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Comment by phdelightful | Hacker News Reader

Can the US taxpayer tolerate (financially, politically) what it will take to get the best and brightest to do AI work for .gov and .mil instead of adtech? All you have to do is look at defense lab salaries to see there is going to be a problem keeping talent around. Some people are certainly willing to take a pay cut to work on national defense, but probably not enough. Perhaps especially not the kind of person who went into adtech in the first place.

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This isn't going to happen by recruiting people to work for government labs. It'll happen by contracting the work out to companies that are already doing top AI research (many of which also work in adtech) and through grand challenges that incentivize research teams and startups to make new breakthroughs.

Google, for example, would have gladly accepted Project Maven contracts if its own employees hadn't protested. If China does supersede the U.S. militarily, that may end up looking naive in retrospect.

Ah, yes, the solution is to cede more of the country to corporations!

People who feel strongly that current procurement strategies are the wrong way to go about things should devote as much toil and treasure as they can to seeing their preferred solution materialize. In the mean time, I hope they will allow others to work within our existing system to keep our adversaries from replacing the US with something much worse for the entire world.

With government salary bands what they are, there is nothing they really can do.

I basically agree. I don't think the political mechanisms exist in the short-to-intermediate term to get salaries in government labs high enough. As you point out, the extent to which "civilians" will be willing to participate in these lines of work is an open question (said without judgement, just as an observation). Presumably folks who have opted-in to work at defense contractors will be more willing, but do they have the ability to attract a sufficient amount of talent in this area?

Paycheques are very hard to walk away from but a lot of very bright minds will go into defence right out of school and never look back.

The way to short circuit this is to make certain classes of adtech de facto (maybe even de jure) illegal.

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