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Full Version: SV warned not to aid Chinese military + He helped invent AI, rebuffs ‘killer robots’
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Pentagon Warns Silicon Valley About Aiding Chinese Military
https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/aero...e-military

EXCERPT: . . . The meeting comes after General Joseph Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, leveled pointed criticism at Google for pursuing technological collaborations with Chinese partners, during his testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee on 14 March. The spotlight’s glare on Google grew harsher when President Trump followed up on Twitter: “Google is helping China and their military, but not the U.S. Terrible!” But beyond the focus on Google, the Pentagon seems more broadly concerned about U.S. tech companies inadvertently giving China a leg up in developing AI applications with military and national security implications. “We watch with great concern when industry partners work in China knowing there is that indirect benefit, and frankly ‘indirect’ may be not a full characterization of the way it really is,” Dunford said. “It’s more of a direct benefit to the Chinese military." (MORE)



He Helped Create A.I. Now, He Worries About ‘Killer Robots’
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/29/world...uring.html

EXCERPT: Yoshua Bengio is worried that innovations in artificial intelligence that he helped pioneer could lead to a dark future, if “killer robots” get into the wrong hands. But the soft-spoken, 55-year-old Canadian computer scientist, a recipient of this year’s A.M. Turing Award — considered the Nobel Prize for computing — prefers to see the world though the idealism of “Star Trek” rather than the apocalyptic vision of “The Terminator.”

[...] Dr. Bengio, a professor of computer science at the University of Montreal, is self-effacing. But his work in an area known as “deep learning” — “teaching machines to learn in a way inspired by how our brains compute,” he says — has already affected our daily lives in countless ways, making it possible for Google Translate to convert a sentence from French to Mandarin or for software to detect cancer cells in a medical image. He and his researchers are also harnessing A.I. to discover molecules that could cure diseases, to detect gender bias in textbooks and to predict when natural disasters will happen.

[...] Even as the late Stephen Hawking, the celebrated Cambridge physicist, warned that A.I. could be “the worst event in the history of our civilization,” and the billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk has cautioned it could create an “immortal dictator,” he has remained more upbeat. “We need to pursue scientific knowledge or all we will do is run against a wall,” he said. “But we need to do it wisely.” Referring to the use of algebra to compute the angles of missiles, he added: “You can’t blame the inventor of algebra for war.”

Nevertheless, at a time when Facebook algorithms have come under criticism for their influence in the 2016 United States election and fears are growing that robots could use A.I. to target humans without human oversight, Dr. Bengio is acutely aware that his innovations risk becoming “Frankenstein’s monsters.” As a result, he said, he supports regulating A.I., including an international treaty banning “killer robots” or “lethal autonomous weapons.”

But he dismissed the “Terminator scenario” in which a machine, endowed with human emotions, turns on its creator. Machines, he stressed, do not have egos and human sentiments, and are not slaves who want to be freed. “We imagine our creations turning against us because we are projecting our psychology into the machines,” he said, calling it “ridiculous.” (MORE - details)