[helaoban]

All of these problems are downstream of the Congress having thoroughly abdicated its powers to the executive.

The military should be reigned in at the legislative level, by constraining what it can and cannot do under law. Popular action is the only way to make that happen. Energy directed anywhere else is a waste.

Private corporations should never be allowed to dictate how the military acts. Such a thought would be unbearable if it weren't laughably impossible. The technology can just be requisitioned, there is nothing a corporation or a private individual can do about that. Or the models could be developed internally, after having requisitioned the data centers.

To watch CEOs of private corporations being mythologized for something that a) they should never be able to do and b) are incapable of doing is a testament to how distorted our picture of reality has become.

[techblueberry]

The private corporation is not dictating to the military, it’s setting the terms of the contract. The military is free to go sign a contract with a different company with different terms, but they didn’t, and now they want to change the terms after the contact was already signed. No mytholgization needed, just contract law.

[nemo44x]

The country is sovereign. It can just make a law democratically that changes things. The sovereign must act on whatever is in its best interest. The method of action is democratic in this case.

[ricardobeat]

> The technology can just be requisitioned

During a war with national mobilization, that would make sense. Or in a country like China. This kind of coercion is not an expected part of democratic rule.

[wrqvrwvq]

It has always been a part of democratic rule, in peacetime and war. All telco's share virtually all of their technology with the government. Governments in europe and elsewhere routinely requisition services from many of their large corporations. I think it's absurd to think llm's can meaningfully participate in realworld cmd+ctrl systems and the government already has access to ml-enhanced targeting capabilities. I really have no idea what dod normies think of ai, other than that it's infinitely smarter than them, but that's not saying much.

[beepbooptheory]

Makes me think of Operation Paperclip [1]. It happened after the war though, and its not China, but I think it helps your point!

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Paperclip

[helaoban]

The question of whether or not the government should be able to use AI for targeting without the involvement of humans is a wartime question, since that is the only time the military should be killing people.

Under such a scenario, requisition applies, and so all of this talk is moot.

The fact that the military is killing people without a declaration of war is the problem, and that's where energy and effort should be directed.

Edit:

There's a yet larger question on whether any legal constraints on the military's use of technology even makes sense at all, since any safeguards will be quickly yielded if a real enemy presents itself. As a course of natural law, no society will willingly handicap its means of defense against an external threat.

It follows then that the only time these ethical concerns apply is when we are the aggressor, which we almost always are. It's the aggression that we should be limiting, not the technology.

[tw1984]

> an expected part of democratic rule.

give yourself a break. what your fancy democratic rule still holds under Trump?

[tootie]

It's also downstream of voters who voted in a president who promised to be dictatorial after failing at an attempted insurrection. We need to deprogram like 70M very confused people.

[raincole]

> We need to deprogram like 70M very confused people

With this mindset the said group will quickly grow to half of the US population.

[helaoban]

You should be asking why 70 million people voted the way they did in spite of the events you describe.

I don't think there's been a greater indictment of a political program (the one you likely subscribe to) in history than Trump's landslide victory in 2024.

You guys used to call deprogramming by another name, I think it was called "re-education". Maybe you should sign up for your own class.

[blitzar]

> Private corporations should never be allowed to dictate how the military acts.

The military should never be allowed to dictate how Private corporations act

[jobs_throwaway]

> The technology can just be requisitioned, there is nothing a corporation or a private individual can do about that.

I strongly doubt this is true. I think if you gave the US government total control over Anthropic's assets right now, they would utterly fail to reach AGI or develop improved models. I doubt they would be capable even of operating the current gen models at the scale Anthropic does.

> Or the models could be developed internally, after having requisitioned the data centers.

I would bet my life savings the US government never produces a frontier model. Remember when they couldn't even build a proper website for Obamacare?

[qup]

> Remember when they couldn't even build a proper website for Obamacare?

With a massive budget, too. Hundreds of millions iirc.

It felt like a website that the small web-dev shop I worked for could build without much problem in a couple months.

We didn't have 200 layers of beauracracy, though.

That said I don't doubt the military could take their current tech and keep it running. It's far different from the typical grift of government contractors.

[vonneumannstan]

This is just a weird Trump talking point. This situation is unprecedented on many levels. The pentagon already had a signed contract with these stipulations and wanted to unilaterally renegotiate with Anthropic under threat of deeming them a foreign adversary and destroying their business if they didn't accept the DoD demands. It's totally absurd to turn this around on Anthropic and paint them as trying to determine US Military policy.

[dartharva]

> The military should be reigned in at the legislative level, by constraining what it can and cannot do under law.

Is there an example of such a system existing successfully in any other country of the world that has a standing army?

[helaoban]

I think any such examination of a military that doesn't actually fight wars is meaningless. The question can only be really asked of a handful of countries.

[snowwrestler]

Congress needs public pressure to act, and the public needs a spur to apply pressure. That’s really what Amodei is doing with this statement.

[einpoklum]

> Congress having thoroughly abdicated its powers to the executive.

Good thing the US is led by such figures as Donald Trump or Joseph Biden, stalwart trustworthy men with their hands firmly on the wheel.</sarcasm>

[JackYoustra]

I'm sorry I read this a lot and this is kind of an insane thing to say? Classified OLC memos giving legal cover to any military action has been a fixture for the last over twenty years! Congress never abdicated power, it just, by the nature of the constitution, practically has SO much less power than the president! The president is a single person that people elect, they expect the person to be a leader, and congress will always, always play a following role so long as the president has unilateral power over the military, is directly elected, and just in general has expansive interpreting authority over laws.

You know who doesn't have as much power? The swiss head of state, so weak you can't even reliably name them! THATS what it looks like to defeat personalization, not some hand wringing hoping a system does something that it wasn't designed to do.

[xnx]

> Congress having thoroughly abdicated its powers to the executive.

This is a common but far too passive description.

Republicans in Congress support everything Trump and friends are doing.