I'm not trying to defend Schmidt, but you're naive if you think the US shouldn't develop AI weapons.
How would the world look like now if the US took the high road and refused to develop nuclear weapons and instead let Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia develop them instead?
I'm no military expert, but wasn't it exactly the opposite?
The attacking army needs to be bigger than the defending army and will suffer way more casualties,even if they are successful.
Iran just sent I-don’t-know-how-many drones and missiles at Israel like a few months ago. A few of them landed, but most were caught and intercepted in the air. Here’s the thing: if even one of them had hit, say, the center of Tel Aviv, or the old city in Jerusalem, it would have been a massively successful attack, even if none of the other ones had done any damage. The size of zero armies was measured in that exchange.
But even if those were real they would still not support Schmidt’s point that “offense always has the advantage because you can always overwhelm the defensive systems”. The Trojan Horse didn’t overwhelm defenses, it penetrated them and destroyed the enemy from inside.
[1]: Having watched the evolution of a football team's tactics from 5-v-5 (2 min, age 6-7) to 11-v-11 (2*45 min, age 18-19). A regular Strategos, me.
In war, defenders can entrench more and more and a lot of work and planning is put into hitting either before the defenses are up, or not at all.
Normal warefare is based on "Manpower" and you reference "Army". He further goes on to explain that artilery, tanks and any kind of "land army" is completely obsolete.
To say that Schmidt "explained" that artillery, tanks and armies are obsolete implies that that is true, which... At the very least, remains to be seen. The correct term would be something like "He further goes on to bloviate about how artillery, tanks and..."
I don't think this is going to be reality anytime soon. In order for the LLM or agent to do what you want, you'd need to be able to precisely specify what you want and that's a hard problem all on it's own. And if you were able to do that precise specification you would be the programmer.
Not say the software developer paradigm won't change but it seems very unlikely to become "make me a better google ads system" anytime soon. I could see getting to something were you are given a result by an agent and then can iterate on it, towards some solution.
no, you just need to vaguely know what you want, and get the LLM to produce something that you then examine, and crawl towards the end goal.
LLM's could potentially allow fast iteration from a laymen's description of what they want.
Equally, you can ask the GenAI to keep asking you questions to broaden its knowledge of the problem you are solving, and also ask it to research the issues customers are having with a current solution.
Some engineers seem to imagine any non coder using AI will behave very simply 'make me a new search engine' . Lots of very clever people (who just don't know how to or want to learn to code) will be picking up the skills to use AI as it gets better and better.
I can see AI being used to write far better requirements and produce amazing prototypes - but if you work at a megacorp, chances are (for now) they will want that code rewritten by a 'human' developer.
But I can't find the bug. I get the wrong answers but can't trace it through the logic.
Maybe it's a dumb thing like a missing index increment? Or a missing assignment and I just can't see it.
Maybe it's easier to just tear down the mess and write it again.
This is how I feel whenever I deal with AI generated code.
The other day I was looking into adding Trusted Types in the Content-Security-Policy header, which was something new to me. In my chat with Claude I asked:
"Lets brainstorm 10 a list of ideas closely related to this so we can think of anything we might be missing on the topic to consider."
And that provided a good list of items to review to consider and expand out the sphere of thinking for the LLM.
It is an infuriatingly hard problem to have the LLM produce excellent results every single time, and have it just do everything and want it to read our mind and all the knowledge and context of a task. I think we'll make some good progress over the next few years as agentic workflows are built out to mimic out thought processes, and the cost/capability of the LLMs keeps improving.
This is not actually one of the things to know about war. It's about as far from the truth as you can get.
Something to keep in mind when reading his other pronouncements.
I think war in ukraine shows that hord of very cheap sea drones can even thread a fleet of warships.
[0] https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2024-08-09/weapons-st...
Betrays the reality of them being "serial lottery winners".
The use of AI/robots in war is probably not a good way to ingrain into people how to avoid conflicts either: as sad as it sound, let them get a taste of it first hand, and that'll probably calm things down more efficiently: not for a few hours/days, but decades.
> This is not actually one of the things to know about war. It's about as far from the truth as you can get.
... Unless you are writing the rules of war:
"Secretary of Defense Ash Carter appointed Schmidt as chairman of the DoD Innovation Advisory Board announced March 2, 2016. It will be modeled like the Defense Business Board and will facilitate the Pentagon at becoming more innovative and adaptive.
In August 2020, Schmidt launched the podcast Reimagine with Eric Schmidt.[71][72] In December 2021, Schmidt joined Chainlink Labs as a strategic advisor.[73] In October 2022, he co-authored a piece titled "America Could Lose the Tech Contest With China" for Foreign Affairs with Ylli Bajraktari, former executive director of the U.S. National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence.[74] In March 2023, Schmidt testified at a U.S. House Committee on Oversight and Accountability hearing regarding AI.
In 2022, Schmidt was appointed to the National Security Commission on Emerging Biotechnology, a legislative commission charged with making policy recommendations to Congress and the Executive Branch.[1]"
"Since 2023, Schmidt has been involved in building White Stork, a startup developing suicide attack drones.[2]"
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Schmidt
[2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/sarahemerson/2024/01/23/eric-sc...
Remember when Georgia invaded Russia?
We don't actually. Care to elaborate?
Germany got's industrial base absolutely shattered while the non-defending US was able to use its industrial base to supply arms for 4 fronts (vs Germany, in Africa, for Russia, vs Japan).
That’s actually an endorsement .
I don't agree with US involvement in Iraq, Afghanistan and many other places, but Ukraine is a obviously totally different from those. Marjorie Taylor Greene may not give a damn as she lives thousands of kilometers from Russia (or maybe she's just been bought by Russian money), but morally she's wrong. When it comes to Russian imperialism, the only right thing to do is help its victims fight back.
i've never agreed with MTG before and i think she's a terrible person but i applaud her stance in this case.
Without US playing world police my home would probably have been bombed by now... Or maybe Hitler would have won and destroyed Russia, who knows. In any case, I much prefer living in an independent country protected by NATO, over being a member of an enslaved ethnic minority inside Russia, in which case I would have probably been sent to the front lines in Ukraine already.
A flawed world police is better than no world police at all.
So imagine a non-arrogant programmer that actually does what you want and you don't have to pay all that money to and there's infinite supply of these programs. That's all within the next year or two.
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Google decided that work life balance and going home early and working from home was more important than winning.
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But certainly in your lifetimes, the battle between the US and China for knowledge supremacy is going to be the big fight.
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And one of the things to know about war is that the offense always has the advantage because you can always overwhelm the defensive systems. And so you're better off as a strategy of national defense to have a very strong offense that you can use if you need to.
And the systems that I and others are building will do that. Because of the way the system works, I am now a licensed arms dealer, a computer scientist, businessman, and an arms dealer. Is that a progression? I don't know. I do not recommend this in your group.
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And if anyone knows Marjorie Taylor Greene, I would encourage you to delete her from your contact list because she's the one, a single individual is blocking the provision of some number of billions of dollars to save an important democracy.