OpenAI changes policy to allow military applications | Hacker News Reader

OpenAI changes policy to allow military applications

techcrunch.com

49 pointsmiles24 comments

Good. In the US, we should all wake up to the fact that we enjoy the lives we lead in large part to the fact that we’re able to project strength. AI will be another piece in the puzzle of national defense.

One can support a strong military and still not want analysis or decision making to be overly automated. Certainly not by an LLM that could easily hallucinate that World War 3 has started.

One can also want to contribute to the military via taxes or service but not personal data. Just as one can be pro-police while also pro-fourth amendment. Respect people’s privacy or you won’t have a country worth protecting.

But nobody said that there is any move to overtly automated decision making.

That’s a proposal that you made.

What exactly do you think they are going to use it for? To discuss the best way to make a sandwich?

At best the AI will only assist with tactical analysis. Eventually it will be more directly involved in decision making. Come on, we already saw this movie on July 2nd, 2003.

What lives exactly do you mean? Because there's nothing unique about America that plenty of other countries don't have anymore, and most of us manage to spend considerably less on defence than America.

Those countries manage to spend less on military than America, because of Pax Americana. This is a uniquely peaceful and prosperous time throughout history where there has been a liberalist unipolar political climate worldwide because of the USA, and dozens of countries have taken advantage of the fruits of America's defense labor - while chipping in little for themselves, and others, in return. America has had the strength and posture to hold the entire Western world on its behalf, and did so.

Europe is re-arming, one of the two leading candidates for this election cycle are Anti-NATO. Expect this generations-old luxury for other western countries beyond America to soon change.

I have a feeling we'll manage just fine without our lord and savior America.

Probably; but that's currently who you have to thank for your more diverse spending budget.

Fuck if I ever work on anything that intentionally kills people. I see it as little different from shooting someone in the head, except you get to pretend that you’re squeaky clean at the end of the workday.

That’s how you get Skynet bros. AGI + military applications seems like the worst possible combo in the history of our species. Note that I’m not against the use of machine learning in military applications _so as long as it’s not smart enough to nuke its maker_. Which this has a potential to eventually be.

I had missed this news... However, this seems to be from January?

Now it will be a "for-profit", so not interest for the public interest or don't care for any possible hurt to the human life if that allows more "profit" to flow in...

Go tell the Ukrainian military that they "don't care for any possible hurt to the human life." It puzzles me how that can be going on and people still think that any military use of tech is inherently immoral. The morality is in the cause the war is being fought for.

War is never moral

Wars and conflicts have been around long before we had defined morals.

That is both utterly thought-terminating and irrelevant.

So is a reductive opinion such as “war is never moral” and completely ignoring thousands of years of human history.

So the Ukrainians should not be defending themselves against a foreign invasion?

Defending themselves against foreign aggressors who have committed documented atrocities against their population, and who are on record as intending to commit genocide against them when they win, is immoral?

Resisting occupation?

Not even the Catholic Church agrees with you and they're famously aggressively anti-war. From Pope Francis, “war is in itself a crime against humanity.” John Paul II, "No, never again war, which destroys the lives of innocent people, teaches how to kill, throws into upheaval even the lives of those who do the killing and leaves behind a trail of resentment and hatred." And yet church doctrine outlines the criteria for a just war.

1. The damage inflicted by the aggressor on the nation or community of nations must be lasting, grave, and certain.

2. All other means of putting an end to it must have been shown to be impractical or ineffective.

3. There must be serious prospects of success.

4. The use of arms must not produce evils and disorders graver than the evil to be eliminated.

The US gets tripped up on 4. a lot.

#3 and #4 are worth valuing, but also sometimes wickedly hard to measure. I mean, look at the interventions in places like Yugoslavia and Libya, where the goal was to stop disorder and/or genocide. Or the disaster that was the UN intervention in Rwanda.

Clausewitz teaches that wars have a character all their own, unique to their time and circumstance, and that understanding the nature of the war you are engaged in is simultaneously vital and very, very difficult to do.

That is unrelated. If you develop new kind of weapons, both sides will use it in the end.

And in addition, from all sides, if official military agencies want to use a tech, no one will be able to prevent them. But it is another thing to have a corporation actively supporting the military complex by working with it if it can increase their profit.

It is because I am lottery winner that was lucky enough to have been born in a time and place that going to war was never a serious consideration as a young man, unlike almost every other young man of the past. The closest I had to get was watching my country blow things up on CNN.

A person in this situation can't help but to have a ridiculous, unrealistic perspective on war.

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