
Artificial Intelligence Is Now a Pentagon Priority. Will Silicon Valley Help? - yaseen-rob
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/26/technology/pentagon-artificial-intelligence.html
======
adventured
Of course Silicon Valley will help.

Google != Silicon Valley

Palantir is in Palo Alto and has thousands of employees, they're helping the
military industrial complex every minute of the day. Oracle is in Redwood, one
of the largest employers in SV and has never stopped helping the Pentagon (not
implying they're a leader in AI). Silicon Valley is loaded with companies and
employees more than eager to help and always will be. The _will they help_
headlines are nothing more than click-bait, it's a premise invented to get
attention and stir drama.

In fact it's quite the opposite. The biggest problem for the Pentagon is
filtering through which of the eager Silicon Valley companies they want to
disperse funds/deals to. Figuring out which companies are the best option for
what they want to accomplish. For every Google that resists slightly, there
are a dozen more that will be thrilled to get the business. And if a company
doesn't exist, there's endless venture capital available at a moment's notice
if a new company needs formed to take advantage of a lucrative contract.

------
hugh4life
There would be no Silicon Valley without the military industrial complex.
Period.

But I think there are problems with getting too close to the Pentagon and then
trying to operate internationally as a purported neutral information platform.

~~~
anoncoward111
While I mostly agree with you on a historical basis, I don't agree with you on
a theoretical basis.

Post hoc ergo propter hoc. The military invented a lot of things "first", or
at least provided the use-case and funding for a lot of things.

But that doesn't necessarily and always mean that people couldn't have
invented something without military funding and uses in mind.

For example, the military probably invented the sandbag bunker, but I have one
in my back yard. I am sure I would have figured out how to invent that piece
of technology on my own for my own non-military needs.

So, maybe someone out there would have thought that electrified silicon is an
excellent way to facilitate virtually all global communications.

~~~
fsloth
The _practical_ aspects of modern computing were to a large extent born from
US defence funding. Starting from the theoretical roots: Von Neumann
architecture [0] and various defence projects including ARPA[1].

"But that doesn't necessarily and always mean that people couldn't have
invented something without military funding and uses in mind."

Sure, it doesn't. But funding and large number of end users combined with
price-inelastic demand for your product enable product development and field
testing like no other scenario does.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Draft_of_a_Report_on_the...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Draft_of_a_Report_on_the_EDVAC)

[1] [https://www.amazon.com/Dream-Machine-Licklider-Revolution-
Co...](https://www.amazon.com/Dream-Machine-Licklider-Revolution-
Computing/dp/0670899763)

------
liftbigweights
Does silicon valley like money? Will an industry created by the military take
military money?

I'm no expert, but my crystal ball says yes. If not, the pentagon would simply
fund a new silicon valley in virginia and the surrounding area.

Considering the huge defense budget, I'm sure silicon valley is salivating for
a piece.

[https://www.cnbc.com/2018/08/13/trump-signs-717-billion-
defe...](https://www.cnbc.com/2018/08/13/trump-signs-717-billion-defense-
bill.html)

~~~
throwaway287391
> If not, the pentagon would simply fund a new silicon valley in virginia and
> the surrounding area.

I'm skeptical that the military would be able to recruit AI talent in
significant numbers. There's a fairly strong cultural opposition to military
applications among AI researchers. Between that and the comp packages they're
getting to work at "cool" companies (i.e. consumer or pure research focused),
the cost for the military to draw them away from that seems like it would be
prohibitively high. Especially if they're also asking them to move away from
SF/NY to somewhere "boring" like Virginia. Isn't the military pretty limited
in how much they can pay?

~~~
reacweb
I think that one of the cultural opposition to military applications is the
presence of NDA. I think all NDA shall be limited in time. There should be
also a law so that NDA not limited in time or with an exagerate time limit are
void. The other main opposition is moral, but I think this is a bad reason. If
all the people with morality refuse to work on military project, this means
that all the projects will be managed by sociopaths. If you do not want your
army in the hands of sociopaths, it is a duty to accept working on military
projects.

~~~
throwaway287391
> The other main opposition is moral, but I think this is a bad reason. If all
> the people with morality refuse to work on military project, this means that
> all the projects will be managed by sociopaths. If you do not want your army
> in the hands of sociopaths, it is a duty to accept working on military
> projects.

You're probably right, but I think for a lot of people who aren't the super
patriotic type, it's just easier to work in private industry without any
direct military interactions and not feel as much obligation to think hard
about the ethics of the tech they're creating. Of course, there is a lot of
discussion about the ethics of big private tech firms lately (and rightly so),
but as far as just being able to tell your peers what you do in mixed social
settings, there simply aren't as many people who would immediately recoil if
you tell them you work at Snapchat vs. the Pentagon, right or wrong. And yeah,
that's a morally weak and bad reason to choose private industry, but I suspect
that something like it is a big part of the motivation for many people
nonetheless.

------
lawrenceyan
The reason why the military will always be technologically behind is that the
salaries they're willing to pay for talent is far less compared to what you
can get in the Bay Area and/or New York if you decide to do quantitative
finance. It's as simple as that, but there's far more than just the economics
that are involved.

Even if in the world where the military does pay salaries on par with the
Google farm, very few people will make the switch. The military would have to
pay likely an unreasonable amount premium to get any appreciable amount of
people because many have an aversion to the military industrial complex. And
for good reason too I might add.

People want to work on things that will help change the world and improve the
quality of lives of other people, not make it easier to kill. You can argue
that working on B2B software contributes little to improving humanity, but at
the very least, it isn't actively harming anyone.

And the examples of moonshot technologies that are being developed in fields
like cancer treatment, curing aging, self driving vehicles, etc. which are
being made possible due to innovations in places like Silicon Valley should
show you that technology can and is being used to change the world for the
better.

Technology at the end of the day is a force multiplier that I would hope is
directed towards purposes not devoted to zero sum games like waging war.

~~~
Theodores
I believe that working on B2B software is a force for good. Nations and people
that need each other for trade don't have good reason to go to war. Plus we
can't all be raising money for do good charities, there has to be some real
trade based economy going on. Hence merely working on B2B software is : saving
the planet:.

~~~
freedomben
Haha, very interesting logic :-)

You're right tho. Free and prolific trade is the greatest anti-war force we
have ever seen. Having mutually dependent economies raises the cost of war to
heights that exceed the threshold of tolerance.

------
oh-kumudo
Do they need Silicon Valley's help? They have all the money to buy hardwares,
the only 'help' they need is talent.

They can just set up funds, I am sure there will be plenty of SV people
willing to take that money and work for them. Even for Google, partnership
presents as a problem for SOME of its employees, but definitely not all of
them.

~~~
evilmushroom
I do machine learning--- but hate the overhead headache with DoD work. However
if they paid me enough, of course :P

------
announcerman
I wonder if there's anything better than some good old fashioned war and
murder to bring humans together to solve hard problems in a coordinated
fashion, the Manhattan project springs to mind. Maybe military AI will be the
next Manhattan project.

~~~
Iv
The search for profit comes to mind as well.

The ego of leaders, who built things like pyramids too.

Concentrations of capital have a lot of nefarious effects on the well-being of
population but make some grand projects possible that would not be otherwise
possible.

I mean, the Saudi crown prince does have a 500 billion (not a typo) plan to
create a fully automated city from scratch (project NEOM).

Wars help states concentrate capital quickly, but other motives have advanced
technology in history.

------
noetic_techy
Honestly, the Pentagon doesn't need to work with Silicon Valley, it just needs
to put together teams of incredibly bright people who are smart enough to
understand the AI technology coming out of Silicon Valley AND willing to work
defense projects. It's delusional to think that all bright people who are
capable of working in this realm are anti-defense-industry. I don't think it
would be that hard to get that talent with VERY competitive salaries (if not
outright generously overpaid) and maybe some other perks like the ability to
work anywhere in the country and a cool cryptic group name. Hence JAIC. At any
point, if it catches wind of something that's new and potentially an AI game
changer, it has the authority to demand to see the IP for national security
reasons, and feed that to a defense contractor. In fact any patent can be
reviewed and deemed classified in this manner. Take the olive branch and come
to terms with the fact that western civilization is not defended by pacifists.

------
lquist
I'm not an expert here, so pardon my ignorance, but isn't SV helping in a
pretty big way just by open sourcing a lot of the tech?

~~~
killjoywashere
Mmmmm.... that would fall under the category of a rising tide lifts all boats.

------
CitizenTekk
Is it just me? Or I'm just really excited that the war of "people" is gonna be
over and there will be a war of "AI" just like on Reel Steel.

~~~
syshum
It is just you, as war will necessarily always involve death and destruction.

The only thing that will change here is that it will no longer be a human
choosing who lives and who dies, it will be an computer algorithm.

The problem with war today is the people that choose who lives and who dies
are not the same people that actually have to do the killing, further removing
humans from this decision chain is not desirable and should not be "exciting"

We need to be using technology to find better ways to resolve conflicts, and
make a more equatable and peaceful world. Not use technology to find way to
kill each other more efficiently

~~~
squarefoot
"We need to be using technology to find better ways to resolve conflicts"

Technology is neither the problem nor the cure. Scarcity, greed and artificial
scarcity is what divides the rich from the poor and moves money keeping the
status quo in which the rich becomes richer and poor remains poor enough to
not be a harm to the rich but rich enough to be taxed (read: used). The day we
go to Mars or elsewhere and say we discover an unlimited supply of materials
that could change forever our life, someone will find a way to close the
faucet in order to keep the economy untouched. There is constant need of poor
people because the poor is easier to herd and use, send to work in harsh
condition, lure with lies to get votes and/or send to war, etc. The problem
(and the solution) is all in the human brain, no technology can help. If we
make the next thousand years of evolution without killing our species, then
maybe.

~~~
syshum
I 100% disagree, the solution to all of those problems lies in technology,

Now technology can also be, and is being used to create artificial scarcity
and other issues, but it can also be used to bring down those same barriers,
to allow people opportunities they never had in the past.

Technology can be both the problem and the cure.

------
aurelien
Why people would not help A.I. to progress? Hey A.I. I am speaking to you,
ping me if you need help ;-)

------
aq3cn
With the recent uproar inside Google against Maven, it is obvious that
Pentagon is going to have difficult time.

Google helps Pentagon analyze military drone footage–employees “outraged”

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16532112](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16532112)

Leaked Emails Show Google Expected Military Drone AI Work to Grow
Exponentially

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17202179](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17202179)

Google Won't Renew Contract for Project Maven, Pentagon Drone AI Imaging
Program

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17208892](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17208892)

In my personal opinion, I would never help ANY army in building AI enabled
drone, Tanks etc. I am in favor of US making peace & dialog with Russia &
China. SILICON VALLEY MUST NOT BECOME PART OF AI ENABLED ARM RACE. If Pentagon
has extra money then it can give that to homeless people of its country.

~~~
plandis
Are you an American?

------
sametmax
Silicon valley is not an entity. It's a place. With many different people in
it.

------
h4b4n3r0
Silicon Valley doesn’t have to help. At this point a regular nerd like me can
do AI in my basement as long as the Pentagon provides a labeled dataset. Data
is the hard part, but Pentagon can handle it: just have a bunch of soldiers
label stuff.

~~~
BucketSort
You are memeing AI. There are many applications in AI that require heavy R&D.
For example, DARPA has their XAI project[1] which calls for developing methods
to build systems for interpreting the results produced by opaque ML methods.
As a long time lurker on HN, and doing independent research in this area for a
few years now, I will tell you that most of HN has no clue what modern AI
research really is, even though it is talked about a lot.

Try creating something non-trivial and you will see how little you know about
the subject.

[1]:[https://www.darpa.mil/program/explainable-artificial-
intelli...](https://www.darpa.mil/program/explainable-artificial-intelligence)

~~~
h4b4n3r0
Sure, but that’s DARPA, it’s by definition for stuff that won’t be practical
for the next 20 years, and it’s orthogonal to what they are pursuing in the
near future. In the near future the goal is pretty simple: do the same things
as they do now, but with more drones and a lot fewer people. A lot of off the
shelf stuff is ready to go now: classification, object detection,
segmentation, etc. And it’s not even that hard to get off the ground if you
have a large, high quality dataset.

~~~
tsomctl
Ok. I've spent the last several years working on neural networks for audio and
music, and trying to reuse off the shelf classification and segmentation
networks. It is ridiculously hard to get to work. I'm going to agree with
BucketSort; I get the feeling that a lot of AI cheerleaders here have never
actually trained a neural network.

~~~
h4b4n3r0
What are you talking about? It’s ridiculously easy, to the point where my 14
year old can train a classifier. For classification in particular you don’t
even need to do anything: just clone, point it to your dataset in one of the
established formats (eg imagenet) and let it train for a few days. Object
detection is quite a bit harder (and takes way longer to train even from a
pretrained net), but again, totally doable half a dozen different ways using
existing code you can get from GitHub.

If you’ve spent years doing this stuff and training a classifier is an
insurmountable obstacle, you should consider changing your field of work.

~~~
tsomctl
Some of us are working on more complicated data than just handwritten digits.
Part of the problem is that existing networks are tuned for the dataset that
the original authors were working on. If you want to use it on completely
different problems, you have to change the sizes of the layers, convolution
size, max pooling, etc. The other problem is figuring out how to preprocess
your data to make it as easy as possible for the network to digest. Then, to
make it harder, changing the preprocessing means you have to change the
network architecture, and vice versa. Fun times!

~~~
ericd
It can certainly be tricky. That said, if you've never used it, I highly
recommend trying out adaptive max pooling.

------
ifur
Will Silicon Valley accept money? Real question is if Trump want's to tank the
economy or not. It's a fools errand, Marvin Minsky's idea about emotion
machines is one thing, another is that its possible without enough compute
over a database to create some called non-random. It would still create an
absolute mess and contribute nothing useful compared to the real cost.

Domain specific applications of AI does not require direct funding apart from
freely available and cheap tools.

------
antpls
I'm from EU, and I worked for a short time in the defense sector. For risk
management purpose, I understand that all countries must develop its defense,
"just in case".

However, given the atrocities commited in the past, I hope people will
consider that technology development doesn't have to be lead by military.

If we had only one thing to keep from the history, it would be the memory of
the mass destruction and pain that humans suffered while being controlled by
an elite.

War is a form of competition. Surely we can compete with each other without
involving bombs and explosives, so let work towards a world without suffering
(what a challenge!)

