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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!
Does this fucking militarist stupidity ever end?
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.
And the Truman Doctrine. Let's not forget the Truman Doctrine.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
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.
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.
No you are only off by 2.8 trillion it's 16.878 trillion
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.
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."
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.
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?
If we take as historical precident of the human genome, (Craig Ventor followed by James Watson), it will likely be Selmer Bringsford (followed by Gordon Bell, because Seymour Cray was killed in a car crash). Dark horse would be Ray Kurzweil if somehow google beats everyone to the punch...
That is the most disheartening comment in this whole discussion. I think it's time to stop reading /. for the day, lest I be proven wrong.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
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
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.
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.