
‘I Could Solve Most of Your Problems’: Eric Schmidt’s Pentagon Offensive - pseudolus
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/02/technology/eric-schmidt-pentagon-google.html
======
spodek
He sounds like Robert McNamara, wonderkind of business in his time, relatively
inexperienced in politics and military.

Then came Vietnam. Eventually McNamara would admit

> "We were wrong, terribly wrong. We owe it to future generations to explain
> why."

You can read more in "McNamara Recalls, and Regrets, Vietnam"
[https://www.nytimes.com/1995/04/09/world/mcnamara-recalls-
an...](https://www.nytimes.com/1995/04/09/world/mcnamara-recalls-and-regrets-
vietnam.html).

Besides military problems, we face environmental catastrophe, which Silicon
Valley's ethos that technology will solve it, when it's mostly exacerbating
it, and I expect Schmidt will end up more than "wrong, terribly wrong."

~~~
baybal2
That idiot ordered to kill president Ngo only to complain later:

> By the mid-1960's, Mr. McNamara says, it was clear that "political stability
> did not exist and was unlikely ever to be achieved"

You can not call this just an incompetency. He is a type of a person who can
not be entrusted with lacing his own shoes, let alone statecraft.

People must stop decrying types like McNamara, Kisinger, Dulles as some kind
of "smart calculating types." They were top idiots at the apex of power, and
their coming was a prelude to what America got itself in now.

~~~
DanielBMarkham
I think there were two huge systemic/structural problems with Vietnam (aside
from whether or not we should have even been there). First, McNamara had the
wrong mental model of what war is. He thought like a GM chairman, where you
want to outproduce and out-deliver a competitor, ie, that it's a numbers game.
That was never ever going to work. Second, and this is even more serious, top
brass at DoD never called the civilians on the fact that they had their heads
stuck up their asses. Instead, oddly enough, they acted like little division
chiefs in a large organization: don't make waves, get face time with the boss,
make sure the TPS cover sheets are attached, and so forth. This meant that not
only were we wrong, we had no system in place to learn from it. There were
several new ideas that look quite effective created in the lower ranks. They
were all shot down before word got out too far, though. It didn't make the
rest of the system look good.

~~~
nostrademons
Interesting that both of those problems could be summed up as "fighting the
last war".

WW2 _was_ about outproducing and out-delivering competitors - the U.S. won
largely because its collective industrial might built weapons that the Axis
powers couldn't match. And it was directed largely through top-down control:
FDR and the War Department had broad control over large swaths of the American
economy, high-ranking generals and admirals directed huge military operations,
and the public trusted their authorities enough to play their part.

I wonder how much of the structure of modern-day nation-states stems from WW2,
and how much is misaligned to current technology and problems. Military
technology has a way of dictating political organization, and military
technology is pretty different now than in 1945.

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carbocation
> _In an interview, Mr. Schmidt — by turns thoughtful, pedagogical and
> hubristic..._

> _While that philosophy has led to social networks that spread disinformation
> and other unintended consequences, Mr. Schmidt said he was convinced that
> applying new and relatively untested technology to complex situations —
> including deadly ones — would make service members more efficient and
> bolster the United States in its competition with China._

If the NYT would cast an equally cynical eye at politicians as they are doing
at Eric Schmidt, it might actually be productive.

To me, this article is so drenched in loathing that it's hard to read. (E.g.,
the second paragraph that I highlighted seems to misattribute elements of the
authors' opinions to Eric Schmidt.)

~~~
ForHackernews
Do you really think the NYT is uncritical of politicians?

They're extremely critical of anything the GOP does, and moderately negative
on the populist left. Maybe they're too cosy with corporate Democrats, but
those are the same Davos set as Schmidt et al.

If anything, I feel like the Silicon Valley titans have gotten a free pass
from the media for too long. It's only in the past few years that issues like
data privacy or monopoly power have started to get coverage in major media
after decades of the EFF or Mozilla banging their lonely drums.

~~~
Redoubts

      > Do you really think the NYT is uncritical of politicians?
    
    

NYT On Trump: _On Thursday, he speculated about treatments involving the use
of household disinfectants. Some experts disagree._

From their own WH Correspondent: _Once again, wondering how Trump would have
fared had he ever run for office in NY and had to face either the NYC or
Albany press corp._

... guess the NYT doesn't think highly of themselves at all.

NYT On Biden: _We found no pattern of sexual misconduct by Biden, beyond hugs,
kisses and touching that women previously said made them uncomfortable._

Later removed because " _the [Biden] campaign thought that the phrasing was
awkward_ "

The NYT is flaming garbage.

~~~
gowld
Let this sink in:

NYT hired the founding editor of _BuzzFeed News_ , whose nearly first article
at NYT was investigating NYT's cover-up of Reade's allegations and exposing
NYT's collusion with the Biden campaign, in the form of an interview with an
NYT executive editor who freely admits it all and can't understand what all
the fuss is about.

[https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/13/business/media/joe-
biden-...](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/13/business/media/joe-biden-tara-
reade-new-york-times.html)

BuzzFeed News is the team bringing integrity to the NYT.

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pcdoodle
I haven't Eric since his comments on the "creepy line" and "if you have
something you want to hide, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first
place". Seems like he'd love to oil an authoritarian apparatus.

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einpoklum
I don't know if Schmidt can solve most of the Pentagon's problems, but
honestly - I'd really rather those problems never be solved.

Also, Schmidt could solve a lot of problems by stopping the censorship of non-
mainstream content on Google Search, YouTube and possibly elsewhere.

Finally, he could solve a bunch of problems by _stopping_ Google's
collaboration with the US government and the NSA.

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Barrin92
>“You absolutely suck at machine learning,” Mr. Schmidt told General Thomas,
the officer recalled. “If I got under your tent for a day, I could solve most
of your problems.” General Thomas said he was so offended that he wanted to
throw Mr. Schmidt out of the car, but refrained.

Yeah because exactly what the world needs is a bunch of Machine Learning
algorithms thrown at matters of life and death and strategic decision making
of the US military.

Over the last ten years technology has really turned into a cult. I think Eric
should go and watch _Colossus: The Forbin Project_ if he's never seen it.

~~~
0xy
Imagine getting mowed down by a predator drone because Mr Schmidt's artificial
intelligence decided you look 74.2% like a terrorist.

~~~
Gibbon1
Imagine suffering a long depression because you're leaders spent the last 40
years preparing to fight a war that is already over. Leaving you unprepared to
deal with a pandemic.

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naringas
maybe in a few years (or decades) there can be a book titled: "Fascism 2.0:
how technology rebuilt fascism in the early 21st century"

~~~
Gibbon1
Careful you're not allowed to talk about fascism here.

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lowdose
For the ones hitting a wall

[http://archive.is/RN8ZA](http://archive.is/RN8ZA)

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Eridrus
I'm not an idealist over here, but It's really weird to me that when he looks
at all of the US government's tech problems, he singles out the military as
the part that it is really important to improve. But I guess it doesn't
satisfy his ego to try and ensure the IRS' website works properly when
addresses don't work unless they're all upper case.

~~~
pc86
Do you need a former Google CEO to help $18/hr H1B contractors figure out
case-insensitive matching?

Problems like the IRS website are are about incompetence at the lowest levels,
not incompetence at the highest levels.

~~~
conro1108
Is it not a sign of incompetence at the highest level when important projects
like the IRS website are handed off to contractors who can't get it done?

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remir
Let's put aside Schmidt for a moment, I think it's naive to assume other
nations won't have their best talent work on ML, image recognition and AI.

That being said, I am not American, so my opinion on this is irrelevant.

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ws66
Move fast and break things... I don’t know how well this applies to the
military, I don’t think it’s a good idea!

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obarthelemy
It's an inflection point.

