I went to the "use my calculator yourself" page. The calculator looks nice but the interface is either awfull or I don't get it. I tried for 5 minutes to type in "1/5 + 1/5 + 1/5" and failed...
16 karma · joined March 21, 2022
Is there reason to expect this to change? Maintaining something like Torch and keeping it competitive in terms of speed is a HUGE amount of work for systems development, writing insane numbers of GPU kernels, etc. After having read it, I wouldn't quite yet call the tone of the discussion you linked "serious talk"...
[1]: https://discourse.julialang.org/t/state-of-machine-learning-...
It's unlikely that your adversaries can decrypt your traffic right now (break things like RSA). However, advances in number theory and/or computing power might enable them to do that in the future. Your adversary can just record your encrypted traffic and wait until the means to decrypt it become available. Thus, for data that has to stay secure for a long time (and where you want to be as sure as possible that it will) it's not good to rely on predictions into the future about advances in number theory or computing. This is the niche that QKD is aiming at.
For what it's worth, China has a huge QKD network, which cost them a lot of money. Their QKD satellite also cost a lot of money. They are in fact world leaders in quantum communication technology as well and spend a lot on researching it. I wonder why they made this investment, whether it was smart, and what they get out of it.
I also have doubts that QKD will see much use in the coming decades and even more doubts that its use will be done properly and actually make a lot of systems more secure. Securing systems is very hard and securing individual communication links (what QKD does) is not the main problem. In the current landscape, securing your data and communications to a reasonable level just isn't worth it for the vast majority of buisnesses, since they can offload most of the damages of being breached to their customers. There is a danger that QKD will be seen as "magic fairy dust" that you sprinkle over your systems just to claim you're trying very hard to secure them (this image is still widespread about standard cryptography as well).
On the contrary, I strongly encourage them to give input, and I criticise those who would rather give up, dismiss the questions as impossible to solve, and lament how technology has been destroying society for the last 2000 years, while self-driving cars still start being used leading to suffering that could have been prevented by thinking about things more and seeing them from more points of view.
Which inputs by philosophers or the public are being ignored?
Yes. I think that's a big part of why it's not necessary to "completely, once and for all solve" ethical problems to automate things that might run into them. One could easily argue (and people of course have) that it's also immoral not to take measures that will reduce accidents, which I'm quite sure will happen with AI drivers in the not too distant future.
His opinion was that such "deep ethical problems" have been around for millenia and it's unreasonable to expect anyone to "just solve" them. Therefore, self-driving cars will not have solutions to these fundamental issues and, as a consequence, society should not and probably will not accept self-driving cars.
I agree that we will not "just solve" such questions (i.e., arrive on a consensus across humanity) any time soon. However, I also think such questions are almost irrelevant, because the "conundrums" ethical philosophy discusses don't happen in practice. There is no need to "solve" these problems in order to use self-driving cars. We can (and will) slowly progress towards a consensus-ish on what we want (or, at least, can tolerate) the "moral choices" of self-driving to be in almost all situations that arise in practice. In fact, AI can be a great step forward in "practical morality", because an AI will actually do what it "considers" morally right.
Of course, there will be many difficult questions to answer. However, I think it's a fundamental error to just give up and take the position of my philosopher friend. Moral qualms have not stopped technology in the past and I find it unplausible that societey will somehow "not accept" it. As a philosopher, or even just a member of society, you have to see AI as a chance and an obligation to advance morality. It's pretty clear that human morality is changing (I believe advancing) over the millenia. AI marks a transition where the moral questions of the past begin to make a difference in the real world because what we set as moral standards has a much larger effect on what people and things do.
To make progress on this, we have to accept that it is a fools errand to try "deriving" correct morality from "first principles" (Kant famously derived from absolute and eternal first principles that it's morally OK to kill "illegitimate" new-borns as a means of birth control). Rather, it's an exercise in consensus building. Likewise, it is not reasonable to expect moral solutions to arrive at something "perfect and complete". Practically relevant morality will be fuzzy and everchanging, just like judicial systems.
I am quite sad that so many philosophers and members of the public seem reluctant to accept this challenge at overhauling the millenia old stagnated academic debates. If they don't participate, engineers will "solve" these problems themselves, perhaps choosing ease of implementation over moral considerations.