
The NSA’s machine learning algorithm may be killing thousands of innocent people - mocko
http://arstechnica.co.uk/security/2016/02/the-nsas-skynet-program-may-be-killing-thousands-of-innocent-people/
======
Houshalter
They literally named it Skynet. They have an evil sense of humor.

Actually using machine learning to detect terrorists isn't a terrible idea.
But you are going to get an error rate, and probably a high one in the noisy
real world. Maybe only 50% of the people you detect are actually terrorists.
Maybe it's even worse than that. We can't even test it because there is no
validation set and unreliable labels.

The reasonable thing to do with that information, would be to surveil them
further, search their house, or arrest them. Not assassinate them without a
trial.

And the more I read the details, the more alarmed I am. The 50% figure I used
above may have been way too high. The base rate of terrorists way too low and
they have very little data to begin with.

~~~
DyslexicAtheist
A drone strike typically kills identified terrorist targets but also
unidentified targets. The trick is that as long as bystanding casualities
(also children yes - or as the drone operators call them "fun sized
terrorists") have not been identified they're automatically counted as
terrorists. (see also [https://theintercept.com/drone-
papers/](https://theintercept.com/drone-papers/))

I don't think now that the beast has been unleashed it can be controlled or
harnessed with peaceful means (the tools of democracy). It will take more than
a couple of middle-class people with billboards handing out flyers. America is
fuelling its own terrorism and creating hate so they can continue their war on
terror. Every terrorist act in the West will further drive the hate and
justify surveillance. Pretty sure this is a downward spiral which ultimately
has only losers.

Which steps can the average Joe take which aren't considered radical by the
system? Do you know any please share because I don't.

~~~
hodwik
We need a military. All states do -- its part of their duty to their
citizenry.

The problem in the US is that our hippy-run academia are driving the smart
people out of jobs in the military (and police force for that matter), and
it's putting us in a terrible position.

The only way to fix it is for smart people to start joining the military
again.

~~~
arca_vorago
This is absolute bullshit. The problem is that we need a military that is
actually going to man the fuck up when an O-5+ decides to push some
unconstitutional program on the people.

What has happened isnt that hippy academia is jacking up the military, but
rather that the military has been kicking out the kind of people who arent
afraid to tell truth to power, and are increasingly making choices and then
only hiring people who tell them those choices are good and what they want to
hear.

I have spent the majority of my free time since I got out trying to understand
what the fuck is going on here, and the reality is that our generals failed
our military by allowing the neocons to push us into wars for dubious reasons.
Thats even counting the real reasons no one talks about, such as upcoming
resource wars and a return to a tripolar world.

No, the real problem is that we have barely had a real president since the new
world order bunch assassinated JFK (and RFK), because that was a very clear
message to any POTUS willing to actually stand up. (Dont get me wrong, JFK was
far from perfect...)

We now have institutional corruption from the top down in every single branch
of government, including the famed fourth estate which has been turned into
stenographers weekly. Corruption and incompetence are running rampant, and are
acting as a cover for the malicious string pullers (Hanlons razor is a logical
fallacy!)

So no, its not that the goddamn hippies have fucked up the military, its much
closer to the military and its propoganda programs have so far infiltrated
academia that its a lifeless shell of what it could and should be in this
internet age.

Keep in mind though, its the military who has pushed this though. While the
three letters have carried out operations similar to mockingbird (thank you
church comittee), its the globalist new world order group who have pushed it
on their controlled government puppets. (Read up on what Norman Dodd found
during the Reese Committee for more info)

Yes, you are correct we need a smarter military, but just having "smart
people" join up wont do it. You need change from the POTUS down, because
beleive you me, we have turned mental deconstruction and reconstruction into
an art form.

~~~
CWuestefeld
_allowing the neocons to push us into wars for dubious reasons_

It seems to me that it was some group other than neocons that got us inveigled
in war in Libya and Syria - thereby creating the fertile spawning ground for
ISIS.

~~~
tremon
Not sure what you're getting at, but ISIS command consists mostly of former
Iraqi officials that were sidelined after Saddam Hussein was ousted. The soil
was initially fertilized by burning down Iraq.

The "fertile ground" that allows moderates to become radicalized eventually
boils down to polarization. It doesn't really matter whether the rhetoric is
coming from Somalia, Nigeria, Mali, Turkey, Indonesia, Libya, Israel, Europe
or the US; as long as the discourse goes in terms of "us vs them", many people
will identify (and act) as victims.

~~~
CWuestefeld
I was careful in my wording. I do grant that the initial war in Iraq catalyzed
the _creation_ of ISIS. What I was saying here is that the power vacuum we
caused in Syria and especially Libya created a place where that seed could
grow and thrive.

But anyway, that wasn't the main point. The real point was to show that it
wasn't a neocon that started our wars in Libya and Syria - it was today's
iconic Progressive who did that, and without any sort of Congressional
approval at all. Those wars can't be attributed to neocons, they are the
Progressives' to own.

------
agd
Big data analysis + mass surveillance is a frightening prospect. Of course you
can train software to look for 'terrorists', but you could also train it to
look for:

\- whistleblowers

\- minority groups (e.g. gay people, particular religious beliefs, political
affiliation)

\- political dissidents

\- journalists whose behaviour changes

\- personal vulnerabilities (affairs, mental health issues etc)

Think what authoritarian governments could (and are) doing with this
capability.

~~~
akerro
\- political dissidents

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

And that's what it is used for. Australian gov. used their abilities to mark
people who say against coal energy as anti-government, all they did was
support renewable sources of energy.
[https://overland.org.au/2014/07/surveillance-of-activists-
is...](https://overland.org.au/2014/07/surveillance-of-activists-is-about-to-
get-much-much-worse/)

and Canada: [http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/feb/14/canada-
en...](http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/feb/14/canada-
environmental-activism-threat)

\- minority groups

FBI was spying on black-rights activists, since ever.
[https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/11/fbis-suicide-letter-
dr...](https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/11/fbis-suicide-letter-dr-martin-
luther-king-jr-and-dangers-unchecked-surveillance)

\- whistleblowers

No example needed.

\- journalists whose behaviour changes

[https://www.opendemocracy.net/ourkingdom/duncan-
campbell/gch...](https://www.opendemocracy.net/ourkingdom/duncan-
campbell/gchq-and-me)

Campbell in '70s discovered ECHELON, NSA admitted he was their personal target
since then.

\- personal vulnerabilities (affairs, mental health issues etc)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SEXINT](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SEXINT)
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LOVEINT](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LOVEINT)

~~~
stevetrewick
_> Australian gov. used their abilities to mark people who say against coal
energy as anti-government_

Even the partisan sources you've linked don't support that particular
assertion AFAICS. It appears that gov.au placed a group of activists with the
potential intent to disrupt energy supplies under surveillance.

'Green' activists suffer from a bad case of noble cause corruption which
prevents them from understanding that things they think are wonderful and
necessary - like disrupting power grids - are well within the scope of what
other people would consider to be terrorism.

There is also no suggestion that any ML or mass surveillance was used in
targeting them. Targeted, intrusive surveillance was authorised against them.

~~~
akerro
I don't know any good sources about it. I heard about it somewhere on reddit
probably and it stuck in my head, there are more different kind of sources if
you need more:

[http://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-
insight/2014/ja...](http://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-
insight/2014/jan/21/fracking-activism-protest-terrorist-oil-corporate-spies)

[http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-01-07/brown-slams-spying-
on-...](http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-01-07/brown-slams-spying-on-
environmental-activists/3762308)

[http://www.smh.com.au/environment/afp-spies-targeting-
green-...](http://www.smh.com.au/environment/afp-spies-targeting-green-
activists-20120106-1pogq.html)

------
nl
This story is stupid.

I'm sorry. No fan of the NSA, but the premise behind it is completely
ridiculous.

There is zero evidence of the repeatably asserted idea that the list this tool
generates is any kind of kill list.

It's a tool that generates indicators of people that may be worth looking at
when trying to find couriers. That's a very _specific_ subgroup of terrorists,
and I find it entirely unsurprising that a journalist would be falsely flagged
as journalists have statistically unusual travel habits (Clearly labeling him
as "member of Al Qaida" is unjustified by this evidence though).

Also, criticizing the NSA on their knowledge of statistics seems unwise. The
NSA is many things, but "bad at Math" isn't one of them.

Read the information yourself, and come to your own conclusions.

~~~
SeanDav
You may of course be right, I would find it surprising in the extreme if
people were killed based purely on output of an algorithm. However we have no
assurance that this tool was _not_ used to generate kill targets without any
human input. The NSA operates without any meaningful oversight and if they
decided to use algorithms to generate kill targets, they would go right ahead
and do it.

~~~
pavelrub
> However we have no assurance that this tool was not used to generate kill
> targets without any human input.

That's absurd. We also have no assurance that the NSA isn't communicating with
aliens to generate kill lists of people who will oppose the alien invasion of
2021, though we do have common sense to filter out such absurd scenarios. "We
have no assurance that this isn't so" isn't an argument.

~~~
titzer
I'll bite. The difference is that communicating with aliens requires positing
the existence of aliens, whereas simply generating a kill list is already
something we know they do, though we don't know how it works.

It isn't "common sense" to filter out entirely obvious actions the NSA would
take, and given the scale of disclosures from the Snowden files you ought to
have already expanded your imagination away from "they'd never do that" to
"yes, they already have the technical capability and have done similar things
in the past, lied to Congress about it, dismantled oversight, lobbied against
oversight, and otherwise deceived every mechanism of oversight put in place."

The fact that 2,500 to 4,000 people have been killed in Pakistan according to
a completely opaque process for classifying targets and blasting them from the
sky--a process that operates entirely outside any law--ought to be considered
absurd, shocking, frightening, and soul-crushingly inhuman. But it's not.
We're arguing about with each other about bullshit.

Focus.

~~~
nl
_The fact that 2,500 to 4,000 people have been killed in Pakistan according to
a completely opaque process for classifying targets and blasting them from the
sky--a process that operates entirely outside any law--ought to be considered
absurd, shocking, frightening, and soul-crushingly inhuman. But it 's not.
We're arguing about with each other about bullshit._

I'm incredibly appalled by that. That's why stories like this are dreadful.
They overreach in their conclusions, and will be easily denied by people
involved in the programs who will then produce evidence to show that this
particular program does exactly what it tries to to: identify terrorist
couriers.

That denial and evidence will then discredit all the sensible arguments about
the drone strike program.

Don't believe it? There's a discussion down-thread where someone is equating
this list with the US Terrorism Watch Lists. Their clearly not the same thing
at all (once glace at the slides shows you that), but they demand evidence. Of
course, I can't show evidence that will convince them, but at some point an
agency will, and they'll show exactly how the ist in this article (or some
other list) is very accurate (I'm sure there is some list that is) and that
will discredit the whole argument against the watch lists.

~~~
mike_hearn
* who will then produce evidence to show that this particular program does exactly what it tries to to*

No they won't, because they've been challenged to do such things repeatedly in
the past and always failed.

These people live in a foreign country and it's not like the US Govt
dispatches a bunch of detectives and lawyers based on the results of this ML
model. Get real. The intelligence is handed off to the CIA without revealing
how it's generated, the CIA then says "we got a list of terrorist couriers
from the NSA, let's go get em" and boom, off it goes.

This is all incredibly well documented.

There is simply no mathematical way the program described in the article can
be accurate, that's what the entire article is about. So I don't see why you
have such profound faith in them. It's quite clear they're a bunch of maths
geeks who have a single hammer and will use it to hammer any US foreign policy
problem regardless of how much it resembles a nail or not.

~~~
pc86
> _The intelligence is handed off to the CIA without revealing how it 's
> generated, the CIA then says "we got a list of terrorist couriers from the
> NSA, let's go get em" and boom, off it goes._

> _This is all incredibly well documented._

Then feel free to submit at least one source (or better yet, several) for this
"well documented" fact that (a) the NSA does not due any due diligence into
suspected terrorists after they get picked up by this meta data process; (b)
the NSA does not indicate in any way to the CIA how the list was generated;
(c) the CIA uses this information without performing any of its own due
diligence on the targets; (d) the CIA then goes and kills everyone on the list
without any further approval from DNI, SECDEF, POTUS, etc.

I'm no drone program apologist but let's get real here to suggest that there's
no intelligence or due diligence into these operations is willfully
disingenuous _at best_.

------
spazmaster
The thing that stood out for me is "Somewhere between 2,500 and 4,000 people
have been killed by drone strikes in Pakistan since 2004".

WHAT!? That is so wrong! This stinks and we're making fuss about mathematics.
Just read that sentence again.

~~~
Aeolos
Exactly.

In which freaking world are assassinations without due process legal or even
desirable? The mere fact that we are debating whether someone was or wasn't
assassinated is a perversion in itself.

Arrest them and try them in a court of justice. End of story.

~~~
oafitupa
Arrest them? They were in freaking Pakistan. Why would you arrest them? You
guys are going crazy. Don't be surprised when you travel and realize the world
hates you.

~~~
mike_hearn
He obviously means "send intelligence to the government of Pakistan and ask
them to investigate".

~~~
Aeolos
Thank you for stating the obvious.

Share information about terrorism suspects, arrest them, bring them to
justice. Don't go all Rambo, shooting first, asking questions later. That only
perpetuates terrorism - "you killed my innocent parents, I'm shall take my
revenge" \- and the circle of violence continues.

(Plus, it's already been proven that anyone shot is marked as an "Enemy Killed
in Action" posthumously, just to cover the perpetrators asses.)

------
dcposch
This story is hugely important. It gets to a deep question everyone here
should ask themselves -- beyond immediate concerns of salary, equity, and
learning value, is my specific work making the world a better place or a worse
place?

This story goes to the core of ethics in engineering.

It's all of 9 hours old and has 341 points -- yet it's already off of the
front page where nobody will see it. You could check HN literally every day
and still easily miss this story.

Meanwhile, the front page is full of unimportant links to obscure tech trivia,
many of which have less than 20 points.

We know that HN automatically penalizes submissions containing certain words,
including "NSA", in the title. Certain prolific HN users have also said that
they "automatically flag" submissions they consider "political".

But I really think HN would be a better place if the front page cycled out a
little slower, if stories like this were not suppressed, if they got at least
one day's worth of attention and discussion.

------
Aeolos
"Obliterated a wedding because people where celebrating by shooting in the
air."

This is the definition of evil.

How and why is the Pakistani government allowing this program to operate
within their territories?

~~~
cmdkeen
Because most of the strikes are in the Tribal areas near the border with
Afghanistan where the writ of the Pakistani state doesn't really run. The
Pakistani military has received some bloody noses when trying to operate in
the area. Even Wikipedia is happy to classify the whole thing as a war[0].
Over 6,000 members of the Pakistani security forces have been killed, 20,000
civilians and 35,000 "insurgents".

Pakistan gets significant military aid from the US to help put down an
insurgency by groups that would overthrow the state. On a realpolitik level
they also get to blame the US when a strike goes wrong whereas if they were
dropping their own bombs they would have to put up with the blame. Mistakes
always happen in war, I'd suggest however that a drone strike has
significantly more time to conduct pre-launch checks than an F16 pilot does.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_in_North-
West_Pakistan](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_in_North-West_Pakistan)

~~~
mcv
But the end result of all that is just that it generates even more hostility
towards the US and feeds terrorism. The US is creating its own enemies this
way. Again.

~~~
Aeolos
Cynically speaking, this is win-win for everyone involved. Except for the
innocents who are killed.

The US gets to debug and optimize their assassination program "on brown people
that noone cares about".

Pakistan and US also get to claim that they are "fighting terrorism". This
breeds resentment and new generations of terrorists to be "fought" in the
future (divide and conquer 101).

Plus, who knows when and where the droid program might come in handy in the
future...

~~~
IIAOPSW
droid program?

------
afsina
Oh come on "machine learning algorithm may be killing thousands.." just put a
"may be" and your BS assertion becomes more plausible? By looking at this,
people are having and idea that attack drones (it is rich that article puts
one picture of it in the beginning) are loaded with such software and killing
by looking at the result of a classifier. Or some super computer gives you a
name and says "exterminate".

Apparently these tools only gives operators some clues and save their time. If
it is a false positive, probably they just ignore it. Of course, obtaining the
information is a different story.

~~~
vladtaltos
the problem is you don't know that 'If it is a false positive, probably they
just ignore it.' -> 'probably' is a fucking optimistic view. AND how the hell
do you know this is a false positive ? some algorithm tells a soldier that
this person is probably a terrorist - what happens then ? do you think they
bother to verify this by spending more money ?

In my opinion it is most likely that, the people using this software send the
output of this algorithm as a recommendation up the chain and some idiot
decides to be 'safe' and recommends execution. because they don't have any
accountability. I don't think you would be this relaxed in your opinion if
these f-ing drones fly over your head - it is just that most people in the US
do not care what happens to some idiot in Pakistan.

from the reports disseminated by the state department they are not even sure
how many people they killed ? it is reported as between 2500 and 4000. Isn't
this insane ? I have no idea in my mind that US is killing people
indiscriminately using drones - and the word is not probably - it should be
'definitely'. i'm sure drones are turning people into terrorists more than
they are killing terrorists.

don't tell me this is a bs assertion before US can give the name of every body
they killed with a drone and the justification of it.

~~~
afsina
AFAIK for such decisions human information/intelligence is required. And there
are often screw ups/bad decisions. No need for bad machine learning algorithms
for this.

~~~
mike_hearn
Your optimism is misplaced. The USA routinely drone strikes people they have
no intelligence on whatsoever on the basis of nothing more than 'they acted
like a terrorist', these are called signature strikes, i.e. they matched the
"signature" of a terrorist.

Organisations that do this so frequently there's jargon for it are absolutely
not going to be slowed down by requiring human intelligence (which is itself
full of false positives and duplicity, see how random people were sold to US
soldiers as "terrorists" to collect the reward money).

------
karmacondon
I was wondering exactly how the NSA trained models to detect terrorists, and
was surprised by the level of detail in this article. So the NSA performs
classification using a Random Forest and about 80 input features? Huh. That
actually sounds a little too similar to a Kaggle contest for my liking, but I
wasn't expecting that much quasi-technical information anyway.

It seems a little silly to write this whole article based on a few powerpoint
slides from years ago. Even as an amateur practitioner, I can see several
obvious things that could be changed about the presented methods. I'm sure
what the NSA is doing now in this regard is much further along than what was
portrayed in those documents. Whether or not they should be doing it is a
discussion for others to have. But it is interesting to learn a little more
about the details of truly high stakes machine learning.

------
mtrn
Reminds me of this dialog from Spectre
([http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2379713/](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2379713/)):

> Have you ever had to kill a man, Max? Have you? To pull that trigger, you
> have to be sure. Yes, you investigate, analyze, assess, target. And then you
> have to look him in the eye. And you make the call. And all the drones,
> bugs, cameras, transcripts, all the surveillance in the world can't tell you
> what to do next.

------
scotty79
> ... possibly resulting in their untimely demise.

I get increasingly annoyed by these kinds of euphemisms in articles discussing
US actions. As if it was something humorous.

Should be something like: ... possibly resulting in them getting assassinated
by US military.

------
donatj
We're killing people in a country were not even at war with over statistics.
Not evidence, but statistics. People who statistical might have something
against us. Since when has this been grounds for killing someone? This is
utterly terrifying.

Just imagine if someone decided to do this to us. How does Pakistan feel about
all this?

This is approaching Auschwitz levels of evil.

------
massemphasis
They don't actually care if the person is innocent. The point is to intimidate
their population. They use this metadata to fit into the system of law so they
can cover their ass.

------
klean92
The argument was that in the US, they "only" collected metadata. No real phone
calls. No big deal...

The power of their use of "only" metadata in Pakistan is frightening..

------
appleflaxen
The founding fathers put due process into the constitution / bill of rights
because it's a fundamental check on government bureaucracy run amok, and
prevents physical harm from coming to people as the result of a capricious
executive whim.

Now, we learn that the executive has excused themselves from following this
process (which applies to Americans, some of which these victims may be, even
when they are not in America).

The farther open we pull the NSA lid, the more revolting discoveries we find.

The individuals behind these decisions should be identified, and tried in the
court of law.

------
luisjgomez
"Under the random selection of a tiny subset of less than 0.1 percent of the
total population, the density of the social graph of the citizens is massively
reduced, while the "terrorist" cluster remains strongly interconnected."

There is no indication in the slides that the feature calculations are done on
the smaller subgraph. The above comment doesn't hold if the calculations are
done on the entire graph and then the 100k are sampled for training.

------
DKnol
I see lots of doubt about the ridiculous nature of this program described in
this article. People saying it's not possible.

Are you sure? [https://theintercept.com/2014/02/10/the-nsas-secret-
role/](https://theintercept.com/2014/02/10/the-nsas-secret-role/)

------
YashN
Funny how in the title, the culprit is the algorithm and not the organisation.

------
tobbyb
The US, UK response to terrorism is so disproportional, odious and sinister
one wonders whether this is infant a 'response' or something far more evil
cooking below the surface.

This kind of technology necessitates mass surveillance, and offers you little
more beyond the faint possibility that crime can be predicted. This is bogus
science.

If you let your mind entertain the idea you can predict crime, then you are
already at the thresh hold of a stifling surveillance state. And why are we
even assassinating people. What happens to due process? One by one all these
fundamental principles are set aside, massive and dubious mass surveillance
infrastructures are being built, doublespeak is comically rampant.

One can begin to understand Snowden's urgent need to act, but what about the
moral compass of all the people in the NSA and who support the US and UK
security apparatus? People need to act. Surely they cannot suddenly subscribe
to values we have aggressively demonized for more than 100 years.

Who would have thought that the US and UK are now the rogue states and other
countries who are far more secure and sure about their politics need to begin
to isolate themselves from these dangerous totalitarian instincts.

------
EGreg
The more I read about US activities abroad, the more I realize Chomsky's
right. Are sovereign countries supposed to tolerate a certain level of drone
strikes by the USA (4500 people in Pakistan killed in the last decade) based
on -- now revealed -- machine learning hunches?

------
georgeek
There are two issues here, firstly some dramatic overfitting of the model, and
secondly that all-too-familiar garbage in, garbage out fact, which is even
more relevant when dealing with data.

------
mcv
They automated the decision to kill people and called it Skynet? That sounds
awfully familiar. When can we expect assistance from the future to take the
NSA people out?

------
andremendes
I feel infuriated while reading that they named it Skynet. They are clearly
the ones creating terror, that's so absurd! I can't believe that they do not
have the understanding that this very act is what propagates wars and keep
them going on forever. As it cannot pass as ignorance, I take as malicious the
people who feed this system.

------
daviddumenil
A related approach that identified suspects based on their banking history was
outlined in SuperFreakonomics. The chapter is reproduced in this review:

[https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/90622011](https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/90622011)

------
kafkaesq
Hmm:

 _Behavior-based Analytics: - Low [cell phone] use, incoming calls only -
Frequent handset changes - Frequent detach / power-down_

 _Visits to other countries - overnight trips - permanent move_

I guess that makes me an extremist militant, also.

------
stevetrewick
Even before reading TFA that headline stands out like poke in the eye. An
algorithm has no agency - moral or otherwise. Algorithms don't kill people,
people kill people.

------
visarga
Why are terrorists still using SMS if it is lethal?

------
anon4
The important part is that it's helping them kill more people, so it means
they're more productive. /s

------
Cacti
Would have appreciated a "top secret" flag in the title. The slides in the
article are not declassified...

------
anovikov
If that system skill kills enough terrorists to make them scared and limit
inflow if new recruits into that system than why not? Obviously rest of the
population of Pakistan pays their price, but what they expect if they can't
(or really, don't want to) shut down terrorist activity in their own country
themselves?

------
botterworkshop
It's ignorant to assume any targets revealed by this program wouldn't be given
a human intelligence analyst to verify accuracy before risking millions of
dollars on a predator strike and the potential risk it was bad information.
Enough said.

~~~
DKnol
[https://theintercept.com/2014/02/10/the-nsas-secret-
role/](https://theintercept.com/2014/02/10/the-nsas-secret-role/)

------
foxyv
Non-Bayes analysis kills.

------
alanwatts
So yes, a state would not be much of a state without some form of military.
But why do we need separate states?

Edit: this is a genuine question about the practicality of a concept (the
"nation-state") that was invented during the Gutenberg era of the printing
press, and how such a concept has become impractical in the age of
instantaneous international interconnectivity and economic globalization.

Downvoters: How are arbitrary divisions drawn on a map anything but
counterproductive to synergy and efficiency in the age of globalization?

~~~
Aeolos
You really want to know? Because of regression towards the mean.

Having a single state would mean that the US couldn't afford to have a
significantly higher standard of living compared to the rest of the world. In
fact, 1st world countries would have to meet 3rd world countries somewhere in
the middle.

(Assuming you are living in the states) Would you be willing to live on a wage
of $5000 a year?

Edit: see here
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_%28no...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_%28nominal%29_per_capita)

~~~
alanwatts
You're still thinking in terms of 19th century paper-based processes when you
attempt to estimate globally integrated wealth in terms of a nationally
fragmented paper-based information system ($). Also, GDP is not indicative of
net wealth, as it is a measurement which implicitly asserts the broken window
fallacy.

Over the long term, breaking down these legacy barriers to trade and freedom
of movement would necessarily uplift _everyone_ economically by principle of
synergy.

Synergy: the interaction of elements that when combined produce a total effect
that is greater than the sum of the individual elements, contributions, etc.

>I'm going to give you an important kind of a picture. I hear a lot of people
say "I don't like machinery and technology, it's making a lot of trouble." So
we're going to take all the machinery away from all the countries of the
world, all machinery, all the tracks and the wires, and the works and we're
going to dump it all in the ocean. And you will discover that within 6 months,
2 billion people will die of starvation having gone through great pain. So we
say "That's not a very good idea lets put all the machinery back where it
was." Then, we're going to take all the politicians from all the countries
around the world and we're going to send them on a trip around the sun, and
you'll find we keep right on eating. And the political barriers now...
scientists say very clear you could make the world work and take care of 100%
of the people at a higher standard of living that anyone has ever known
despite the increasing population, but you can't do it with the barriers, any
more than you can try run a human organism with a wall between the ear, the
eye, and the stomach. It is an organic whole, it is total industrialization.

-Buckminster Fuller

>Human history can be viewed as a slowly dawning awareness that we are members
of a larger group. Initially our loyalties were to ourselves and our immediate
family, next, to bands of wandering hunter-gatherers, then to tribes, small
settlements, city-states, nations. We have broadened the circle of those we
love. We have now organized what are modestly described as super-powers, which
include groups of people from divergent ethnic and cultural backgrounds
working in some sense together — surely a humanizing and character building
experience. If we are to survive, our loyalties must be broadened further, to
include the whole human community, the entire planet Earth. Many of those who
run the nations will find this idea unpleasant. They will fear the loss of
power. We will hear much about treason and disloyalty. Rich nation-states will
have to share their wealth with poor ones. But the choice, as H. G. Wells once
said in a different context, is clearly the universe or nothing.

-Carl Sagan, Cosmos

~~~
pc86
Please try to make your points without quoting random people. Quotes are not
sources, they are not facts, they're just something someone said.

~~~
alanwatts
If you think the thoughts of great scientists and engineers like Buckminster
Fuller (Former president of the Mensa Society) and Carl Sagan are unwarranted
in a place like hackernews then you should find a new forum. Do you have
anything to contribute to this discussion?

Edit:

"The argument from authority (Latin: argumentum ad verecundiam) also appeal to
authority, is a common argument form which can be fallacious, such as when an
authority is cited on a topic outside their area of expertise, when the
authority cited is not a true expert."

Please do tell who might be a true expert on science and technology as it
relates to societal organization, if not Fuller or Sagan.

~~~
pc86
Since you're a fan of linking to Wikipedia articles about fallacious
arguments, I'll just leave this:

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

~~~
tremon
That doesn't apply, and you know it. The fallacy is constructed as "A has said
B, A is great, therefore B must be true".

The GP never stated that B must be true. Simply quoting somebody is not in
itself a fallacy.

