
Putin: Leader in artificial intelligence will rule world - jeremynixon
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/putin-leader-in-artificial-intelligence-will-rule-world/2017/09/01/969b64ce-8f1d-11e7-9c53-6a169beb0953_story.html?utm_term=.d2f001d34881
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chi17
> Putin: Leader in artificial intelligence will rule world

Correction: remove "Leader in" from the title.

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aub3bhat
Artificial intelligence == ML/CV/NLP (not the AGI) will transform the world
over the next two decades. People vastly underestimate importance of recent
advances in detection/recognition/NLU tasks.

Sure it sounds boring by some sci-fi standards but when it comes to warfare
ability to deploy cheap drones that can do near real time enemy identification
will transform not just the battelfield but the entire society. Look at the
current heated debate on Police stops leading to shooting. In less than a
decade we will have autonomous cop car capable of disabling vehicles and
firing tasers.

The world will be completely transformed just with todays state of the art
tech. All it currently lacks are "platforms" for deployments.

~~~
johnchristopher
I might believe in the advent of AI once my phone alarm disables itself
instead of ringing when I have been travelling at 75miles per hour for 30
minutes, obviously awake and going to work.

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aub3bhat
Unless you are traveling in subway/Uber/Car-pool/commuter-rail and catching a
quick nap.

What does this have to do with AI. In fact having an alarm that randomly gets
disbabled is Stupid design.

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johnchristopher
Why would an AI randomly disable the alarm ? Indeed that would be a stupid AI.

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kmeaw
I have found the source video. Here is a link to the relevant part:
[https://youtu.be/iXXHVZIkw9Y?t=3296](https://youtu.be/iXXHVZIkw9Y?t=3296)

He is actually talking not about AI in general, but about self-driving
technologies and drones.

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nopinsight
In another piece of news:

China to add AI courses in primary education

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15154289](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15154289)

Where does the US stand? Any serious plans by its leaders and the government?

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sillysaurus3
Oh goodness, please do not make courses mandatory. China adding AI courses to
their primary education means their students will hate it.

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moretai
Enough will get spit out from the grinder and do something. The vast majority
will hate it, but who cares...

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dogma1138
Why is this flagged? If this was Musk or Page instead of Putin it would've
been on the front page with 1000 comments.

You can dislike Putin because of his actions but you cannot deem his opinion
irrelevant.

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lostmsu
> you cannot deem his opinion irrelevant

Why not? Its not like he's an expert on that matter.

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dogma1138
Because he sets the course for a nation, one with the will to ascend back to
its former place.

The opinions of experts are often irrelevant unless they have the agency to
act. Based on your categorization Musk and Page's opinions aren't relevant in
this manner either, neither of them is what one would classify an expert in
AI, but like Putin thier opinion matters because the agency they wield.

~~~
lostmsu
> Based on your categorization Musk and Page's opinions aren't relevant in
> this manner either, neither of them is what one would classify an expert in
> AI

Bingo!

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reilly3000
Can't wait to see how these words sound in 20 years

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bhollan
Don't get me wrong, I fully subscribe to the school of thought that he's a
murderer, but honestly, drones fighting drones sounds pretty good.

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Iv
It terms of life saved, I totally agree.

In terms of social progress, this causes a big problem: military power, until
now, depended in big parts on having military people on your side. So sure,
they can be corrupt, swayed by a more or less evil ideology or just plain
racist, but in order to be a leader, you needed to at least satisfy a big
group of people. And it was easier if it were the majority.

Automated warfare makes war and military power purely capital-based. That just
seem wrong.

And also, do you really think that drones will be solely used on other
peoples' drones?

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staunch
This already happened in the 2003 Iraq invasion. It was wildly unpopular, so
Cheney & Gang crafted a bullshit strategy around using very few troops and a
lot more technology. It never made sense. They just wanted a war and knew they
had to placate members of the military and people concerned about a Vietnam-
style draft.

The next time their strategy might actually succeed. Once the U.S. military
has a drone army capable of patrolling every street in Iraq 24/7/365.

> _In a January 2003 CBS poll, 64% of Americans had approved of military
> action against Iraq; however, 63% wanted Bush to find a diplomatic solution
> rather than go to war, and 62% believed the threat of terrorism directed
> against the U.S. would increase due to war._

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2003_invasion_of_Iraq](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2003_invasion_of_Iraq)

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adventured
It's interesting the extent to which Americans didn't support going into Iraq
and knocking over Saddam during the first Gulf War. The widely supported
essentially what Bush did, in pushing their forces out of Kuwait and semi-
crippling Iraq's military capabilities (no fly zones, sanctions, etc).

The American people had to be terrified into Iraq part 2. They had to be lied
to constantly, abused with terrorism color codes on a weekly basis, constantly
told their lives were in danger at the airport, lied to about the threat from
WMDs, and the warhawks had to use 9/11 on a constant basis as a rallying cry
to drive blind patriotism and to auto-silence anyone that would stand against
it.

The authorities had to put on one helluva an aggressive propaganda effort to
convince Americans to allow it.

Contrast that with the non-existent support for a large military action in
Syria (invasion or otherwise), which Obama's Administration floated and
quickly pulled away from. The American people are _very_ war sick at this
point, fortunately.

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mercurialshark
Yet the actual purpose of this statement is lost on most.

Using popular concepts to plausibly question the sustainable dominance of
others in the geopolitical power-game. It really doesn't matter if this
statement proves accurate or not in the future.

"Artificial intelligence" is an interchangeable subject for the purposes of
that statement. It's Psy Ops 101. A non-falsifiable piece of propaganda, used
to undermine and chip-away at assumptions, which is particularly useful for
sowing doubt in perceived institutional strength and their ability to sustain
success when new variables are introduced.

In short, swap "AI" for any emerging subject matter or previously unaddressed
and now relevant issue and you can make the same statement, in perpetuity, as
ammunition against your opponents.

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cmelbye
This is especially true when combined with mass surveillance, domestically and
abroad. Huge trove of data that is likely already being mined with machine
learning and other techniques.

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corporateslave2
Yeah if you think about all the unstructured phone conversations tagged with
people who are terrorists, and then jammed into a neural net, things get
powerful. But taking that a step further, you can identify political dissent,
etc

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0xBA5ED
And he thinks it's going to be China. (probably)

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ericzawo
He's not wrong.

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pzone
What makes you so confident in that assertion?

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Grue3
And that definitely won't be him, what with causing massive brain drain with
his retrograde policies.

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erikb
Everybody knows it, everybody talks about it, Google is the only one who
really does it for now (afaik).

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billly
What is going on here

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0xbear
Dude is 64 years old, and was never seen using a computer. Give him a break on
this one, he's likely just parroting Medvedev, who in turn is parroting one of
his distant underlings.

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aleyan
> Dude is 64 years old, and was never seen using a computer.

Putin became acting president of Russian Federation on New Years Eve 1999. In
months since, the only thing he brought into Yeltsin's former office was a
computer[1]. He may not be a digital native, but to underestimate him is a
mistake.

[1]
[https://youtu.be/EjU8Fg3NFmo?t=3m10s](https://youtu.be/EjU8Fg3NFmo?t=3m10s)

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0xbear
Immediately after that point in the video he says he doesn't know anything
about it.

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asdfzxc
So you believe him now? It is in his interest to have his opponents
underestimate him.

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0xbear
I would bet you $1000 that he doesn't even know how to use email. :-)

