Ex-Googler Schmidt warns US: Try an AI 'Manhattan Project' and get MAIM'd Former Google chief Eric Schmidt says the US should refrain from pursuing a latter-day "Manhattan Project" to gain AI supremacy, as this will provoke preemptive cyber responses from rivals such as China that could lead to escalation. China would not sit idle waiting to be dictated to by the US once it achieves …
Current world leaders look like Bond movie villains. They look like they actually want total world domination by any means possible.
That holds for all three (four?) of them.
I suspect they see this risk assessment as a road map, not as something to be avoided.
Or maybe they will simply divide the globe up into spheres of influence? Each can then be a tyrant in his own quarter. Not that that has ever been a stable strategy.
Pity that the thinkers failed to predict and counteract the disastrous impact of (a)social media. China had it right from the beginning, it seems. What if China suddenly becomes necessary to stand up against a democratically elected malware(*). Hitler was supposedly democratically elected.
Social media are the most urgent risk, not AI.
* Musk's Grok AI claims Trump is very likely a Russian asset: https://www.newsweek.com/elon-musks-chatbot-says-theres-strong-chance-trump-russian-asset-2040338
Or more likely end up with a quasi-stable situation where we've always been at war with Eastasia.
And we'll have to forgo the internet because the AIs run by the thought police will be able to scrape our entire lives off it and deal with us as they see fit. "give me 6 things said by a man, and I'll find something to hang him with"
No wait... its eurasia we at war with .....sorry... no not the cage full of rats..... do it to her..... not me......
or even a state-issued edict.
Reminds me of what was happening in the beginning of the gene-editing days where quite a few cerebral organizations made pronouncements about how/when/where/etc. modifying the human germ genome should only be done with serious reflection and consultation with these learned organizations.
Then one scientist in China decided to do so anyway. Same will happen with AI - inside the USA (or USSR) and outside.
For clarity:
The USSR is no more !!!
[See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_Union ]
The US of A is in the middle of a 'small' change of alliance(s) !!!
USSR may be closer to a comeback than we think (with US of A help) !!! <jk>
:)
Computers, or the machines which preceded them, made the choice on both sides on the earth that the enemy had launched nuclear attacks. Some in space, some across the ocean, some under water, some flying towards us, and so on. We know of a few famous ones, but nobody sane would believe that those were the only ones.
Each time, EVERY time, humans were the one to prevent the catastrophe, simply by "na, that does not make sense". So little has changed over the last 100 years in that regard, even though the technology made leaps beyond imagination (and still lacking other aspects where imagination is still ahead).
He tried this before in that book with Kissinger but I guess it's worth another kick at the can. I mean, what IF we could just squash research to preserve our hegemony in the current crappy state of the art?
"We own Nvidia stock and those GPUs ain't gonna buy themselves!"(At least not without AI....)
"As AI diffuses across countless sectors, societies can raise living standards and individuals can improve their well-being however they see fit"
Sorry, best we can do is force more people into unemployment, have C-levels and shareholders pocket the short-term difference and let organizations drown in poorly guardrailed slop with indefinitely deferred responsibility.
With particular and peculiar regard to .....
the US should refrain from pursuing a latter-day "Manhattan Project" to gain AI supremacy, as this will provoke preemptive cyber responses from rivals such as China that could lead to escalation.
.... is provocation of preemptive cyber responses from rivals the least of your worries methink whenever so much more beyond general knowledge has already been done to render to others, who may or may not be helping the Chinese, the clear advantage of an overwhelming gain of AI supremacy function.
GrahamC [2503061426] asks on https://www.nationaldefensemagazine.org/articles/2025/3/5/b21-inherently-incumbent-on-nextgen-nuclear-communications-system[Thank you. Your comment
willmay not be displayed soon after reviewing.]"As the Air Force works to modernize the air and land legs of its nuclear triad with the B-21 stealth bomber and Sentinel intercontinental ballistic missile, their success will depend on the next generation of the United States’ nuclear command, control and communications systems, service officials said."Does that next generation of the United States’ nuclear command, control and communications systems oppose and/or compete against and present itself as an alternative peer leader to C42 Quantum Communications Control Systems ...... AI@ITsWork ..... exercising NEUKlearer HyperRadioProACTive IT Protocols ...... Advanced CyberIntelAIgent Threat/Treat Programs ...... or is it perceived and believed whenever such as may be foreign abilities and possibilities for alien facilities and capable utilities which are not understood and misunderestimated to be dismissed as highly unlikely and quite improbable, that the one is not at risk and in clear and present danger of being overwhelmed and neutralised by the other, for some would posit such can all too easily be the case and therefore something gravely to be regarded and steered well clear of if in any sort of competitive adversarial opposition.
Whenever the whole nature of global defence and universal attack is fundamentally changed by unexpectedly novel and rapidly emerged and anomalous remotely controlled otherworldly virtual technologies exercising almighty vanquishing methodologies are all previous aggressive militarised means of commanding intimidation and international control rendered obsolete and a liability to retain and maintain even as a relic to remind future masses of the barbarism of the past that has been left behind for history to condemn as a collective folly born and borne of systemic madness and institutional mayhem, stoked by wilful human ignorance and encouraged by the arrogance displayed and supported in the hubris exhibited by worthless wannabe heroes and fiat paper tigers alike.
And the awkward question asked here, and further afield elsewhere too today, for more than just the United States and Departments of Defense to comment on and answer is ....... Is that not where y'all and IT and AI is all at nowadays, and blowin' in the wind?
Like suddenly opening up all the Chinese social media, accurately translated into English and cross-posting into Facebook, Reddit, 4chan etc etc. So that there is an even *larger* pile of codswallop for the training to scrape.
Hmm, if the DoD's super mega AI turns out to be as prone as its progenitors to making things up, being "jail broken" and generally useless, do you think we can get the DoD to brand Facebook as unamerican, an obvious long-term deep sleeper agent strategy to destable the US defenses by ruining all the LLMs?
Does anyone else wonder how much of what is going on in the world is just "distraction crap"? It makes sense when you think about it. We all have diplomatic channels and back channels with each other. These were put in place decades ago. AI as it is is just a distraction. It can't really do much. Ukraine was a blatant mineral grab (which I said 3 years ago) and don't even get me started on Gaza, China, Taiwan and the Islands of the Philippines.
What are we supposed to believe anymore?
The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.
AI, bah humbug.
The intriguing thing here, even hardware that exists now may be capable of superintelligence.
I looked into this, some of the components on Nvidia's H100 seem to have almost quantum level interactions.
A hypothetical Singularity might occur because someone stumbles across a way to exploit quantum effects
on classical hardware, gives the AI enough incentive and .. (Terminator theme intensifies)
Sooner or later everyone will look back at most of this junk and realise that the idea of 'AI supremacy' is about as useful as 'blockchain supremacy' would have been back when that was the hot thing not so long ago.
Some of this stuff is good and useful but as with the many blockchain ideas people came up with, a lot of it - even if perfectly delivered - is at best an inferior way to achieve something that is already possible by simpler means. Many of the AI proposals aren't even close to reaching that low bar.
The wild hype cycle continues but it still doesn't make the crude hype any truer.
(I may be slightly burned out from endlessly dismantling various vague AI->?->Profit! proposals I get that can be usefully & cheaply achieved with other methods that might even still involve some older simple AI instead of an LLM and/or masses of GPUs)
What a load of hypothetical bullshit from a man who is no longer relevant in the industry.
Even if you assume creating an actual AI is possible there is no guarantee that you can create a superintelligence and even less guarantee that it will be created by an American. Especially since they're deporting immigrants, who are always the ones doing the research.
Colossus The Forbin Project ( 1970) ..... get/watch it here ..... https://archive.org/details/colossus-the-forbin-project-1970
And well worth watching too.
And the fear being touted nowadays appears to be the Sci-Fi imagined then is morphing inexorably into Sci-Fact now and fundamentally able to better lead the future than that which and those who tasks themselves with that burden/opportunity today.
This!
And before the movie (well, the first one was before the movie, the next two, afterwards), there was a 3 novel trilogy written by D.F Jones, which was even better (read them as a youngster) - highly recommended:
Colossus 1966
The Fall of Colossus 1974
Colossus and the Crab 1977
GenAI hype has everyone dreaming of AGI and the Singularity. Governments are compelled by the vision of a rapid self-improvement cycle that results in superintelligence. There’s a belief that whomever it is that reaches this milestone first will rule the world. So, get ready. Anything that can generate power including all combustibles must be used to feed power to each national AI. People concerned about climate change are screwed, they no longer matter. Are we really doing this?
From TFA: At least we can console ourselves that any "superintelligence" is likely to be a long way away from realization.
Superintelligent true AI is not required to threaten all life on Earth. All it takes is a group of highly-placed, overly-credulous, new-and-shiny-seeking, silver-bullet-chasing, trend/hype-following, possibly-bribed-or-blackmailed, governmental and military officials to purchase and have installed a pile-of-crap "AI" thing with control over nuclear weapons. Or, even in a position to make "reccomendations", as people have fairly-consistently shown a worshipful attitude toward whatever "the computer" tells them.
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