
The Manhattan Project Fallacy - raghava
http://aelkus.github.io/essays/ai_manhattan_project.html
======
aftbit
My fundamental hope for humanity is that someday, rather than having to
confront social challenges around distribution of resources (who gets more
water? who gets more land? who gets more oil? do we need to raise energy costs
to capture the extrinsic costs of polluting the air?), we will just have
enough and more of everything.

The Central Arizona Project and the Navajo Generating Station are my favorite
examples of this. The Navajo Generating Station is a giant coal-fired power
plant, which provides energy used primarily to pump water up into Arizona. The
station substantially degrades air quality in the surrounding areas, and the
water that is "stolen" from the Colorado is a part of the West's growing water
concerns. Right now, there are two sides to the issue: those who think it is
worth the cost to bring water to Arizona, and those who believe the
environmental issues are too big. We could solve that like a social problem,
using politics and ethics to try to make the decision... or we could just get
on making energy cheap and clean, and suddenly a huge part of the cost
disappears. If there was no fly ash issue, no NOx issue, no CO2 issue, then
we're back to just worrying about the water flow. But if we have cheap energy,
desalination suddenly looks a lot more palatable, which would reduce a lot of
water pressures in the US. Los Angeles could switch to 100% desal water and
the Colorado river would have a surplus of water again.

Cheap (and preferably clean) energy, solving climate change, and cheap access
to space (this one is more dubious) would all broadly boost the quality of
life for humanity.

~~~
moyta
Los Angeles could also recycle its water for a much lower cost than
desalination, but due to campaigns that claim it is unsanitary (ass to glass,
etc) it is not an option politically.

Another angle on this is why are we scrutinizing only where 10% of
California's water usage is, while ignoring 90% (farms)? Why do California's
farmers have the right to the majority of the water while paying next to
nothing for that water as compared to the rates the other users of water pay?

~~~
cestith
I grew up in a town along the Mississippi River. It's "ass to glass" all the
way from Minnesota to Louisiana. Basically every city, town, and village on
both banks treats its drinking water and its wastewater, then releases its
treated wastewater downstream.

Are the farmers paying so much less for treated, potable tap water delivered
through municipal water mains? I think you'll find the cost of the water
itself is pretty small. You may find that treating it, transporting it, and
distributing it pretreated to all those people are the real economic costs
even during most stages of a drought.

~~~
JoelBennett
Funny thing is, most waste water treatment plants I've seen - the water coming
out of the waste treatment plant is cleaner than the water removed from the
river for drinking (which is then treated).

Wait until people learn that they air they breathe has likely already been
breathed by someone else...

~~~
tonyarkles
Or that it's got particles from other peoples' farts!

~~~
SticksAndBreaks
Sorry, Sir, but we got to dialyse your blood- there is t-rex urine in it

------
sapphireblue
DeepMind looks like a hilariously wrong project to criticize because it is a
true moonshot, something very different from the majority of other SV
projects. If hiring hundreds of PhDs to create a general purpose learning
agent, all while publishing all the intermediate results in freely available
papers isn't a moonshot with socially beneficial outcome, then I don't know
what is. Also note that DeepMind went even further than that, there is
DeepMind health division aiming at using this technology to help doctors and
patients directly.

If I were the author I'd choose some social media unicorn or an ad network as
an example of inherent misallocation of human talent.

~~~
xg15
> _If hiring hundreds of PhDs to create a general purpose learning agent, all
> while publishing all the intermediate results in freely available papers isn
> 't a moonshot with socially beneficial outcome, then I don't know what is._

I'm sorry, I don't buy it. What exactly are the social benefits of general
purpose learning agent?

It's an impressive technical and scientific challange, agreed, but most
applications that I can immediately think of are harmful to society (reduction
of white-collar jobs, increased potential for surveillance and profiling, etc)
- so how would such an agent be used to actually improve society?

~~~
foxylad
The social benefits are that our knowledge develops. You can argue that that
is not a good thing because of the social upheaval it causes, but everyone who
has argued that since we were cavement have been proved wrong.

For example, humanity's current best attempt at sustainable society is an
unstable mix of democracy and capitalism, and in many countries that isn't
working out too well - particularly for blue collar workers, but increasingly
for your white collar workers too.

It isn't inconceivable that deep mind could design a better political system
for the US, for instance, that resulted in broad consensus instead of virtual
civil war. Or design a fairer tax system that meant more people could have
fulfilling and enjoyable lives.

Whether deep mind's masters would apply it to those questions is moot, but the
parent's point is that the huge resources being poured into Facebook makes it
a much better example of the squandering of the efforts of our brightest and
best.

~~~
sapphireblue
Note that Facebook also has a formidable AI research group called FAIR and
they are pursuing goals close to DeepMind's, while openly publishing their
results and tools. There is a lot of social media unicorns that don't
contribute much to research which are not Facebook.

Who knows, maybe there is no real need for a dozen of global social media
companies that provide roughly similar features to the same users?

------
Tossrock
I think the author is strawmanning a bit here. The central premise they're
attacking is that tech should not be called upon to solve social problems, and
they assume this is what the pull quote at the top is implying. They then
spend the body of the essay arguing that social problems are intractable to a
top down approach, technological rationality is subject to the same problems
as government bureaucracy, etc.

However, one could more charitably interpret the quote as saying there are
lots of TECHNOLOGIES that would produce social good, which are underfunded -
alternative energy, carbon capture, distributed social networking, etc.
Ycombinator seems to agree, given their recent focus on nuclear.

~~~
mjb
I think the author is right that top-down technical solutions to social
problems don't work. Their examples are compelling, and more come to mind. As
you say, though, that doesn't extend to the argument that technology and
social good are unrelated. Companies reasonably can (and, one could argue,
should) choose their investments and priorities based on their social effects
and other distant externalities. There are also problems, like the social
effects of climate change, that can be effectively addressed, at least
partially, with technical solutions.

The much more interesting question for me is whether it's ethical to invest in
technologies that will cause social change, even if those changes are highly
likely to be negative in the short term. The default silicon valley answer to
that would be yes, but a broad range of other people would say no. Both have
rational arguments. If you look at the social effects of the industrial
revolution (or the green revolution, or the enlightenment) there's a lot of
short-term negative for a lot of people and some enduring problems for some
groups of people.

~~~
skybrian
Do anti-spam, anti-malware, anti-phishing, and https-everywhere campaigns
count as social change?

How about moderation policies for social networks?

------
Animats
Is anybody seriously proposing heavy Government spending on any specific
problem right now, other than a wall against Mexico?

Some engineering problems have yielded to heavy spending. The Polaris
submarine program. The Apollo program. RCA's color TV effort. AIDS treatment.
Extreme ultraviolet photolithography. The H-bomb. Sometimes this works. With a
narrow goal, a general idea of how to get there, and heavy funding, impressive
results are possible.

~~~
manachar
You left out the interstate system, one of the largest public works projects
of American history with lasting economic, social, and political impact.

Big money does change stuff, it can just be really hard to determine what
exactly it will change and if it will ultimately be good.

~~~
Animats
The Interstate highway system wasn't an attempt to solve a technology problem.
It was just a big public works program. Expensive, but low-risk. The
Pennsylvania Turnpike already existed, and its first section opened in 1940.

~~~
sandworm101
There were military reasons too. Several leaders during WWII noted how
difficult it was to move between the coasts. Railroads were too easy to block
and didn't have the capacity in an emergency. If you are worried about the
Russians invading, you want big fast/wide roads between large cities.

~~~
Spellman
Plus the fact that, by design, they have to support planes being able to land
on them. Thus we not only have a great network to move goods, but also built-
in landing strips across the nation.

I doubt they are in compliance with the latest heaviest planes the military
fields, but still, pretty forward thinking and synergy of infrastructure
spending for both economical and military needs.

~~~
nerfhammer
> by design, they have to support planes being able to land on them.

[http://www.snopes.com/autos/law/airstrip.asp](http://www.snopes.com/autos/law/airstrip.asp)

~~~
fennecfoxen
What does it mean when you look at that article and get upset that the
illustration of the runway includes an upside-down 19? (It's supposed to be
readable as 19 from the plane travelling at a compass heading of 190 degrees,
south-southwest.)

------
ckozlowski
I'd question how much of a necessity it is to refute the need for a "Manhattan
Project" for various things is. But having heard the same call myself, I'll
add my two cents to what I think is a rather good essay.

There's a perception among those calls I gather that the Manhattan Project was
pulled together as this massive undertaking at the stroke of a pen. The
reality however, was that it started off as overlooked, modest, and aimless at
times. Overtime, as the goals and necessities became more clear, it grew and
matured into the massive, focused effort we all know. But it was because of
the direction and need that developed that resulted in the Project, not the
other way around. And I think that's a very important distinction.

I think great projects tend to owe a good amount of their growth to organic
factors. The reason why we haven't seen a "Manhattan Project" to solve a
societal issue is because the conditions are not necessary right for one, and
perhaps more importantly, the "project" needed to tackle one _might not
necessarily be recognizable to us_ as such.

------
sandworm101
>> First, the Manhattan Project itself was sui generis. There is very little
reason to believe that this model does, in fact, generalize widely outside of
the basic and applied sciences.

No. It was a basic question of practical physics. It was an effort to
translate theoretical knowledge already proven in laboratories into a working
product at scale. The innovations were definitely costly, but essentially
rather incremental and straightforward. That was much of the reason it needed
to be done in a hurry: eventually someone would do it.

Fusion power is in the same place. The theory works in the lab, we need to
translate that into a working model at practical scales. Eventually someone
will crack the problem. A Manhattan-style push would accelerate that date,
hopefully to within our lifetimes.

~~~
knorby
The Manhattan Project had nearly unlimited resources at a time of scarcity,
and it took enormous engineering risks. The risk component is something easy
to overlook, but these were enormous infrastructure projects by any standard
done at scale without much chance to prove them, and they were accomplished in
incredibly short time-frames.

Could you imagine someone building a full-scale, power generating fusion
reactor off a new and untested design in a about a year? More to the point,
could you imagine someone funding that?

------
coldtea
> _One representative example of this argument, applied more generally, can be
> found in this lament about why Silicon Valley isn 't solving the "big"
> problems. Assuming that this complaint is sincere, it nonetheless misses the
> point. What are "real" problems?_

Well, I could name 10 real problems off of the top of my head, and most people
would agree that they are important too. So I don't really understand the
question. It seems to me to imply that people are unique snowflakes and
because of that it's difficult to determine what's important, but that's not
really the case.

> _1\. The clamoring for tech companies to solve social problems ignores the
> empirical record and empirically observed characteristics of top-down
> engineering efforts_

Like this internet thing, on which the very article is posted on?

> _Unfortunately, Manhattan Project-like ventures are not translatable to
> social and political problems._

Maybe, but then again there are tons of serious problems that are not "social
and political" in nature, and are not "social video sharing for cat lovers"
either.

And, yes, people might enjoy and derive some value from the latter too. But
they'd derive a lot more value from, e.g. not dying from certain diseases due
to a better focus on such problems, or sustainable energy.

What I think the people the author mentions ask for is not stopping Google and
co from doing their stuff and conscripting SV engineers to basic research, but
more and better funded and coordinated national (and international) efforts on
stuff that matters in a large scale for our societies and our survival. Kind
of like the internet was developed, we went to the moon, nuclear energy, and
also applications of such stuff to current problems (from environment to
health, education, democracy, privacy, etc).

------
grondilu
I have a pet theory that the level of concern towards social issues for an
individual, as a function of wealth and well being, is convex[1].

That is, it is highest at the extremes : for the poorest and the wealthiest.
The former are concerned because of the tacit idea that solving social
problems would directly solve theirs. The latter are concerned because as
people who don't have direct problems themselves, solving other people's ones
would alleviate a repressed guilt feeling, satisfy their ego, or help with the
minor annoyance of having to listen to people's whinning.

Then I'm guessing most people working in tech industry are right in the middle
of this curve, and consequently give the least possible F.

1\.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convex_function](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convex_function)

~~~
MaxfordAndSons
Funny, I'm inclined to think it's actually concave. The poorest don't actually
have time to worry about this stuff, they're way too busy just surviving. The
wealthiest don't have time to worry about this stuff, they're way too busy
trying to increase the growth rate of their wealth. The people who do actually
care the most end up in the middle - they're smart and resourceful enough to
not be in extreme poverty, but also too kind and selfless to have gained
extreme wealth.

Though I think the fact that we can have exactly opposite hypotheses about
this metric points to the reality that there isn't really any neat curve to
this, or likely most other sorts of hypotheses about complex human
beliefs/behaviors projected on a two dimensional space.

------
michaelmrose
When someone bemoans the fact that a significant chunk of the our generations
intellectual and monetary capital is invested in trivial matters it isn't
necessarily that they wish google and Microsoft ought to save the world
instead of make phone operating systems and ads.

If they have any sense what they want is for we as a species to put our money,
our labor, our hearts and our lives into matters of importance to the human
race.

~~~
bigger_cheese
I agree. The part that bugged me about the article was it took a quote:

'The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click
ads.'

Then immediately launched into saying

'Tech critics should be very careful what they wish for when they say that
they wish that tech companies would tackle the "real" problems'.

I think this misses the point. I don't think critics are clamoring for tech
companies to "solve" real problems. They want people, smart people, to focus
on solving these problems.

A company doesn't solve anything people solve things not organisations.

He could have just as easily talked about all those PHD physicists working on
High frequency trading and used that to launch into a tangent about how Wall
Street is not suited to solving difficult problems.

The original quote is a serious issue publicly funded R&D outfits cannot offer
the financial incentives large banks, tech outfits and other private
organisations can offer.

Whether you think this is a good thing or not depends on how cynical you are I
suppose. Personally I'm skeptical that private research interests will ever
align with anything other than creating value for shareholders - which for
google means selling more Ads...

~~~
epicureanideal
I'm hopeful that we'll exhaust the low-hanging fruit of social networks and
advertising sometime soon, and the best returns will need to come from solving
some other problems.

------
jwatte
Let's reframe the question:

Why does society today not attempt to maximize happiness among all citizens?

Resources are expended to make those with more resources marginally more
happy, rather than someone with less resources comparatively much more happy.

Market economy says that this is the most "efficient" distribution of
resources, but the assumption there is that the happiness of the rich is more
important than the happiness of the poor.

Is this what we want our societal values to be? And if so, how much more
important? And if not, is a domestic happy person more valuable than a foreign
happy person?

The ethics and morals that come out of defining these answers are quite
strikingly different.

~~~
dmix
> Market economy says that this is the most "efficient" distribution of
> resources.

Focusing on the rich sounds like you're referring to "trickle down economics"
which is not a real thing in economics and is largely a fabrication of the
media and partisan politics:

[https://fee.org/articles/there-is-no-such-thing-as-
trickle-d...](https://fee.org/articles/there-is-no-such-thing-as-trickle-down-
economics/)

[http://www.nationalreview.com/article/367682/trickle-down-
li...](http://www.nationalreview.com/article/367682/trickle-down-lie-thomas-
sowell)

Saying that 'market economies' only favours or benefits the wealthy is a
mischaracterization and/or a drastic over-simplification of supply-side
economics.

Also I'm with Arthur Schopenhauer in questioning the premise of happiness as
the basic goal in life. Although you're probably just referring to maximizing
the general 'quality of life' rather than the emotional state, which I do
agree with.

------
blater
I honestly couldn't finish this. Who exactly is comparing today's startups to
the manhattan project? Yes many projects are aiming for more ad clicks, but so
what? In the 30's movies and radio were doing the same thing and what? Why are
they being compared to the manhattan project, or to apollo, or to the search
for the Higgs boson, or world peace, or whatever?. Is there anything to this
beyond the obvious strawmab cllckbait?

------
rl3
> _If the problem of producing the atomic bomb occupied the attention and
> resources of the scientific establishment during World War II, it is sadly
> unsurprising that this very same establishment immediately moved on to the
> problem of adapting to the political, military, and intelligence
> consequences of such an disruptive innovation. We live today with the legacy
> of those consequences, and cannot imagine a world without them._

Nuclear weapons may have been a positive development. The doctrine of
mutually-assured destruction has a lot to do with why World War III hasn't
happened yet.

------
jameslk
"Change the world," they say. As if changing the world implies that change
will be better for everyone. Some would love to change the world and bring
slavery back. How about we focus on changing ourselves to adapt to the world
we have? I'm glad this essay touches upon this since nobody else seems to be
talking about it.

------
maverick_iceman
_> “What would make Mom proud?”_

I can say from first hand experience that most Silicon Valley engineers' moms
are plenty proud of them.

~~~
shadytrees
maverick_iceman has talked to many moms

------
davidgrenier
Glad I had seen SlingShot, documentary on Dean Kamen, prior to reading this
article.

------
thro32
Go and Chess AI are SERIOUS and REAL problem. It is something which goes back
for thousands years and will be remembered for another thousands years.

AIDS and other contemporary diseases will be soon forgotten after their
extinction.

~~~
sctb
It's hard to read this in a way that doesn't suggest that real, serious
diseases aren't, at which point it becomes hardly distinct from a troll
comment. Please post civilly and substantively on HN; we have to ban accounts
that refuse.

~~~
zeveb
> Please post civilly and substantively on HN

Did the author edit his comment? This is what I see:

> Go and Chess AI are SERIOUS and REAL problem. It is something which goes
> back for thousands years and will be remembered for another thousands years.

> AIDS and other contemporary diseases will be soon forgotten after their
> extinction.

That is both civil and makes a substantive point. There is nothing trolling
about it. Nor does it suggest that AIDS is either fake or unserious: it
suggests that someday AIDS will not be a problem (I think that's very likely,
in the sense that bubonic plague is no longer a problem).

I can only imagine two possibilities: the author's original post _was_
trolling, uncivil or unsubstantive; or sctb had a knee-jerk reaction.

~~~
civilian
Yeah. I think sctb is overreacting. thro32 just has a cynical view on what the
public values, and has a long view of history.

The namespace collision between Go and Golang infuriated me before I realized
that--- Go has lasted thousands of years, and could very well outlast Golang.
:D

~~~
zeveb
> Yeah. I think sctb is overreacting.

Probably 11 times out of 12 when I see that one of the admins has marked
something as off-topic, I disagree. Probably a quarter of those times I
_strenuously_ disagree; the rest I can kinda see their point, but still think
it was on-topic. It's rare that I think, 'thanks admin team, that was garbage
and deserved to be detached!'

From what I've seen, the admin team does more harm than good. I think that
their hearts are in the right place, and I completely appreciate that they
don't want HN to devolve into chaos — but I think that instead they risk
turning HN into an echo chamber in which only views considered mainstream in
San Francisco & Boston are permitted (even when those views are considered
extreme elsewhere), while those which are considered mainstream elsewhere are
silenced.

------
gwbas1c
Is there a tldr version?

~~~
Animats
It's 90 seconds of reading. What's the problem?

~~~
michaje
If you had a 90s read, you clicked the wrong link.

~~~
dismantlethesun
Truthfully so, it's ~5800 words. Even at "top" skimming score of 1000 words
per minute, that's still almost 360 seconds to read it.

