Meanwhile there are plans to build standard gauge lines on key routes.
Ukraine is interested in Spanish technology for gauge-changing trains.
10 Likes
3 Likes
That’s a lot of potential spies.
7 Likes
6 Likes
Not only it seems completely useless to demand something like that, but it is also an hypocrisy after they sent/sold shells to Ukraine via the US.
3 Likes
10 Likes
The US first accused North Korea of supplying arms to Russia in September 2022. The reports that South Korea would supply shells to the US came in November 2022.
7 Likes
A complete history of warfare in just one sentence:
Very bad things will happen.
I fully agree with your assessment.
I think that we need to find a new narrative to convince the policymakers to act, now. We need to break it down to them, and still be very aware of oversimplification and overblowing the acute and current dangers. As far as I am aware, we are still very far from reaching singularity, and singularities are, in my view, not the problem as such. Maybe we should retire the term AI completely, and quite possibly we should refrain from popcultural references to Skynet and the likes. If engaging in serious discourse, that is: it’s totally fine to do so, e.g., here on the BBS, of course. But serious journalism and researchers in the public should not use these tropes, I think.
Personally, I try to explain people that the so-called AI are basically what they did in high school: linear regressions. Plugged together, tuning their parameters with feedback loops and some other statistical methods. AI is math, people. But since errors are probable and And it is out of the box, and that’s all fair and well, but we should define international regulations how to use it - or how to not use it.
Using it to make life-or-death decisions must be regulated. But the problem is in the details. I am typing on a device which uses some of the methods we (stupidly) call AI, e.g. for spelling correction. ML methods are everywhere, and can be put in nearly everything. But nearly everything can also be put to a dual use. So, how do we regulate that?
(One idea could be to use a licensing system, forbidding military use. Some Linux distributions do so, don’t they? But how does this work out, in practice?)
I sadly assume the Russian war will prove to be a turning point in the application of advanced statistical learning and decision making models. I am under the impression this war will go on for a long time, so there will be plenty of time for bad decisions.
And very bad things will happen.
I just hope we learn from that.
5 Likes
The tell in [Cornel] West’s remarks was calling the U.S. an empire but referring to Russia by its de jure name, implicitly erasing its imperial, colonial character. It’s a common tendency among the segment of the left to which West belongs, one that Kazakhstan-born Pitzer College sociology professor Azamat Junisbai attributes to ignorance and a myopic, know-nothing focus on American imperialism to the exclusion of imperialism by other nations.
“They’re kind of imperial about their anti-imperialism,” Junisbai said. “There’s something very provincial and strange about it where you literally do not know anything about what’s happening beyond this one issue you care about.”
8 Likes
RFK Jr and the late scholar of Russia Stephen F. Cohen also fell for this provincial and narrow-minded version of anti-imperialism. Anyone who thinks this way is prime Useful Idiot material for Putin.
8 Likes
5 Likes
9 Likes
5 Likes
Fun place if you want to cut of the Baltics.
4 Likes
That’s … interesting!
Hungarian Charity Service of the Order of Malta
The Order of Malta historically was an important political actor, until a combination of inadequate leadership and Napoleon made it basically obsolete. (Ok, that’s a bit of an overstatement, maybe).
One thing to remember is that the order still is very well connected, and strictly hierarchical. I would wager that NOTHING on this diplomatic scale can happen without the top level supporting it.
Also, I would not be the least surprised if some other world leaders who happen to catholic were involved.
4 Likes
5 Likes
