MIT Committee Report on the Changing Nature of Information (1983) [pdf] | Hacker News Reader

MIT Committee Report on the Changing Nature of Information (1983) [pdf]

archive.org

Found this in MIT’s basement archives after Ron Rivest told me he’d helped write it but no digital copy existed.

The 1983 committee was reacting to federal pressure on university cryptography. It warned that “trying to firewall cryptography … will shrink the talent pool and slow U.S. progress” (p 2) and predicted a labor crunch if non-citizens were barred from cutting-edge VLSI work.

Swap “cryptology & VLSI” for “LLM weights & 3 nm” and it reads like 2025 BIS testimony. Do today’s export-control proposals on AI and chips risk the same backfire? Curious to hear from anyone involved in CHIPS-Act workforce planning.

I guess CHIPS-Act might be even worse: where cryptography didn't end up in huge-volume products that brought big bucks at that time, It is different with AI now. Nvidia almost has a monopoly on AI-capable chips. At least for the vast majority of the 'no time to adapt to AMD/Intel/Google chips' researchers. Export controls break that dependence for overseas researchers and they'll look for alternatives, if possible in-country. Meaning that the CHIPS-Act actively hurts American tech companies and induces research spending to build up foreign AI chip capabilities that can undercut any current advantage.

The next Asia-is-cheaper-and-better shock will be AI chips from the likes of Huawei, Samsung, NEC.

When you say MIT’s basement archives, what are you referring to? Archivesspace? Are there other caches of paper documents outside of MIT’s Archivesspace scope?

I visited MIT and dug through their physical archives. They have boxes filled with documents that you can request online. Took me three trips to finally find this report.

Could I request whether you’d be willing to contact me via my contact in my profile page? While I’ve enjoyed some luck I would like to engage better with MIT AS, and I think you may have built greater familiarity with their processes, published and otherwise than me to date.

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