Putin: Leader in artificial intelligence will rule world
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
Correction: remove "Leader in" from the title.
Sure it sounds boring by some sci-fi standards but when it comes to warfare ability to deploy cheap drones that can do near real time enemy identification will transform not just the battelfield but the entire society. Look at the current heated debate on Police stops leading to shooting. In less than a decade we will have autonomous cop car capable of disabling vehicles and firing tasers.
The world will be completely transformed just with todays state of the art tech. All it currently lacks are "platforms" for deployments.
What does this have to do with AI. In fact having an alarm that randomly gets disbabled is Stupid design.
He is actually talking not about AI in general, but about self-driving technologies and drones.
China to add AI courses in primary education
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15154289
Where does the US stand? Any serious plans by its leaders and the government?
From my experience with my elementary && high school teacher, I can safely assume that they can't even program a complex stuff, let alone understand what AI is.
It could be really interesting to see my future son/daughter ask me something I'm also interested in and probably working on.
"Seven-year-old Chen Jiahao has a problem sum he can’t solve and he can’t wait to get home from school to pose the question to his all-knowing maths tutor.
His tutor is amazing, the boy says. Just snap a photograph of the question and the tutor will provide every possible approach to solve the problem, step by step – all in a split second.
Jiahao’s tutor is inside his mother’s smartphone. It is, in fact, an app that draws on artificial intelligence (AI) technology to solve challenging maths problems for primary school children.
And it’s just one of many AI-enabled apps Jiahao uses daily on his mother’s phone. When the boy started primary school in Beijing, his teachers recommended that his parents install the apps on their phones. The software give out school assignments, grade pupils’ work and even generate unique sets of exercises for each child based on their areas of weakness.
“Jiahao likes his AI teachers,” said his mother, Yu Ting, adding that her son spends at least two hours on the AI apps every day. “He greets my phone as eagerly as he greets me.”"
Inside the AI revolution that’s reshaping Chinese society http://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/2100427/china...
Interestingly, it seems Jiahao is not allowed to bring a smartphone to school for now. That could change in the future.
The US Government does not need to mandate student course on artificial intelligence. Just as they did not need to mandate courses on the transistor, micro-processor, dozens of programming languages, html, TCP/IP, or how to be a database admin.
Tensorflow (prev DistBelief) - which helped provide the spark for this AI boom - was not derived from a command & control method, a dictate handed down by Donald Trump & Co. or Obama's Administration. It's a hilariously laughable premise.
You can trace it directly by counting AI stories on HN. There's a before TF and an after TF. I don't think it's subtle, there was a huge acceleration at exactly that time forward.
I think when you look back at big explosions in tech, it's usually hard to argue it was just some miracle product that was 10x superior to everything else that was the reason (there's usually other competing products or technologies). Often it's a combination of factors that come together and result in the boom (timing, viral cult-like adoptive behavior, etc). Whether we're talking about the web browser (specifically Netscape), the iPhone / mobile Internet, electric car (Tesla), and dozens of other technologies that seem to have followed similar sudden big spikes after seeming to be comparatively stagnant for years or decades (eg solar). They hit that inflection point and off they go. I suspect Google's TF product (along with the other mentioned reasons) was near the sweet spot on timing, combined with a significantly easier to use product, when the GPU was simultaneously getting a lot cheaper and faster. It's likely that for the AI boom to occur, we had to hit a GPU inflection point before it could lift-off fully. Google, as a result of the nature of their business (they perhaps had more reason & resources - due to the nature of search etc - than anyone else to be doing something like TF at that specific time), was there with a product at the right time.
I don't mean to suggest that Google was the sole reason for the AI boom though. Rather, I think the GPU inflection basically guaranteed it was going to happen and Google was in a sweet position out of necessity for the benefit of their own search technology (to their credit they were pursuing this tech despite their money printing monopoly). That they opened up TF, was a big deal though. You can imagine a lot of giants of industry would never in a million years open up something that potentially valuable.
There are more than 9 million Chinese who take Gaokao university entrance examination each year. Even if 1% choose to major in AI or a closely related field, that is 90,000 per annum. Among this mass, there will be some future inventors of breakthrough algorithms who could have chosen to major in physics or math without the policy.
Moreover, most of future AI workforce will focus on applying it to various domains rather than inventing whole new algorithms or frameworks. For that purpose, having more people is a clear advantage.
In my opinion the field is also developing so quickly right now that it seems too early to teach in school. By the time students graduation their knowledge would be outdated.
For more than half a century, the best and brightest minds in the world have come to America. Bret Stephens put it best:
>As for Nobelists, a report by George Mason’s Institute for Immigration Research found that Americans have won 40 percent of all Nobel Prizes ever awarded — and immigrants accounted for 35 percent of those winners. Last year, the only native-born American to win the prize was Bob Dylan, for literature. The rest of the American winners — economist Oliver Hart, physicist J. Michael Kosterlitz, chemist Fraser Stoddart — are immigrants.
>A common American conceit is that we attract brilliant foreigners because we have brilliant things: great universities, vast financial resources, a dynamic economy, high-tech. That gets things mostly backward. It’s because we have brilliant foreigners that we have those things in the first place. Google. Comcast. eBay. Kraft. Pfizer. AT&T. They all had immigrants as founders.
>Overall, a 2016 study by the Partnership for the New American Economy found that 40 percent of all Fortune 500 companies were founded or co-founded by immigrants or the children of immigrants. Taken together they employed 19 million people and had revenues of $4.8 trillion.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/01/opinion/daca-trump-dreame...
The United States will be the leader in all major technological advancements for the conceivable future, because there is more genius in the United States than there is in the rest of the world combined. There has never, in human history, been a nation so adept at attracting the best and brightest minds from the far reaches of the globe.
No other country comes close to possessing the capacity for invention and sheer brilliance that the US does.
You can dislike Putin because of his actions but you cannot deem his opinion irrelevant.
Why not? Its not like he's an expert on that matter.
The opinions of experts are often irrelevant unless they have the agency to act. Based on your categorization Musk and Page's opinions aren't relevant in this manner either, neither of them is what one would classify an expert in AI, but like Putin thier opinion matters because the agency they wield.
Bingo!
In terms of social progress, this causes a big problem: military power, until now, depended in big parts on having military people on your side. So sure, they can be corrupt, swayed by a more or less evil ideology or just plain racist, but in order to be a leader, you needed to at least satisfy a big group of people. And it was easier if it were the majority.
Automated warfare makes war and military power purely capital-based. That just seem wrong.
And also, do you really think that drones will be solely used on other peoples' drones?
The next time their strategy might actually succeed. Once the U.S. military has a drone army capable of patrolling every street in Iraq 24/7/365.
> In a January 2003 CBS poll, 64% of Americans had approved of military action against Iraq; however, 63% wanted Bush to find a diplomatic solution rather than go to war, and 62% believed the threat of terrorism directed against the U.S. would increase due to war.
The American people had to be terrified into Iraq part 2. They had to be lied to constantly, abused with terrorism color codes on a weekly basis, constantly told their lives were in danger at the airport, lied to about the threat from WMDs, and the warhawks had to use 9/11 on a constant basis as a rallying cry to drive blind patriotism and to auto-silence anyone that would stand against it.
The authorities had to put on one helluva an aggressive propaganda effort to convince Americans to allow it.
Contrast that with the non-existent support for a large military action in Syria (invasion or otherwise), which Obama's Administration floated and quickly pulled away from. The American people are very war sick at this point, fortunately.
Using popular concepts to plausibly question the sustainable dominance of others in the geopolitical power-game. It really doesn't matter if this statement proves accurate or not in the future.
"Artificial intelligence" is an interchangeable subject for the purposes of that statement. It's Psy Ops 101. A non-falsifiable piece of propaganda, used to undermine and chip-away at assumptions, which is particularly useful for sowing doubt in perceived institutional strength and their ability to sustain success when new variables are introduced.
In short, swap "AI" for any emerging subject matter or previously unaddressed and now relevant issue and you can make the same statement, in perpetuity, as ammunition against your opponents.
Authoritarian survivors like him tend to have an extremely well tuned grasp of threats to their power. Whether those are technology based or people, and whether they are domestic or foreign based. The small group of people running the CCP are similarly competent at spotting such threats, regardless of their understanding of technology. Most of the politicians that have supported the great firewall over the years, very likely had a limited understanding of the technology involved. They didn't need to understand the technology at an intimate level, they understood some of what it could enable, they understood the potential threat to their power. These people develop an almost sixth sense about it, they spend their entire lives cultivating that awareness as a means of survival and promotion.
The biggest (and only) threat to Putin's survival is a coup.
AI as a military technology can threaten Russia. It can cripple their economy. It can cripple their military technology (depending). Over decades it will likely lead to faster advances in both the economic and military spheres (including nuclear weapons and missile defenses), which would net weaken Russia. The winner accelerates, which is exactly what happened to the US vs the USSR when it came to the massive tech economy the US built out post WW2 (now our economy is ~16x the size of Russia's).
Kim Jung-un?
is there any evidence of this? This might be true, but does not seem self evident to me.
Citation needed
But either way, it's more likely he's "parroting" secret U.S. military plans that his spies obtained for him.
This is almost certainly what our military is planning and he almost certainly knows it.
Putin has spent his entire life keeping tabs on the U.S. military's plans and actions. He knows definitely what the U.S. military is working on
When he raises the issue publicly, he's executing a strategy against that effort.
Putin became acting president of Russian Federation on New Years Eve 1999. In months since, the only thing he brought into Yeltsin's former office was a computer[1]. He may not be a digital native, but to underestimate him is a mistake.