> Going head-to-head with Google with a project involving well-funded, energetic entrepreneurs would be foolish. Attempting the same with a multigovernment collaboration is beyond description.[1]
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaero
1: http://spectrum.ieee.org/telecom/internet/loser-whats-the-la...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exalead
I guess they are still widely indirectly funded by the state.
A better strategy would to distribute the money to more companies a bit like VCs do.
The German/French collaboration just sounds like it was badly organized.
The end result may be the same, but it sounds like the root causes were different.
I think they do mostly base research, the kind that private companies tend to avoid as there rarely is any direct profit to be had.
The "google-killer" or "SK AI project" or the "5th generation project" for that matter are quite different. First, they start with an ill-defined yet concrete goal, which makes success well nigh impossible. Second, they start from the position of a large sum of money being necessary -- which naturally attracts inappropriate as well as appropriate bids; the deciders are often more political than with the MPG (which itself, consisting of a group of people, must have its own politics, but presumably less intensely). Also this money is often a one-time or short term allocation rather than a long term investment as with the MPG.
The one example I can think of in which this actually worked was Airbus, but that took decades, massive sums, and a stubbornness to change the structure a lot along the way. Not sure I can think of another example.
In the others, the reality is that the dictatorship is even more corrupt but because there is no freedom of the press, nobody reports it and the dictator publishes their propaganda about how clean they are and how they are jailing people for corruption, when really they are jailing their opponents (like President Xi in China today). Who would have dared to report about corruption by the original President Park, or to defend his opponents?
Democracy produces the least corrupt governments in the world. One big reason is that people are free to report it, the leader can hose their job in the next election, and an indepedent judiciary can convict the leaders friends (and protect their enemies). The corruption is there in any government or human institution; if we aren't reading about it, that's when we have a problem.
Democracies also produce the most economically and technologically advanced economies and societies - look at any list; democracies dominate it. The 'strong leadership' approach, for all its appeal to some, doesn't deliver the goods. For all the chaos, giving input to millions rather than to just one person produces much better results.
Every once in a while, people luck out and get a competent dictator with proper leadership & economic understanding to direct resources to appropriate areas for economic growth.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Park_Chung-hee
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_Kuan_Yew
Both brutal dictators; but widely considered to have done a fine job steering economies.
One does not balance the other. Stalin industrialized Russia; Hitler rebuilt the German economy.
[citation needed]
...Or was that a rhetorical device, meaning if people were caught accepting bribes, then of course they were already out of political favor, so they were heavily punished?
In the late years Park's servants would "recruit" women to serve him. In fact there was a young girl in the last night when he was shot by his own aide while drinking. So I find it very hard to believe Park would have minded his minions doing creating accounting.
Some people say Park wasn't corrupt because he did not amass personal wealth, but that argument misses the fact that he had no intention to retire. The country was his, and would remain his. Moving money to his own bank account would have been like moving money from the left pocket to the right pocket. Why bother?
17 billion $~ spent with little to show for it, with much allegations of corruption between President Lee & his ex-employer Hyundai constructions.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L0ANQBP0Cq8 6 million $ spent on "robo-fish" to detect & observe water conditions, 7/9 units DOA; met 10% of targeted spec (speed/data networking bandwidth capabilities)
I think government sanctioned projects can work if the leader in charge has proper intent and skills & leadership to steer the resources.
This is far from the case with current Korean leadership; as Ms.Park was elected mostly based on her name recognition/ positive sentiments left by her dad. She is widely considered to be one of the most incompetent president ever to be elected into office.
During the summer these days, the state of the riverwater is humorously called "Nokjo (algal bloom) latte". See: https://www.google.com/search?q=%EB%85%B9%EC%A1%B0%EB%9D%BC%...
I'm actually happy that Park Geun-Hye is babbling about AI's. At least I can't think of any way that could do a long-lasting harm, other than burning taxypayers' $$$, but they're gonna do that anyway, so what's the difference?
Hopefully, in the next election we could find someone who could utter more than one coherent sentence at a time.
It is normal for politicians to be stupid. Don't you want your country to be normal?
It doesn't matter much whether it's the government accidentally destroying the universe, or a private company or a university research team accidentally destroying the universe. Pointing an AGI in a particular direction is a hard technical problem that we haven't yet seen much interest in solving as a technical problem, in part because people have been distracted over arguing who gets to destroy the universe. This is easier to argue about and activates a lot of fun human political instincts where you get to valorize or devalorize particular tribes, so it's a very dangerous distraction.
You would need to make a lot more progress on the alignment problem, as a technical problem, before it made any difference to actual outcomes who'd built the thing or what they'd thought their intentions were.
But regardless of the failure mode, my concern is precisely that anyone or any organization with a sufficiently large (and sunk) investment into itself, regardless of what the nature of that organization is, will have a temptation to include their own interests in a value function. And because it's hard to reason about the consequences of errors on that scale, such organizations might also tend to not make a sufficient distinction between "fail by destroying the universe (or worse)" and "'fail' by not preserving whatever principles this organization (thinks it) holds dear". Not distinguishing those two cases would then tend to lead the organization to discount the risk of meddling in the value function, even in the face of warnings that doing so would destroy the universe, because they might view their own obsolescence as little better.
So, among the large number of things that have to go exactly right, one of many will be the need for the organization developing it to very specifically have no goal other than getting AGI right, for a definition of right in terms of sentient life rather than anything distinguishing that particular organization.
- The internet
- The microchip
- Cellular communications
- GPS
- Solid state memory
- Capacitive sensors
Just the technologies that more or less every other Silicon Valley innovation is based upon.
That is, he was one of his own kind. A legend, if you could call him that.
Pure injections of capital may work for basic needs in Africa, but tend to flounder in creative endeavors. From what I've seen, access to resources - a strong entrepreneurial community, top researchers, good hardware, and a flexible and customer-rich business environment - will always trump access to money.
Unfortunately, peacetime development lacks that feeling.