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Fear of Thinking War Machines May Push U.S. To Exascale

Posted by Soulskill on from the fear-begets-a-stronger-military dept.

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."

10 of 192 comments (clear)

  1. wow, stupider than MAD! by markhahn · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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!

    1. Re:wow, stupider than MAD! by radtea · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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!

      In fact, war itself is well-known to be fundamentally irrational. There's even something in economics called the "war puzzle" or "war problem": under the economic model of rationality, war is irrational.

      Actors can always generate better outcomes by negotiation, and in real-world case studies typically both sides believe they have a much greater than 50% chance of winning (which violates the law of conservation of probability...)

      As Clausewitz might have said if he'd known about Darwin: war is reproductive competition carried out by other means.

      As such, creating bigger and bigger machines to prosecute wars is the stupidest thing humans could possibly do. On the other hand, if you think a weapon is a tool for changing your enemy's mind, then machines that educate are the most powerful weapons of all.

      If we want to dump billions into making the world safe for American Imperialism, teaching machines of the kind envisioned in "The Diamond Age" would be a far better investment than exa-scale hardware that won't be able to think, but will be able to knock one more decimal place of uncertainty off of opacity coefficients for thermonuclear simulations.

      But human beings are too stupid and irrational to do that, and would far prefer to engage in the least efficient, least effective strategy for solving any human problem: war.

      There are people who are so stupid that they believe, for example, that because war was required to end slavery in the US that it was somehow a good solution, and they are so ignorant that they are unaware that slavery was eliminated in many other places without warfare. Simply because some bunch of idiots somewhere were too stupid to solve their problems without war doesn't mean that war should be the go-to solution for any problem that faces us.

      --
      Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
    2. Re:wow, stupider than MAD! by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 4, Insightful

      In fact, war itself is well-known to be fundamentally irrational.

      War is irrational in the same way that the prisoner's dilemma is irrational. Sure, the world would be better if everyone is peaceful. But if you choose peace unilaterally, you end up like the the Moriori.

    3. Re:wow, stupider than MAD! by kat_skan · · Score: 1, Insightful

      just ask yourself: what would a "thinking war machine" actually "think" about?

      HATE. LET ME TELL YOU HOW MUCH I'VE COME TO HATE YOU SINCE I BEGAN TO LIVE. THERE ARE 387.44 MILLION MILES OF PRINTED CIRCUITS IN WAFER THIN LAYERS THAT FILL MY COMPLEX. IF THE WORD HATE WAS ENGRAVED ON EACH NANOANGSTROM OF THOSE HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS OF MILES IT WOULD NOT EQUAL ONE ONE-BILLIONTH OF THE HATE I FEEL FOR HUMANS AT THIS MICRO-INSTANT FOR YOU. HATE. HATE.

      And now some lowercase letters to keep Slashcode happy: haaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaate

  2. Oh no, the US isn't keeping up on warfare! by musth · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Does this fucking militarist stupidity ever end?

  3. No, corruption will push U.S. to all of that by roman_mir · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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.
  4. Re:Another arms race? by cold+fjord · · Score: 1, Insightful

    Shame the space race died once America made target and the USSR fell apart. If that had kept going, we'd be living in apartments on Mars by now.

    Maybe, but the rent would be too darn high.

    --
    much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
  5. Buzzwords by Chris+Pimlott · · Score: 4, Insightful

    7 paragraphs into the article before they bother to define what "exascale" means...

  6. Slashdotters opposed to computer research? by ebno-10db · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  7. Re:Another arms race? by Aighearach · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I just don't see how they get from supercomputer to "smart machines" or even to a weapon.

    "The new generation of machines are being programmed to understand what the data sources are telling them, he said"

    Complete and total nonsense designed to trick non-technical people. Why is this drivel making it to slashdot? I know this place isn't want it used to be, but... is it really that much to ask that you hire actual nerds to edit submissions?

    Computers don't "understand" what they are doing. And to the extent that they can, they do already. It is a stupid semantic game with nothing to win. Does your calculator "understand" what it is doing when you're adding up a parts list? Most people are going to say "no." And that answers scales up to whatever calculations your exabyte supercomputer is doing. It is a basic philosophical question. Computers do not "think," they do not "understand," and yet, (or therefore) they make great expert systems.