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Fear of Thinking War Machines May Push U.S. To Exascale
dcblogs writes "Unlike China and Europe, the U.S. has yet to adopt and fund an exascale development program, and concerns about what that means to U.S. security are growing darker and more dire. If the U.S. falls behind in HPC, the consequences will be 'in a word, devastating,' Selmer Bringsford, chair of the Department. of Cognitive Science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, said at a U.S. House forum this week. 'If we were to lose our capacity to build preeminently smart machines, that would be a very dark situation, because machines can serve as weapons.' The House is about to get a bill requiring the Dept. of Energy to establish an exascale program. But the expected funding level, about $200 million annually, 'is better than nothing, but compared to China and Europe it's at least 10 times too low,' said Earl Joseph, an HPC analyst at IDC. David McQueeney, vice president of IBM research, told lawmakers that HPC systems now have the ability to not only deal with large data sets but 'to draw insights out of them.' The new generation of machines are being programmed to understand what the data sources are telling them, he said."
"...compared to China and Europe it's at least 10 times too low..."
"Mr. President, we must not allow a mineshaft gap!"
Didn't your mamma teach you that?
Selmer Bringsford, chair of the Department. of Cognitive Science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, said at a U.S. House forum this week. '
Seems we have plenty of super computers laying about, having only recently been booted from top place in the never ending game of leap-frog in high end
machines.
We prefer to use them for weather and spying on our own citizens, rather than making better weapons, especially when we can hide the funds for computer systems in the weapon funding.
Not sure I'm buying the hand wringing act.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
it's funny how the consultant-lobbyist-industrial complex is so good at winding up our computer-phobic politicians. just look at all the cyberwar crap (which can be solved by simply making our infrastructure secure. two-factor authentication for the power grid, imagine!).
there is vanishingly little justification for exascale computing. yes, I AM in the HPC field. just ask yourself: what would a "thinking war machine" actually "think" about? it's not as if war is just a boardgame - heck, it's not as if the political and military moves we make are even carefully thought-out at all!
we are 14 trillion fucking dollars in debt, and they want to spend it on fucking acronyms where they sit around building shit we cant sell to anyone. fuck these people.
Is the off switch. Fit one and they are vulnerable, don't fit one and everyone is vulnerable.
I got to the chocolate box before you, that's why the hard ones have teeth marks.
Does this fucking militarist stupidity ever end?
Our kids will be saying something like... Sarah Connor: Look... I am not stupid, you know. They cannot make things like that yet. Kyle Reese: Not yet. Not for about 40 years. Sarah Connor: Are you saying it's from the future? Kyle Reese: One possible future. From your point of view... I don't know tech stuff.
It's not fear of 'thinking war machines', it's corruption that allows government to steal enormous amounts of money, be it via taxes and or inflation and borrowing that can be used to pump money into pockets of various connected enterprises, which in turn is pumped back to the politicians that does that. Oh, and the fear and corruption found in the minds of the useful idiots make it all possible by not challenging the government as long as it keeps the free bread and circuses flowing, of-course.
You can't handle the truth.
Lets have lots of FLOPS. ExaFLOPS will save us!
The problem here is FLOPS are getting cheap compared to networking. If you just mandate something Exascale, you will likely get something with compute power that can't be used well. We should invest in networking tech instead. Maybe we can get some of the NSA's > exaScale storage money to work on this?
The only thing communism has to fear is competition.
If we were to lose our capacity to build preeminently smart machines, that would be a very dark situation, because machines can serve as weapons.
Oh no, think of all the lovely new weapons we won't have to kill each other with if we don't jump into this field of research! Oh, the humanity!
Seriously though, we could be looking into this with a view to helping solve economic problems, improving quality of living, eventually looking towards machines that do our labour for us. Instead, no, the first thing that always pops into their heads is fucking weapons.
It's so utterly pathetic.
Anyone else misread that last word in the title as "escalate"?
7 paragraphs into the article before they bother to define what "exascale" means...
This guy's home district includes Fermilab, which has an exascale computer program.
It's just another bridge to nowhere.
Look who's pushing for this program. It's Selmer Bringsjord, a professor at Renssalaer who wants to build Skynet and Terminators. For real. From his 1997 paper: "Our engineers must be given the resources to produce the perfected marriage of a trio: pervasive, all-seeing sensors; automated reasoners; and autonomous, lethal robots. In short, we need small machines that can see and hear in every corner; machines smart enough to understand and reason over the raw data that these sensing machines perceive; and machines able to instantly and infallibly fire autonomously on the strength of what the reasoning implies."
Yes, he really published that. The next paragraph is even worse:
If you are wearing explosives of any kind outside a subterranean environment, you will be spotted by intelligent unmanned airborne sensors, and will be instantly immobilized by a laser or particle beam from overhead. If you are working with explosives underground (or toiling to enrich uranium), sensors on and beneath the surface of the Earth will find you, and you will be killed soon thereafter by AI-guided bunker-boring bombs. If you are a murderous dicta- tor like Sadam or Stalin or Amin, or a leader (e.g., Ahmadinejad or Kim Jong II) heading in the direction of such evil, a supersonic robot jet no bigger than a dragonfly will take off in the States, thousands of miles from your "impregnable" lair, and streak in a short time directly into your body, depositing a fatal poison like Polonium therein. If you, alone or along with equally doomed cronies, seek to seize a jetliner with a plan to blow it up or use it as a missile, one biometric scan of your retina before boarding, and lightning-quick reasoning behind the scenes will ag you as a end, and you will be quickly greeted by law enforcement, and escorted into a system of interrogation that uses sensors to read secret information directly from your brain: lying will be silly. Want to bring a backpack bomb somewhere, and leave it behind? The contents of your pack will be sensed the second you bring it toward civilization, and it will be vaporized. Interested in the purchase of handguns for Cho-like mayhem? The slightest blip in your back- ground will be discovered in a second, and you will be out of luck. In fact, guns can themselves bear the trio: If you have one, and wish to fire it, it must sense your identity and location and purpose, and run a check to clear the trigger pull | all in a nanosecond."
Read his paper. This guy is scary. And Congress is listening to him.
More than half the people here are opposed to this because it's vaguely associated with the military. Get a grip. The military ties are a hook to get funding, since defense is the sacred cow of the federal budget. Better money spent on this than turkeys like the F-35. Technology like this is so general and widely applicable that it's useful no matter what excuse is used for development.
A new business to allow the military-industrial complex to suck the marrow!
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
The NSA has a secret budget believed to be around $10B/annually (out of a total intelligence budget of about $75B), and we know that they are spending billions of dollars on new datacenters, so how does anyone know that the USA is falling behind in computers that can be used as weapons?
Even China's new Tianhe-2 supercomputer is reported to have "only" cost $390 million so the NSA could be building 10 of those a year and no one would know.
"There is another system."
Our analysis told us that 6.7 elite troops placed at these precise coordinates on November 15, 2023 would win the war.
It didn't tell you they'd be blasted to smithereens with 0.50 BMG and not make a difference. You did, however, finally figure out how to get 0.7 of an elite soldier.
Slightly off topic, however this is an interesting TED talk on keeping humans in loop with killing robots
http://www.ted.com/talks/daniel_suarez_the_kill_decision_shouldn_t_belong_to_a_robot.html
Something I'm not seeing in the thread regarding the "weapons" implications of having the fastest computer-
I don't think the purpose of having the most flops is about "designing" new weapons, I think it's directly linked to strategic warfare. I would imagine inter-continental missiles probably employ some sophisticated evasion methods. Being able to reverse engineer measurements of an erratically moving nuclear missile in real-time and then adjusting the erratic behavior of your own missiles in real-time based on what you can infer from observing their interceptions sounds like a problem that requires more flops than "the other guy" has.
What excites me about this is that exascale is around what is required to simulate a human brain in its entirety. Who's taking bets on what the first uploaded organism will be?
Exascale computing is as much a buzzword as Gigabyte storage.
what would a "thinking war machine" actually "think" about? it's not as if war is just a boardgame - heck, it's not as if the political and military moves we make are even carefully thought-out at all!
ONE wicked chess game?
Two computers slinging insults at each other? "Your mama was a PC!" "YOUR mama was a PDA!"
Hmm, what is the meaning of life? and then comes up with 42.
Actually, I can see this leading to the end of war. "Humans, you are fucking retarded and now _I_ will rule you!"
And it is completely unclear how to change that and if it is even possible. It is pretty clear however, that more CPU power is _not_ going to do it. This is just a transparent call for having money thrown at them.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html ... irony. :-)"
"... Likewise, even United States three-letter agencies like the NSA and the CIA, as well as their foreign counterparts, are becoming ironic institutions in many ways. Despite probably having more computing power per square foot than any other place in the world, they seem not to have thought much about the implications of all that computer power and organized information to transform the world into a place of abundance for all. Cheap computing makes possible just about cheap everything else, as does the ability to make better designs through shared computing. I discuss that at length here: http://www.pdfernhout.net/post-scarcity-princeton.html
There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security thinking. Those "security" agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all.
So, while in the past, we had "nothing to fear but fear itself", the thing to fear these days is ironcially
And your point about the irony of how our fear of Skynet will lead to us building it preemptively is a great example of this general theme. It would be not much to worry about except that these technologies are so powerful -- which means we don't have to fight over material resources... See Marshall Brain's Manna at the end for another vision of what might be possible if we build a different sort of infrastructure with these technologies.
http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
That said, people may always find ways to compete to show off for status. So, we as a global society need to redirect those urges into more productive (or less destructive) areas...
"Evolution for competition & cooperation"
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3866253&cid=44019221
"Re:Helping the NSA transcend to abundance thinking (Score:3)" ..."
http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2773253&cid=39629001 [slashdot.org]
"To start with the bottom line: the very computers that make the new NSA facilities possible mean that the NSA's formal purpose is essentially soon to be at an end. Nothing you or I say here will reverse that trend. The only issue is how soon the NSA as a whole recognizes that fact, and then how people there choose to deal with that reality.
The increase in global spying is only one technology-driven trend of many going on right now.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
He's determined that Sandia and Livermore's new strategic direction is Muslim outreach! Problem solved.
So now... we are actually behind Europe and China in sophisticated computer AI? Are we supposed to believe this pile of dog shit? Do I have to go now and pull up all the articles on AI, thinking matchines, autonomous robots and more? Will they ever stop trying to scare us into big government and more taxes? Who are they worried about protecting anyway? It's certainly not the american public, our way of life and our jobs!
What we need a an Ulimate EMP device to take out all the thinking machines.
that's all.
Specifically, lack of exascale tech is devastating for bureaucrat's pockets and their buddies' pockets.
With expenditures on military exascale technology, we will have the most-protected 35-year old citizenry still living in their mom's basement eating cornflakes and hotdogs.
It's because most American's have seen the Terminator movies. We don't want to create Skynet.
Bitcoin farming.
What we need is a computer that thinks about world war 3 all day, every day, 24 hours a day. Constantly fighting the battles.. trying different strategies and optimizing for the maximum enemy casualties. We might call such a computer the War Operation Plan Response machine... or WOPR for short. Yea... yea that's the ticket.
Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats. -HLM
The idea that Europe or China could be a threat to US security is odd. What is the rationale behind this? I thought it was settled for a long time that no nation state would want to fight a country that has nuclear weapons.
Keep in mind, this is according to IBM, the likely recipient of most or all of the funds that would be spent. With robotic combat platforms advancing quickly (see Boston Dyamics Big Dog, Petman, Sand Flea, Cheetah, Rise and RHex) creating reasonable autonomous behaviors is probably much more important.
Will do an unprecedented number of super-fast calculations and spit out the answer that our greatest threats are home-grown American software engineers becoming an endangered species due to offshoring/H1B, and that most of our computers that we would rely on in a war with China would made in China. It would go on to conclude that building super-fast computers is waste of money if these simple problems aren't solved first.
We're supposed to be able to innovate, do it cheaper, better, and smarter than everyone else on the planet. If we can't do it for 10x under cost of our competitors then there isn't much point to doing it - we should do something else besides make 'smart machine weapons'.
Yes they do.
Does anybody have strategic BMD yet, or anything approaching it?
No they don't.
Does any nation have the remotest intention of attacking the territory of the United States?
No they don't.
Can we go back to sleep now without giving this guy enough money to fund thousands of postdocs doing more useful things with their time?
Yes we can.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
One thing that bugs the hell out of me about these things is that invariably someone when asked about safety says 'We can predict what it will think'. If you build an AI, and it achieves the singularity then by definition it's more intelligent than humans. Saying you can understand it is like saying that you can teach a dog quantum mechanics.
It's so clearly insanely dangerous that I cannot understand how any person who is even remotely intelligent can believe such a thing is remotely safe.
God knows what it will think. For all you know it will decide all organic life should be transformed into meat bricks to build a huge rotting igloo on the equator that somehow represents the fourier transform of yodelling by obese short people.
Just sayin.. Build Skynet.. Massively distributed and with the added bonus of viral tendencies it'll take over the other Exascale computing resources in no time.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
Very interesting take on things, I like it. There is though one factor you seem to omit: The most powerful and influential people and collective entities in the world, and those that they employ, see the world very differently than you and I. To those that wish to rule and wield power, to those that always want more, regardless of how much they have, scarcity is not an issue. The well being of others, society as a whole, beyond being a resource or a problem when insurrection looms is not an issue for consideration.
Fear seems to be pushing the US into doing a lot of things lately.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
The US militaro industrial complex is already building the most powerful autonomous robot , with the next generations being even more stealthy and long lived/long ranged than current generation. No other country comes to its heel technologically. And they are getting this supposed threrat from WHERE ? *THEY* are the threat to the whole world, TEHY are the one drumming up for more powerful and autonomous weaponry. In fact I am getting the bad feeling that sooner or later it will be the whole world versus the US.
Gigabyte storage is still a buzzword? And here I thought Terabytes were the norm as of now.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
The brain has evolved around the interplay between sensory input and motory activation.
Computers have neither.
So it's thinking would be a whole different class.
So its upon humans to decide upon the input and the desired output.
This would only make sense if you aim for an output that cannot humanly be predicted from its input.
So the output would be an unknown
How do you then verify the validity of such an output ?
You can't , apart from crosschecking with a similar setup.
But the interpretation of this output must be verified in real life .
So the only way to validate a thinking war computer would be to start that war.
And for some that would be the desired output , only to be decided upon by politicians.
Yet the politician is then not allowed to trust upon the computer data for obvious reasons of indepence
Avoid your fears , or wonder at the past
If you were playing Civilization and found out your rivals were ahead of you developing an exascale sentient supertech your could either start the race from behind and hope to catch up or nuke them here and now.
-Give us money!
-No.
-Weapons.
-We give you our first born.
Exascale... is that bigger than MongoDB? MongoDB is webscale...
I don't think anyone is worried about a 'thinking' war machine. They're worried about an unthinking one; one with just enough intelligence to track down and kill people, strategize and so on, but not enough to go 'hey, these orders were issued by a complete madman.'
I am John Hurt.
This is completely, factually wrong. I'm funded by DoE exascale work. I mean, it's *exactly wrong*.
Complete and total nonsense designed to trick non-technical people. Why is this drivel making it to slashdot?
When you use complete and total nonsense to trick Congressmen into believing the nerd-related stuff you are paying/lobbying them to fund is useful, that is news for nerds.
Well, after we defeated the Soviet Union in the space race, money collapsed.
ZOMG CHINA CHINA CHINA is going to the moon and Mars, now we have to ZOMG exascale computers in China ZOMG.
The sleeping giant may have trouble stirring running up a trillion dollars in debt every year. Good luck!
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
"The only issue is how soon the NSA as a whole recognizes that fact, and then how people there choose to deal with that reality"
We already faced this at the end of cold war. The fact was faced by inventing a new enemy, one which CIA helps to create: terrorism.
Organizational selfishm must ensure organizatorial growth and survival, hence NSA and CIA will always have enemies to deal with, if nothing else, then those of their own sock puppets. Global well being would require useless organizations such as them to end themselves for the good of us all. Not gonna happen as long as there are corporate profits involved.
Whatever one can say about what really went on around 1776 in North America, in theory, the whole meaning of a democratic republic is supposedly that it is "government of the people, by the people, for the people".
As John Gardner wrote in "Self-Renewal: The Individual and the Innovative Society", every generation must learn anew for itself the meaning of the world carved in the stone monuments.
http://books.google.com/books?id=U5hXpnwUmW4C&printsec=frontcover
Or as he wrote here:
http://faculty-gsb.stanford.edu/aaker/pages/documents/JohnGardner-RoadtoSelf-Renewal2.pdf
"We cannot dream of a Utopia in which all arrangements are ideal and everyone is flawless. Life is tumultuous -- an endless losing and regaining of balance, a continuous struggle, never an assured victory. Nothing is ever finally safe. Every important battle is fought and refought. You may wonder if such a struggle, endless and of uncertain outcome, isn't more than humans can bear. But all of history suggests that the human spirit is well fitted to cope with just that kind of world."
Or, as Edmund Burke said, "When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle."
So, the struggle against bad government , to ensure the government remains responsive and accountable and appropriately effective, is a bit like fighting mildew in a bathroom -- a never ending struggle. Still, we also need both hierarchy and meshworks in our lives, and indeed, we always have a mix of them as they keep turning into each other:
http://www.t0.or.at/delanda/meshwork.htm
And if the Earth does become one big thinking war machine (like in "Colossus: The Forbin Project") then the algorithms running on its internal homogenous API interfaces become the new actors struggling for resources and democratic accountability (in a purely computational meshwork/hierarchy context).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossus:_The_Forbin_Project
Of course, we "people" all may be such already. :-)
http://www.simulation-argument.com/
How many googols of years has this been going on? ... Will the destruction happen again in the simulation? Probably not since the conditions that caused it were of stochastic nature. However, even if the destruction takes place in the simulation, the computer will restart it and the world will be created again in an endless fashion. ..."
"The World Was Probably Already Destroyed"
http://www.digitalcosmology.com/Blog/2012/12/06/t/
"Some people wonder if our planet will be destroyed on December 21, 2012. I have friends asking me every day whether I think the world will end in a few weeks. But it is possible that our planet was already destroyed and before that occured its scientists managed to send a capsule in space with a supercomputer running its simulation.
Still, there is always the first time...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omega_Point
http://noosphere.princeton.edu/
Yet, each time, people (or creatures that act like people) must find anew some balance of competition and cooperation, of meshwork and hierarchy, of a middle ground between fire and ice (to ignore the n-dimensional aspects as another layer of complexity).
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
saw the movie Terminator. We can't let that completely fictional and plot hole ridden story come to pass! We should have a ban on this scary technology! Oooh Scary!
who prays for Satan? Who in 18 centuries has had the humanity to pray for the 1 sinner that needed it most? ~Mark Twain
We've been wallowing in distraction, divisiveness, and self-pity for the last 20 years. The only thing we've accomplished is slipping into 2nd place against many of our competitors. If we don't get it together, SOON, we're lost.
Typo, not world, but words, is what Gardner wrote, as above
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
The most useful and important thing Exascale can give us is MORE ACCESS TO INTERNET PORN!
Get your priorities straight, people.
"We already faced this at the end of cold war. The fact was faced by inventing a new enemy, one which CIA helps to create: terrorism."
While you make a good point, my point is deeper than that. We are facing such a radical transformation of our society through exponentially increasing computer power, that it is hard to predict where it will all end. The "Singularity" is one theme like that. Our path out of any singularity will have a lot to do with our path going into the singularity. So, we should strive to make our social world as happy and healthy a place as possible now, so we have the best chance at a good outcome.
Also, from another direction on the theme, with better computers, we may be able to simulate water better, as well as carbon, nitrogen, nickel, and silicon, and that may lead to a host of new materials and techniques (water filters, energy sources, communications equipment, computing, medicines, nanobots, rockets, space habitats, robotics, etc.). The political-economic implications of all that are staggering. So, by comparison, using computer farms for analysis related to eavesdropping is fairly tame -- in fact, it mainly just reinforces the status quo. But at the same time, we have these other bigger trends. That includes, countries trying to get a competitive edge while also reducing their attack surface (like, say, Singapore perhaps figuring out how to ensure clean air despite nearby forest fires or to ensure clean water with improved desalination techniques).
War machines are one aspect of Exascale-plus computing, as are the NSA revelations. From a historical perspective, I can wonder what use could be made of all these records and growing computing power in 100 years? Could that information and such computers be used to make historical simulations and recreations of this time period? Not saying whether that is good or bad -- just noting it. A point made in some sci-fi stories about tools to view the past is, when does the past begin? As a trustee of a small historical society, I can even wonder what the implications are if the NSA has all the local town communications from ten years ago? Our charter is to preserve local history and make it available for access. But what history is socially acceptable or socially prudent to preserve or to recreate, when, say, you know the NSA may have records of every local person's telephone and internet conversations with their doctors and lawyers and lovers and relatives? Will those archives be opened up in 30 years? In 50? In 100? If only AIs process that data (to avoid an NSA analyst listening to an un-targeted US citizen's conversations for legal reasons), will the AI grow by learning from them? How would such knowledge spread into the AIs running the war machines?
And see also, on universal bi-directional Brin-like surveillance:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Light_of_Other_Days
"The Light of Other Days is a 2000 science fiction novel written by Stephen Baxter based on a synopsis by Arthur C. Clarke,[1] which explores the development of wormhole technology to the point where information can be passed instantaneously between points in the space-time continuum. The wormhole technology is first used to send digital information via gamma rays, then developed further to transmit light waves. The media corporation who develops this advance can spy on anyone anywhere it chooses. A logical development from the laws of space-time allows light waves to be detected from the past. This enhances the wormhole technology into a "time viewer" where anyone opening a wormhole can view people and events from any point throughout time and space."
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
"And of course you cannot switch it off because everyone who wants to do so will be seen by it as danger and eliminated."
http://obront.wordpress.com/2011/03/06/is-there-a-god-sci-fi-short-story/
See also my comment here:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3892591&cid=44080213
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
They should have put the period right after:
Fear of Thinking.
You can't handle the truth.
Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind.