The Commerce Department is considering national security restrictions on AI
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
At Cygnus we generated a version with no cryptography at all and sent it to Switzerland where someone wrote crypto routines (available in the open literature) that interoperated, and the everyone on the planet had access to it (but American folks had a different version). All so that the Swiss stock exchange could use Kerberos for single sign on and end-to-end encryption.
>illegal to provide them to non-us persons without a license
I wonder if in this case Git{hub|lab} would need the license, or the person uploading the code?
True, software is dual use[0] but it's too slippery. Even things like nuclear weapons designs[1] are getting pretty easy for people to get their hands on. This stuff is just text! How are you going to stop this from spreading? It won't work.
Besides, top-shelf AI tech isn't much better than mid-shelf stuff. For example, self-driving car technology. We're talking about the difference of 1000kms with no intervention by a human driver vs 5000kms. A terrorist weaponizing self-driving tech for, say, a mobile weapons platform (AKs connected to remote triggers, say) doesn't need the top shelf stuff. They need an auto that can go maybe 10kms.
Thing is, unlike most people I talk to in tech, I actually support the majority of the objectives intelligence agencies in the west have. I just don't know how you solve this one. We need free speech to be a liberal democracy but information itself is becoming dangerous. How do you square that?
Further, if the power of individuals keeps going up due to technological advancement how do you maintain security and freedom at the same time? The only way I can see it working is for individuals to continue to get more peaceful.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual-use_technology
[1] Thank goodness weapons grade fissile material is hard to make.
You can't. Either speech is free or it's not. There are reasonable restrictions - literally inciting violence or things done to intentionally cause harm ("Fire!" in a theater, etc).
For information, the only thing you can do is make it classified, which is hard to do when it's a private company doing the innovating.
Can you give references?
In my experience of living in Germany, freedom of expression is welcomed as long as it's the right kind of expression.
At least since NetzDG was passed I'm not sure it's quite that simple.
Google[0] says this about the NetzDG:
"The Network Enforcement Law (NetzDG) requires social networks with more than 2 million registered users in Germany to exercise a local take down of “obviously illegal” content [..] To qualify for a removal under NetzDG, content needs to fall under one of the 22 criminal statutes in the German criminal code to which NetzDG refers."
Politico[1] said this "Titanic, a German satirical magazine, was similarly barred after parodying anti-Muslim comments on its own Twitter account"
[0] https://transparencyreport.google.com/netzdg/youtube [1] https://www.politico.eu/article/germany-hate-speech-netzdg-f...
This is a good example of something that is, without a doubt, unconstitutional to ban in the US.
The classic sci fi example is spaceships; a rocket travelling at .2c is a devastating weapon and amazing tool for transit.
But so is AI tech, drones, and other technologies. Crypto can stop hackers and the government. 3D printers can print pen guns as well as plastic tools.
The material itself is easy to make. It's the delivery systems that are hard to engineer. Missile technology is literally rocket science.
https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2018/11/19/2018-25...
Relevant excerpt:
The representative general categories of technology for which Commerce currently seeks to determine whether there are specific emerging technologies that are essential to the national security of the United States include:
(2) Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning technology, such as:
(i) Neural networks and deep learning (e.g., brain modelling, time series prediction, classification);
(ii) Evolution and genetic computation (e.g., genetic algorithms, genetic programming);
(iii) Reinforcement learning;
(iv) Computer vision (e.g., object recognition, image understanding);
(v) Expert systems (e.g., decision support systems, teaching systems);
(vi) Speech and audio processing (e.g., speech recognition and production);
(vii) Natural language processing (e.g., machine translation);
(viii) Planning (e.g., scheduling, game playing);
(ix) Audio and video manipulation technologies (e.g., voice cloning, deepfakes);
(x) AI cloud technologies; or
(xi) AI chipsets.
This stupid approach was such a disaster in the days of crypto controls. Lifting them protected Americans and unleashed a huge number of new capabilities.
Source ?
Hogarth expressed the opinion that Google's purchase of DeepMind(A UK based company initially) is going to be seen increasingly in the future as an amazing coup, a unit with some of the world's greatest minds on Deep learning allowed to be sold to a foreign conglomerate. I have to say as time goes by and governments realize how strategic their AI community is, I agree.
I do not doubt deep minds talents, but your comment seems to me an overstatement on its value.
Source?
"At that point people who are angry, mistrustful, and may not understand a thing about computers will regulate your industry into the ground. You'll be left like those poor saps who work in the nuclear plants, who have to fill out a form in triplicate anytime they want to sharpen a pencil."
A large fraction of the advances in AI come either from China proper or by Chinese grad students in the US, or by ethnic Chinese raised in the Americas. I don't think a large fraction of this demographic shares the cold war mentality of the war hawks in the Pentagon.
USG will probably resort to will be to put restrictions on export of Nvidia GPUs/TPUs (similar to that on Intel Xeons). Hopefully, this'll have the unintended effect of breaking their monopoly of the DL market.
Let us open free no restriction between china and America software border not one way. Let us do Facebook and Twitter ... no.
Open source is great in a free word and inside a free world. At least the free rider paid but just benefit to their country even they live, study and suck you dry.
When something is new or "scary" doesn't mean knee-jerk legislation will do anything other than lead a country to missing out and innovation strengthing other countries.
If you want to restrict something, you would restrict the tooling. Like we restrict the tooling to make advanced aircraft wings. In the case of ML that means you restrict ... migration of certain groups of engineers? Sale of GPUs?
I believe it is fair, to at least start with the premise that, restrictions that would normally apply to some data, would reasonably extend to the Model trained by them, obviously, how much depends on the context and sensitivity of the data.
More worrying is the fact that for every “benefit” we receive from AI (self driving cars, open source home automation), there are numerous, globally negative consequences such as discriminatory practices based off biased training data. The Chinese executive mistakened for a jaywalker is a clear example of this.
It feels like this is a train that cannot be stopped that will lead to disasterous circumstances.
I think the car insurance industry has shown how unwilling governments are to do anything about that sort of thing. No need to involve AI.
Restricting information sharing on the internet is the complete opposite. If there was no law then everybody would do it, many people will fight you on principle to the point of overt civil disobedience, and if even one source is available the whole thing falls apart -- including from other countries you have no jurisdiction over.
I think someone wrote an article about this many years ago called "the colour of bits" or something like that. Basically the idea that you can trick your way out of the law with "it's just a number" type arguments are nonsense.
If both were provably independently created at the same time, you would probably instead be having an uproar among scientists about the probability for such an event happening. It may still cause issues because the probability of such an event is so small, that the probability of the proof of their being independently created being wrong is the far more likely event.
https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2018/11/19/2018-25...