Former Google CEO and Henry Kissinger: Manage 'Age of AI's Epoch-Making Transformations (time.com) 50
"At the age of 98, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger has a whole new area of interest: artificial intelligence," reports Time magazine:
He became intrigued after being persuaded by Eric Schmidt, who was then the executive chairman of Google, to attend a lecture on the topic while at the Bilderberg conference in 2016. The two have teamed up with the dean of the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing, Daniel Huttenlocher, to write a bracing new book, The Age of AI, about the implications of the rapid rise and deployment of artificial intelligence, which they say "augurs a revolution in human affairs." The book argues that artificial intelligence processes have become so powerful, so seamlessly enmeshed in human affairs, and so unpredictable, that without some forethought and management, the kind of "epoch-making transformations" they will deliver may send human history in a dangerous direction...
Schmidt: The visit to Google got him thinking. And when we started talking about this, Dr. Kissinger said that he is very worried that the impact that this collection of technologies will have on humans and their existence, and that the technologists are operating without the benefit of understanding their impact or history. And that, I think, is absolutely correct...
Kissinger: [T]he technologists are showing us how to relate reason to artificial intelligence. It's a different kind of knowledge in some respects, because with reason — the world in which I grew up — each evidence supports the other. With artificial intelligence, the astounding thing is, you come up with a conclusion which is correct. But you don't know why. That's a totally new challenge. And so in some ways, what they have invented is dangerous. But it advances our culture. Would we be better off if it had never been invented? I don't know that. But now that it exists, we have to understand it. And it cannot be eliminated. Too much of our life is already consumed by it....
Up to now humanity assumed that its technological progress was beneficial or manageable. We are saying that it can be hugely beneficial. It may be manageable, but there are aspects to the managing part of it that we haven't studied at all or sufficiently. I remain worried. I'm opposed to saying we therefore have to eliminate it. It's there now. One of the major points is that we think there should be created some philosophy to guide to the research.
Time: Who would you suggest would make that philosophy? What's the next step?
Kissinger: We need a number of little groups that ask questions. When I was a graduate student, nuclear weapons were new. And at that time, a number of concerned professors at Harvard, MIT and Caltech met most Saturday afternoons to ask, What is the answer? How do we deal with it? And they came up with the arms-control idea.
Schmidt: We need a similar process. It won't be one place, it will be a set of such initiatives. One of my hopes is to help organize those post-book, if we get a good reception to the book.
I think that the first thing is that this stuff is too powerful to be done by tech alone. It's also unlikely that it will just get regulated correctly. So you have to build a philosophy. I can't say it as well as Dr. Kissinger, but you need a philosophical framework, a set of understandings of where the limits of this technology should go. In my experience in science, the only way that happens is when you get the scientists and the policy people together in some form. This is true in biology, is true in recombinant DNA and so forth.
Schmidt: The visit to Google got him thinking. And when we started talking about this, Dr. Kissinger said that he is very worried that the impact that this collection of technologies will have on humans and their existence, and that the technologists are operating without the benefit of understanding their impact or history. And that, I think, is absolutely correct...
Kissinger: [T]he technologists are showing us how to relate reason to artificial intelligence. It's a different kind of knowledge in some respects, because with reason — the world in which I grew up — each evidence supports the other. With artificial intelligence, the astounding thing is, you come up with a conclusion which is correct. But you don't know why. That's a totally new challenge. And so in some ways, what they have invented is dangerous. But it advances our culture. Would we be better off if it had never been invented? I don't know that. But now that it exists, we have to understand it. And it cannot be eliminated. Too much of our life is already consumed by it....
Up to now humanity assumed that its technological progress was beneficial or manageable. We are saying that it can be hugely beneficial. It may be manageable, but there are aspects to the managing part of it that we haven't studied at all or sufficiently. I remain worried. I'm opposed to saying we therefore have to eliminate it. It's there now. One of the major points is that we think there should be created some philosophy to guide to the research.
Time: Who would you suggest would make that philosophy? What's the next step?
Kissinger: We need a number of little groups that ask questions. When I was a graduate student, nuclear weapons were new. And at that time, a number of concerned professors at Harvard, MIT and Caltech met most Saturday afternoons to ask, What is the answer? How do we deal with it? And they came up with the arms-control idea.
Schmidt: We need a similar process. It won't be one place, it will be a set of such initiatives. One of my hopes is to help organize those post-book, if we get a good reception to the book.
I think that the first thing is that this stuff is too powerful to be done by tech alone. It's also unlikely that it will just get regulated correctly. So you have to build a philosophy. I can't say it as well as Dr. Kissinger, but you need a philosophical framework, a set of understandings of where the limits of this technology should go. In my experience in science, the only way that happens is when you get the scientists and the policy people together in some form. This is true in biology, is true in recombinant DNA and so forth.
Re: Kissinger is evil (Score:1)
Not so confident in Kissinger's arguments (Score:4, Insightful)
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Let us not forget his complete cockup of the Middle East.
Considering his track record, I'm not sure we should be listening to him.
Re:Not so confident in Kissinger's arguments (Score:5, Insightful)
Considering his track record, I'm not sure we should be listening to him.
Considering his total lack of expertise in technology or AI, we should not be listening to him even if he had a track record of success in other areas (which he does not).
Celebrity does not bestow value to opinions (Score:4, Funny)
Re: Not so confident in Kissinger's arguments (Score:4, Interesting)
Just looking at his comments they are intriguing no matter his politics or history. Sometimes itâ(TM)s good to listen to what people outside of those you agree with have to say, you might learn something new.
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Just looking at his comments they are intriguing no matter his politics or history.
No, they are not intriguing at all. They are the standard naive view of "Hollywood AI" held by anyone who watches too many sci-fi movies.
His only coherent suggestion is to control AI the same way we control nuclear weapons. That is not a new opinion, nor does it make any sense. Building nuclear weapons requires infrastructure that only nations possess and can be plausibly detected, monitored, and controlled.
AI just needs a GPU. TensorFlow can run on any PC. OpenCL works on a Raspberry Pi.
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I give no fucks what war criminals have to say about what we should do, whether they have evaded prosecution or not.
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I mean, didn't he win a Nobel Peace Prize? Which makes only slightly more sense than if they had awarded Hitler the Nobel Peace Prize as well.
They awarded Obama a Novel Peace Price, a man who was quite liberal with drone attacks and killed quite a few innocent bystanders
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I'm not so confident in Kissinger's arguments. His last big argument was that interaction with "the West" would liberalize the Chinese Communist Party so it is OK to establish imbalanced relationships. For example commercial trade where China can maintain barriers and the US cannot.
Was he totally wrong? The Tienanmen square protests were a close thing and China almost moved in the direction of freedom. If that had worked and Chinese people had achieved their own self-determination it would have been a great thing. Probably a risk worth taking and a thing worth trying. The problem is after it failed everyone failed to react and realise things had changed. Cmpanies like Microsoft continued to pour in technology when they knew clearly that it would be used for oppression. Nobody back
Re:Not so confident in Kissinger's arguments (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm not so confident in Kissinger's arguments. His last big argument was that interaction with "the West" would liberalize the Chinese Communist Party so it is OK to establish imbalanced relationships. For example commercial trade where China can maintain barriers and the US cannot.
Was he totally wrong? The Tienanmen square protests were a close thing and China almost moved in the direction of freedom.
Our respective definitions of "close" or not very close. It was brief, localized and quickly extinguished.
The problem is after it failed everyone failed to react and realise things had changed.
Everyone realized the idea failed after Tienanmen. The problem is they had a different motivation by then, everyone in power was making a lot of money off of China.
Re:Not so confident in Kissinger's arguments (Score:4, Insightful)
The Tienanmen Square protests were a close thing, and China almost moved in the direction of freedom.
Indeed. Moving in the direction of freedom was not rejected by the government but by the protestors.
There was a great deal of debate within the leadership of the CCP, and reformers such as Zhao Ziyang [wikipedia.org] had the upper hand. But when they tried to negotiate, the protestors rejected their attempts. Any protestors willing to accept compromise were pushed aside, and an even more extreme group would grab control of the loudspeakers and start making new demands.
Eventually, the CCP ran out of patience, the reformers were sidelined, and the hardliners led by Li Peng [wikipedia.org] took control and ordered the army to clear the square ... but the army had pro-reform people as well and refused. So soldiers from the countryside were brought to Beijing instead.
China came close to choosing a very different path.
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That's really interesting! It puts the recent HK protests in a new light. The HK protesters threw away any chance at getting some concessions by refusing to give any themselves. Hardliners in the HK movement got a firm response from China. (That's not to say China wasn't also sending in agitators, but that's beside the point.)
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The Tienanmen square protests were a close thing and China almost moved in the direction of freedom.
Hilariously, spectacularly false. Most Chinese never even heard of what happened there, just like most Americans never hear about what happened here at the Line 3 protests, except it's actually illegal to discuss the Tiananmen square riots.
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He's a war criminal and Schmitt can only dream of a future so grand, after transforming Google into a PRISM partner. Kissinger's last project was Theranos, which he sold privately as a way to clandestinely sequence everybody on Earth - now Holmes is on trial as the fall guy.
Whatever these two are up to should be opposed on first encounter and they should not be trusted without the most extraordinary of evidence. Protip - evidence of skulduggery will appear first.
Oh, yeah, Eric Schmidt (Score:3)
That's the guy who - while at Google - said privacy was over and we should just get used to all our info being in their possession, then got upset when someone published his home address and phone number.
Yeah, he's someone whose opinion really matters to me.
The future is going to be awful (Score:2)
Imagine the stupidest person you know, an almost untrainable purely pattern matching kind of idiot with no capacity for reason whatsoever. Now imagine replacing that waste of oxygen with a program that is even dumber, giving it final authority because eliminating people from the job was the goal, and giving free time to the idiot who is unemployable now. Idiocracy was written by an optimist.
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What AI means in the next 10 years (Score:2)
Point your cellphone at someone and it will give you their name, address, handicap state, party affiliation and sexual preferences through subtile face expressions now one knew existed.
Flawed Premise (Score:5, Interesting)
Kissenger's fundamental understanding of the issue is flawed, and if Schmidt can't see that then he, too, is in for a rude awakening.
Kissinger: We need a number of little groups that ask questions. When I was a graduate student, nuclear weapons were new. And at that time, a number of concerned professors at Harvard, MIT and Caltech met most Saturday afternoons to ask, What is the answer? How do we deal with it? And they came up with the arms-control idea.
Schmidt: We need a similar process. It won't be one place, it will be a set of such initiatives. One of my hopes is to help organize those post-book, if we get a good reception to the book.
You can't compare AI to nuclear weapons. With nuclear weapons you have controls on who can produce them. The technology, tools, and raw materials were all expensive, difficult, and reasonably easy to track and restrict. You didn't have to worry about some kid in their basement making nukes in their spare time.
With AI it is fundamentally different. It is software, which is impossible to track and restrict. And the hardware for running good AI is getting smaller and cheaper all the time. You can get nVidia A100 compute accelerators for under $10,000 USD on eBay. The older generation Volta cards go for as little as $2,500. Those are just going to get cheaper, smaller, and more powerful. Hell, Coral toolkits [coral.ai] start at around $100 if you want to get started with local -- can't monitor -- AI.
How's the philosophy working out on keeping ransomware away from hospitals? The world is full of people who want to see it, or at least a good part of it, burn. There are also tons of people with legitimate grievances and in a fully connected world, won't be powerless like they were in Kissinger's day. What do these two people think the oppressed masses are going to say to their philosophical restrictions?
How about creating super (biological) viruses (Score:1)
That should be an order of magnitude easier to do than controlling software. And we now know that SARS-COV-2 was almost certainly made in the WIV and that there are many other labs around the world doing similar work. All well-meaning, playing with a fire far hotter than nuclear. And needing very high tech and specific tools to do this work.
Yet we cannot even control that. For all sorts of special interest reasons we have swept it under the rug.
So control AI? Forget about it.
The future is pretty clear.
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And we now know that SARS-COV-2 was almost certainly made in the WIV and that there are many other labs around the world doing similar work.
"Now know" implies there's been some new evidence on that front, but the only new evidence I'm aware of is finding some extremely closely related strains in the wild that tilted the balance more towards natural origin. So do you have any actual evidence to support that, or is this just an extension of the bickering about whether that single experiment was gain of function research or not? I think it was, but at the same time it's clear the strains in that experiment couldn't become SARS-Cov2, so unless you'
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The evidence is pretty overwhelming. New evidence is about the funding requests.
1. The bat coronavirus outbreak occurred in Wuhan, home to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), the world's leading bat coronaviruses laboratory. (Not proof, but certainly of interest.)
2. Wuhan is over 1000 km from the relevant bats. The bats were not traded in the Wuhan wet markets.
3. The virus arose suddenly, fully functional, with no known human or animal
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I'm not sure I see your first point: Henry The K and someone else are talking about State-sponsored AI. You're talking about what, automating your local environment? AI can be as dangerous as nuclear weapons. When operated by The State, AI can be used as a weapon of mass destruction. I think some on /. see believe such weapons operate in minutes, not years. /Fight Club/ describes such a world.
On your second, not so well of course.
Please, let's not forget Henry The K is a war criminal. Every statement about
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My point was what is today's "State-sponsored AI" will be tomorrow's local computing environment in terms of resources and costs. While State-sponsored may forever be ahead, there will come a point where the local stuff is so powerful it doesn't really matter anymore.
It is as if the knowhow and resources to make the Hiroshima bomb kept coming down in cost to the price of used tricycle and as difficult to produce as ice cubes. The gov'ts may have Tsar Bomba, but if every peasant has a Little Boy, what differ
Is there anything war criminal Kissinger can't do? (Score:5, Informative)
Well, not tried in The Hague for one.
“Once you’ve been to Cambodia, you’ll never stop wanting to beat Henry Kissinger to death with your bare hands. You will never again be able to open a newspaper and read about that treacherous, prevaricating, murderous scumbag sitting down for a nice chat with Charlie Rose or attending some black-tie affair for a new glossy magazine without choking. Witness what Henry did in Cambodia – the fruits of his genius for statesmanship – and you will never understand why he’s not sitting in the dock at The Hague next to Miloevi.”
—Anthony Bourdain [slate.com]
Re: (Score:1, Troll)
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Is he still around? (Score:5, Funny)
I mean, Kissinger has got to be almost as old as Keith Richards.
I understand Keith has been kept alive this long because he did so many drugs it altered his DNA to make him immortal, but Satan must have preserved Kissinger as thanks for all the people whose deaths he caused.
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My three and a half laws (Score:2)
1. No AI will ever desire to self replicate.
2. No AI will ever desire to hurt a human.
3. No AI will ever desire to disobey a human and will desire to obey humans.
These ar posited as desires, not rigid rule. An AI will have to make judgments about each situation in a context of core goals/desires.
Regulation as a barrier to entry (Score:2)
Google and the others want government to step in and regulate artificial intelligence so that only those with deep pockets and an entrenched business position can afford the regulatory burden.
Is this the movie sequel to when... (Score:2)
Henry Kissinger and Le Duc Tho shared the Nobel Peace Prize, and then satire died at the end ? 'Cuz it was sad.
Both War Criminals (Score:2)
Kissinger's a murderous piece of shit, but less well-known is that Schmidt might also be culpable for war crimes. It hinges on exactly what Schmidt did for the State Department in Myanmar, spreading subsidized Internet connectivity; this was part of how Facebook got popular and spread memes which led to the Rohingya genocide.
Re: Both War Criminals (Score:2)
Kissinger does not undersrand AI (Score:2)
With artificial intelligence, the astounding thing is, you come up with a conclusion which is likely correct. But you don't know why.
How much likely it is correct depends on how much the particular case resembles the training set. It is an important distinction especially for now when AIs are actually pretty dump.
Kissinger's "philosophy"... (Score:2)
Another advocate (Score:2)
Kissinger, another advocate for dictatorship, with him in charge, of course.
Start with the right label (Score:2)
Instead of calling it "artificial intelligence" or "machine learning", how about:
fuzzy partition of multi-dimensional space
I'm a veteran of AI Winter (1985 PhD in symbolic AI), so I know all about the over-promise/under-deliver scenario. The hype back then was "expert systems", which at the time looked like they had deductive/classification capabilities similar to modern deep learning systems.
The good news was that expert systems were based on rules created by experts - their behavior could be explained in
I'm not listening (Score:1)