“Military AI Needs Its Manhattan Project”

Oh fuck no. This sounds like:

Let's hookup Metasploit to AI, give it seed crypto totalling $100k USD, purchase access to buy 0d's from Zerodium, domain registrar, email, VOIP phone numbers, and let it loose on the world to see what happens. Oh, and if we want self-designing killer drones and self-designing software and systems, that's cool too because every other country is going to do it.

Like becoming a chemist instead of a pyro: I agree that things should be tried, but you don't want to light a segment of an Space Shuttle SRB motor segment to defrost your windshield every day. Both are playing with fucking fire, but the habit should be not normalizing a routine of unsafe practices. There is no "Manhattan Project" to be had here because there is no clear, unclassified achievement objective to produce a universal, static forever, turnkey "nuclear weapon".

In my humble opinion the US needs a cyber security Manhattan/Moonshot project a great deal more. We should be training phalanxes of people to code securely, designing open and secure hardware (no more binary blobs, no more back doors) and doing everything else we can do uplift our aging and insecure infrastructure.

This isn't jingoistic sabre rattling: allegedly secure systems will always have some flaws and rely on people and therefore always be exploitable, so this isn't an us vs an enemy argument about some Boogeyman coming to get us. It's more about acknowledging we need the modern day equivalent of air bags, seat belts and crumple zones so the average user is more secure in their endeavors and proper lane markers, potholes filled and so on so where they travel is the best it can reasonably be as well.

I thought the military worked with Palantir, and Accenture, and Amazon, and Google, and Facebook, and ... Is this to say no one has produced advanced AI for the military? I find this hard to believe. Is it that persons in advanced positions are older, and don't themselves understand the actual problem space?

It feels a bit shallow, this pitch for more military funding. The DoD disappeared how many billions of dollars, for how many years? IMO, we need to see restructuring across the military and improved internal checks and balances before considering blindly throwing any more money into corrupt pockets.

An “AI Manhattan Project” sounds like “SKYNET” with extra words.