Fear of Thinking War Machines May Push U.S. To Exascale 192
dcblogs writes "Unlike China and Europe, the U.S. has yet to adopt and fund an exascale development program, and concerns about what that means to U.S. security are growing darker and more dire. If the U.S. falls behind in HPC, the consequences will be 'in a word, devastating,' Selmer Bringsford, chair of the Department. of Cognitive Science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, said at a U.S. House forum this week. 'If we were to lose our capacity to build preeminently smart machines, that would be a very dark situation, because machines can serve as weapons.' The House is about to get a bill requiring the Dept. of Energy to establish an exascale program. But the expected funding level, about $200 million annually, 'is better than nothing, but compared to China and Europe it's at least 10 times too low,' said Earl Joseph, an HPC analyst at IDC. David McQueeney, vice president of IBM research, told lawmakers that HPC systems now have the ability to not only deal with large data sets but 'to draw insights out of them.' The new generation of machines are being programmed to understand what the data sources are telling them, he said."
Fund us or [insert fud] (Score:5, Interesting)
Selmer Bringsford, chair of the Department. of Cognitive Science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, said at a U.S. House forum this week. '
Seems we have plenty of super computers laying about, having only recently been booted from top place in the never ending game of leap-frog in high end
machines.
We prefer to use them for weather and spying on our own citizens, rather than making better weapons, especially when we can hide the funds for computer systems in the weapon funding.
Not sure I'm buying the hand wringing act.
Re:Another arms race? (Score:5, Interesting)
If you're going to have an arms race, it might as well be in an area with significent civilian applications.
Shame the space race died once America made target and the USSR fell apart. If that had kept going, we'd be living in apartments on Mars by now.
Re:Another arms race? (Score:5, Interesting)
How ironic, our fear of skynet will lead to us building it pre-emptively.
Re:Another arms race? (Score:5, Interesting)
Shame the space race died once America made target and the USSR fell apart. If that had kept going, we'd be living in apartments on Mars by now.
Or perhaps deploying weapons on Mars by now...
Oh no, it's Selmer Bringsjord (Score:5, Interesting)
Look who's pushing for this program. It's Selmer Bringsjord, a professor at Renssalaer who wants to build Skynet and Terminators. For real. From his 1997 paper: [rpi.edu] "Our engineers must be given the resources to produce the perfected marriage of a trio: pervasive, all-seeing sensors; automated reasoners; and autonomous, lethal robots. In short, we need small machines that can see and hear in every corner; machines smart enough to understand and reason over the raw data that these sensing machines perceive; and machines able to instantly and infallibly fire autonomously on the strength of what the reasoning implies."
Yes, he really published that. The next paragraph is even worse:
If you are wearing explosives of any kind outside a subterranean environment, you will be spotted by intelligent unmanned airborne sensors, and will be instantly immobilized by a laser or particle beam from overhead. If you are working with explosives underground (or toiling to enrich uranium), sensors on and beneath the surface of the Earth will find you, and you will be killed soon thereafter by AI-guided bunker-boring bombs. If you are a murderous dicta- tor like Sadam or Stalin or Amin, or a leader (e.g., Ahmadinejad or Kim Jong II) heading in the direction of such evil, a supersonic robot jet no bigger than a dragonfly will take off in the States, thousands of miles from your "impregnable" lair, and streak in a short time directly into your body, depositing a fatal poison like Polonium therein. If you, alone or along with equally doomed cronies, seek to seize a jetliner with a plan to blow it up or use it as a missile, one biometric scan of your retina before boarding, and lightning-quick reasoning behind the scenes will ag you as a end, and you will be quickly greeted by law enforcement, and escorted into a system of interrogation that uses sensors to read secret information directly from your brain: lying will be silly. Want to bring a backpack bomb somewhere, and leave it behind? The contents of your pack will be sensed the second you bring it toward civilization, and it will be vaporized. Interested in the purchase of handguns for Cho-like mayhem? The slightest blip in your back- ground will be discovered in a second, and you will be out of luck. In fact, guns can themselves bear the trio: If you have one, and wish to fire it, it must sense your identity and location and purpose, and run a check to clear the trigger pull | all in a nanosecond."
Read his paper. This guy is scary. And Congress is listening to him.
Re:Oh no, the US isn't keeping up on warfare! (Score:4, Interesting)
Shut up and take the money. Later on we can employ the exa-tech for something useful.
What do you think funded the development of the earliest computers, like ENIAC and Colossus? How about the USAF being about the only customer willing to pay for the first IC's? Or so many of the comm techniques we use today, like CDMA, frequency hopping, and FEC?
Re:Oh no, it's Selmer Bringsjord (Score:2, Interesting)
" a supersonic robot jet no bigger than a dragonfly will take off in the States, thousands of miles from your "impregnable" lair, and streak in a short time directly into your body,"
I'd like to know what he expects to use to fuel that dragonfly. Antimatter? Pixie dust?
This guy is scary, especially if anyone is taking him seriously.
Recognized irony is key to transcending militarism (Score:5, Interesting)
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html [pdfernhout.net] ... irony. :-)"
"... Likewise, even United States three-letter agencies like the NSA and the CIA, as well as their foreign counterparts, are becoming ironic institutions in many ways. Despite probably having more computing power per square foot than any other place in the world, they seem not to have thought much about the implications of all that computer power and organized information to transform the world into a place of abundance for all. Cheap computing makes possible just about cheap everything else, as does the ability to make better designs through shared computing. I discuss that at length here: http://www.pdfernhout.net/post-scarcity-princeton.html [pdfernhout.net]
There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security thinking. Those "security" agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all.
So, while in the past, we had "nothing to fear but fear itself", the thing to fear these days is ironcially
And your point about the irony of how our fear of Skynet will lead to us building it preemptively is a great example of this general theme. It would be not much to worry about except that these technologies are so powerful -- which means we don't have to fight over material resources... See Marshall Brain's Manna at the end for another vision of what might be possible if we build a different sort of infrastructure with these technologies.
http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm [marshallbrain.com]
That said, people may always find ways to compete to show off for status. So, we as a global society need to redirect those urges into more productive (or less destructive) areas...
"Evolution for competition & cooperation"
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3866253&cid=44019221 [slashdot.org]
"Re:Helping the NSA transcend to abundance thinking (Score:3)" ..."
http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2773253&cid=39629001 [slashdot.org] [slashdot.org]
"To start with the bottom line: the very computers that make the new NSA facilities possible mean that the NSA's formal purpose is essentially soon to be at an end. Nothing you or I say here will reverse that trend. The only issue is how soon the NSA as a whole recognizes that fact, and then how people there choose to deal with that reality.
The increase in global spying is only one technology-driven trend of many going on right now.
Re:Another arms race? (Score:5, Interesting)
I thought that Nukes were bad but this is worse. Nukes are so drastic no one has gotten up the balls to fire one up since they saw what happened to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This stuff is too easy to use and could actually end up being as bad as Nuclear war. Just what we need, Berserkers.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berserker_(Saberhagen) [wikipedia.org]
Re:Recognized irony is key to transcending militar (Score:3, Interesting)
Very interesting take on things, I like it. There is though one factor you seem to omit: The most powerful and influential people and collective entities in the world, and those that they employ, see the world very differently than you and I. To those that wish to rule and wield power, to those that always want more, regardless of how much they have, scarcity is not an issue. The well being of others, society as a whole, beyond being a resource or a problem when insurrection looms is not an issue for consideration.