Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/02/11/trump-ai.html
There aren’t many details in Trump’s “American A.I. Initiative,” but the point appears to be: send a message of technological dominance to China.
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He must be hoping they can build him a little.
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Maybe he just saw that 2001 movie A.I. Artificial Intelligence on DVD recently and wants to get himself a few of those sexbots.
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The problem isn’t that we can’t think of these things. It’s that we can’t build them cheap enough for people to buy.
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What do you call a policy initiative with no funding? A wish?
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The jokes just write themselves.
The Republicans don’t seem to realize that all of our technological dominance is based on decades of funding basic research, and that all that research (at least in the natural sciences) is fundamentally interconnected. You can’t pick and choose and say "we’re defunding the NSF, but we still want to be the best in this particular technology. "
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why? cloud service AIs are a thing, you’ve probably used several without even knowing it.
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The way I interpret this statement…
…is “Federally funded research labs like DARPA should make sure A.I. is higher on their priority list” (which means other research such as hypersonic planes and advanced prosthetic limbs will get kicked down the priority list unless someone increases the overall DARPA budget).
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Natural Idiot Funds Artificial Intelligence
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Or a shiny outfit.
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We’ll know it’s been created when it meets him and rolls its eyes.
eta:
Trump: “AI, I am your father.”
AI: “…”
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Silly Chinese. It’s much more important to spend your money on tax rebates for the wealthy, coal mining, and WALL instead of “investing” in research and development. That stuff takes YEARS to pay off.
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Meh. This is the kind of stuff that gets put in front of a POTUS and they get told to just sign.
Meh.
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Just like factory automation. Hooray!
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The American American Initiative Initiative? 
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“This Al guy sure does a lot. Impressive. Have him come round for some hamberders and a photo op. What does Al stand for? Albert?”
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One can become so jaded having watched “Artificial Intelligence” go through so many stages and fads over the decades. It passed through neuron modeling, symbol training, lisp, logic forms, databases, and now apparently it’s mostly Bayes and Markov statistics often termed “deep learning”. Well, maybe we’ll get really unlucky someday and finally produce something which objects to its own creation. But meanwhile…
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AI is in widespread use all around us: Google searches, Siri, targeted advertising algorithms, not to mention emerging technologies like self-driving cars. The mistake a lot of people made was in assuming machine intelligence would be good at the same things as human intelligence, or would even resemble a human mind. That’s as misguided as assuming a really good airplane should be judged by how closely it resembles a bird.
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That’s the ticket! The more than a half century of mind modeling and databases were wasted time when it was there under our noses all the time as a nebulous aggregate of all the extant stuff around us! …uh, plus Siri and that IoT rice cooker.
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