
AI and ML to Revolutionize U.S. Intelligence Community, Pentagon Official Says - bcaulfield
https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2017/11/01/gtc-dc-project-maven-jack-shanahan/
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groby_b
Oh, yay. Given the magic of AI and ML, that's going to be a clusterfuck of
epic proportions. If we're lucky, we'll even survive to tell the tale.

It's going to be vulnerable to (accidentally or intentionally) biased training
data, and on top of that we're making rapid progress on adversarial patterns.
On top of all that, the results will be relatively inscrutable. (Yes, you can
somewhat explain the results you get. But the lure of ML is that it's right
most of the time, and you start trusting it. Not to mention that explanations
cost time and money)

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Canada
It's a reasonable strategy for processing images and other sensor data. People
aren't perfect for the task either. We're expensive, get bored easily, and
even at the best of times we're also vulnerable to plenty of adversarial
patterns.

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tmalsburg2
Please define "reasonable" and explain how your definition accounts for the
potential risks pointed out by OP.

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Canada
Automated or not, the nature of the military mission guarantees it will take
the lives and destroy the property of innocent people. (So don't take this as
an endorsement of what the military is doing.)

If all you care about is winning and you accept that human sentries sometimes
shoot the wrong people, as all military forces do, then automation of sentry
tasks makes perfect sense.

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ENGNR
Count down until a contract includes extracting "anonymous", "aggregate only"
models built from private communications back into their commercial
activities, then techies start doing 'deep dream' type stuff to reveal swathes
private data. 5 years..

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jackyinger
Hana; the cat is out of the bag now. Interesting idea

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agorabinary
I encourage anyone working in these fields to find other engineering work.
It's a great relief to not be working on advancing Skynet.

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akerro
Thanks nVidia for publishing this on your blog, so we know who is officially
supporting Skynet managed by insane US administration.

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saas_co_de
this is going to revolutionize Nvidia's stock price and probably not much
else.

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briga
Were they not using AI and ML techniques before? Or is this announcement just
indicating that they are going to put a greater emphasis on deep learning? I
have trouble seeing how the NSA would function without ML techniques, for
example.

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fnbr
I suspect that they were using classical ML techniques, and a lot of
traditional scientific computing techniques, but not a lot of deep learning,
given how new it is, and how slow government operates.

It's also not clear how a lot of the classical ML can be translated into a DL
setting- a lot of graph analysis [1] is traditionally solved using matrix
factorisation, for instance, which doesn't directly translate into deep
learning. You can find different ways of doing it with DL, but it's not as
transferable.

[1]: e.g. analysing an individual's social graph. I believe that Facebook uses
a lot of classical techniques, like PCA. I've heard that Facebook has been
pouring a lot of money into research that uses DL on arbitrary graphs.

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deepnotderp
Random walks or spectral embeddings for graph convolutions already work
exceptionally well.

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visarga
I've been following the domain of Graph Neural Nets with interest for a while.
It seems to be picking up.

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empath75
It's going to also eventually revolutionize warfighting, and I suspect that
the US will be slower to adopt it than other countries because of the ethical
and moral considerations of turning over decisions about life and death to
machines.

I worry that in 5-10 years, we might be facing a blitzkreig sort of a surprise
as an ai powered drone army captures a huge amount of territory before human
soldiers even manage to get their pants on to defend it, setting off a new and
deadly arms race.

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Mikeb85
> It's going to also eventually revolutionize warfighting, and I suspect that
> the US will be slower to adopt it than other countries because of the
> ethical and moral considerations of turning over decisions about life and
> death to machines.

I like your assumption that the US actually cares about moral or ethical
considerations, considering how many governments they've overthrown, how many
terrorists they've funded, etc...

Not to mention the fact that they are already the leaders in drone warfare,
and routinely use drones to drop bombs on civilians. I really don't see them
giving a fuck if an algorithm bombs a wedding instead of someone staring at a
screen pressing the button...

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musage
And the fact that people can assert otherwise without blushing kind of goes to
show it's all right on track, including the psy ops aspect. If control of the
hemisphere requires control of the planet, if modern communications mean
control can only be maintained by controlling speech and thought in every nook
and cranny -- then so be it. The people who don't want power at the expense of
becoming a monster don't reach high echelons of power, they remain at the PR
level.

To think in terms of countries, instead of interest groups within countries,
is not even wrong. It's not countries vying for power, it's elites within a
country using the elites in another country to suppress and exploit "their"
populace. Two dictators in two neighboring countries might genuinely hate each
other, but they still can use the other one as the perfect excuse to clamp
down.

Soldiers are at best there to defend other soldiers. It's like having a
debugger that can fix bugs only the debugger introduces, with the operative
word being "can" \-- so the net result is negative. What goes for soldiers
goes for killer drones, and a white list approach, killing everyone on the
planet who is not flagged for survival, would be _already_ easier to make
than, say, self-driving vehicles. We're already there, now all that remains is
to sell it, and that is going butter smooth. We're still wide eyed and sleep
walking, we absolutely need more powder in this keg so when it goes boom,
nobody will even have time to ask anyone "what did you know, what did you
choose to not learn, what did you do and what have you failed to do?".

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scalablenotions
Reading this article, along with the following one, is striking:
[http://www.labsix.org/physical-objects-that-fool-neural-
nets...](http://www.labsix.org/physical-objects-that-fool-neural-nets/)

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localcdn
Anyone have a link to watch the keynote?

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wslh
Could Google convert into a defense provider?

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etiam
I suspect they see little reason to leave their successful and highly
profitable role as a leading 'intelligence provider'.

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Dowwie
The icing effect is real..

