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Comment by mirker | Hacker News Reader

Is there a non-vacuous example of AI being used in this context? Is it matrix multiplication, linear regression, same old control theory, or deep learning?

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If you want sense of what real AI warfare will look like, look at Cambridge Analytica. Extremely primitive, but still highly effective. The key concept is the ability to sift through vast piles of data, find previously unknown patterns, and then exploit them. Humans have to make one ad for the whole nation. AI can micro-target hundreds or thousands of communities with custom propaganda, often even contradicting itself, achieving a much more powerful result. Now apply this approach to broader conflicts.

Yeah, I think the point of China's term "Informationized Warfare" is to manipulate information flow and content to serve your interests more than your enemy's. If you can distort the perspective of an opponent country's decision makers or twist popular opinion there to foment internal dissent (as Russia famously has done in the US in the past decade w/o using any AI, so far), then you win.

I also believe this strategy is not only about conducting occasional violent hot wars but very much about conducting a non-violent day-to-day cold war which is largely invisible to the public (both China's and the US's). China has been waging such a "cold war" in the US for over a decade in their many break-ins onto US computers to steal IP, especially from high-tech and military/intelligence sources. In the last 5 years, they more active in international PR initiatives to promote their economic and political interests. China's AI and data-driven social engineering techniques will surely play an increasing role in daily practices like these.

Info-based warfare isn't about killing the enemy as much as weakening them, as Sun Tzu famously wrote, and I believe that's a view that China embraces. If you're patient, you don't need physical war. You can win simply by helping your enemy become more of a dysfunctional loser.

Was Cambridge Analytica highly effective? My understanding was that it was only used by Cruz in the 2016 primaries. In the main election, the Trump campaign found RNC’s data to be more useful than CA’s.

Cambridge Analytica was largely a nothing burger [0].

[0] https://twitter.com/nickconfessore/status/131385399616835174...

There is no evidence that Cambridge Analytica was "highly effective". How many voters did they convince to change their votes? Please provide a number backed by reliable data.

I've worked in Ad Tech for awhile now at many different places. While the data and privacy issues that abound are mind blowing, this process:

> sift through vast piles of data, find previously unknown patterns, and then exploit them.

is much harder to pull of sucessfuly than you think. Having worked in the weeds with many projects of this nature, in practice these models are wildly less useful and powerful than the people buying the output from them believe.

For an individual case, you can exploit this data pretty well to find out shocking amount of personal information about a person. Doing this at scale in a way that doesn't converge into noise is much harder.

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