Comment by dfee | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dfee | Hacker News Reader

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Eric Schmidt is a household name around here. Doesn’t mean I give a damn about what he thinks.

> Dr Schmidt, who is currently the Chair of the US Department of Defense's innovation board, said he thinks the US is still ahead of China in tech innovation, for now.

“Invest in my next project now, before it’s too late!” is what I read it as.

Edit: let me clarify. Innovation isn't zero-sum. I believe America is the most fascinating experiment – balancing (albeit imperfectly) innovation with ethics. There's a lot of innovation that can happen – and at a cost that's too great.

For example, North Korea has demonstrated an ability to develop nuclear weapons (deep technical advancement), and China can develop datasets on millions (billions?) of people (broad technical advancement). But, the ethical costs are too great. I don't want to celebrate cultures of innovation that do this – foreign or domestic.

Sure, let's always have an eye on increasing our investments against R&D – fundamental and more broadly. But I'm no apologist for falling behind when the truth is that that view of innovation is a zero-sum game where we lose our humanity in the process.

Weird examples. The US has demonstrated an ability to develop nuclear weapons (deep technical advancement) as well and it has developed datasets on millions of people (see the Snowden revelations). How and why are you dismissing the ethical costs in this case?

The cost of innovation in crude governments of faith (Dictatorships, Tyrranies, etc) is measured in starvation, famine and deaths in the population. The cost of innovation in modern governments built on systems (socialist or capitalist democracies) is a lot of squaking about the innovation and its uses.

The cost of the NORK's replicating nukes and China's profiling their citizens contrasts with the US in that those costs are much lower in the US. The US isn't carting off undesirables to re-education camps (there's a prison system with a lot of people in jail but every single one of them was put there by a jury) or starving its citizenry to make innovations (although there is a point to be made there). This, in turn, tends to increase the rate of innovation (people don't come to associate the change with bad things and because they are discussing them more people are exploring them).

China or Europe can be #1 in scientific paper publishing but until I see robots that can do what General Dynamics is doing or even what Honda was doing 5 years ago, it's all just copying the leader and the development cycle for those countries to product decent copies is quite long and tends to be inconsistent due to people developing bad cases of I-don't-give-a-shit-itus. E.G. China has problems innovating for the same reason they have problems making an aircraft carrier and maintaining a navy; their steel mills churn out inconsistent crap.

The BBC article is trying to deliver a message using Schmidt's name, and isn't coming to any conclusions or providing any data. It's pure propaganda and a total waste of time to read or comment on really.

Yeah the problem with Chinese innovation is the government still has a brain drain for fundamental science and Advanced manufacturing which still needs years of development. So thanks a lot Trump to help creating a Chinese hostile atmosphere to turn it to a brain gain (you can argue about it but many talented people are going back whatsoever)

However the people there are ironically submissive, dictatorial, flexible and long term thinking. Every now and then magically CCP would adopt some bottom up Suggestion and turn it to top down strategy that does the right thing

^ Look into NSCAI, a DoD think tank he's on the board of. Specifically, their plans for competing against China in essentially an AI arms race

The United States balances innovation with ethics ?

The people of Hiroshima or the victims of agent orange might have something to say about that.

>The people of Hiroshima

You know what I found most fascinating about the Hiroshima memorial in Japan? They go on about how bad the bombing was but literally have a statement to the effect that if Japan was invaded they would have fought to the last man, woman and child. Millions would have died on both sides and the country would have been a wasteland. So unpleasant as it is, sometimes ethics does require the lesser of two evils as there is no good choice.

There are reams of scholarship about how the bomb wasn’t necessary to end the war in the Pacific Theater. This was, in fact, the conclusion at the time of the United States Strategic Bombing Survey:

> Bаsеd on а dеtаilеd invеstigаtion of аll thе fаcts, аnd supportеd by thе tеstimony of thе surviving Jаpаnеsе lеаdеrs involvеd, it is thе Survеy's opinion thаt cеrtаinly prior to 31 Dеcеmbеr 1945, аnd in аll probаbility prior to 1 Novеmbеr 1945, Jаpаn would hаvе surrеndеrеd еvеn if thе аtomic bombs hаd not bееn droppеd, еvеn if Russiа hаd not еntеrеd thе wаr, аnd еvеn if no invаsion hаd bееn plаnnеd or contеmplаtеd.

Americans have invented this popular narrative about Hiroshima solely because it undergirds the fragile notion of “heroism” that country still clings to. Unnecessarily nuking a city that was at that point primarily women, children, and old people is anathema to the story we tell about ourselves, so we’ve simply decided it wasn’t so.

https://www.airuniversity.af.edu/Portals/10/AUPress/Books/B_...

Saying we knew something in hindsight given information not available to the decision makers at the time is a poor argument. Amazingly Truman didn't have the honest testimony of the Japanese leaders to make his choice on in 1945.

Plenty of US military leaders advised against the bombing, prior to the strike, including Eisenhower. But we’re not speaking to legitimacy of hindsight views anyway, instead the lasting, incorrect assertion that it was necessary or justified, which you embraced in your first comment.

Do you actually think damages caused in actual wars are somehow comparable to those in peace time technical development? What do you really mean by that?

DuPont developed Teflon, then made billions by taking it to market without developing a way to dispose of the toxic waste byproducts of the manufacturing process. They just dumped it into virgin streams in West Virginia.

Then they avoided responsibility for the deaths they caused by spending millions in the us court system to reduce the damages payout to less than one years profits.

This is comping directly from the DoD, so the military. And yes, the military uses peacetime to develop technologies to be used later in war to devastating effects.

WWII advanced nuclear research, computing, electronics, and aerospace by decades within a few years.

Was that a good thing? Was it a bad thing? Is there a definitive ethical answer to this question?

There probably is - but not for this culture.

How about we look at that quote with a bit of nuance?

I’m willing to hear your nuanced take on how America balances innovation with ethics.

It’s the very same innovation that is used to wage wars that have destabilized whole regions and led to the deaths of millions. Or the same military force that is used to implicitly backstop dictators that have carried out some of the worst genocides of this century.

I’m not sure this is what balancing ethics looks like.

America is innovative. Sure. America is god gifts to humanity the most ethical and innovative civilization we couldn’t do without ? No.

I think that quote could use a bit of nuance itself (albeit, yeah, maybe bringing up Hiroshima like that does set off Godwin's Law alarm). China can develop datasets on millions (billions?) of people and, yes, given the current state of AI research, that can give them an edge, and I am, too, of the opinion that it's better to not have this edge than to develop it at such an expense in human lives and well-being.

So where is the scientific answer to that? Is there any serious additional research effort, and more industrial effort, going into models that are less reliant on training data, for example? What industries are trying to become less dependent on massive data collection, and on massively data-driven models?

You can still get heaps of money with a product that can be aptly described as "it does linear regression with sugar on top and it'll tell you great things if you throw more than 100GB of tables at it". Selling an analytics SaaS that sucks up data from every imaginable data source to tell you things about your Google Analytics graphs is still a pretty profitable business. On the other hand, serious researchers in academia, and a lot of talented engineers, are struggling to get funding for topics that do not have the magic words "machine learning", "data-driven", and "AI" in them, and they mostly go ignored because everything can be solved with enough data.

This is literally coming out of the military. I think the OP is spot on.

US ? Ethics ? I just choked on my coffee.

Such tunnel-minded posters.

The GP clearly meant the US is ethical RELATIVE to other countries currently "innovating" i.e. China.

Even as stoutly anti-American as my country and people are, I still fervently hope it's the USA and NOT China who prevail in future techno/political battles.

Granted, when the U.S. was as old as the current Chinese government is, it had officially sanctioned slavery in place.

My theory is that as countries become stronger and more confident that they can withstand internal pressures without outsiders immediately being able to take advantage of them, they'll slowly become more and more democratic as they prosper.

I think this is vastly preferable than having the CIA install a pro-US puppet regime that is deeply unpopular and will only lead to another coup, meaning investors are not confident in the country being stable enough for investment and the populations suffer.

That’s pretty sinophobic. What are you basing your determinations on? US led media?

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