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U.S. Grapples With Potential Threats From Chinese AI

The Biden administration is grappling with how to identify artificial intelligence that poses a threat to national security, a central challenge as the U.S. moves to curb investment in advanced technology companies in China.

Biden administration officials have been preparing a new executive order for months that will restrict U.S. investment into some geopolitical rivals, namely China. Their goal is to prevent U.S. private equity and venture capital from contributing to China’s development of cutting-edge technology that could aid Beijing’s military.

“AI is in many ways a meaningless category. It encompasses everything from Netflix recommendation algorithms to autonomous weapon systems and a bunch of stuff in between,” said Martin Chorzempa, who studies capital and technology controls at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. “It’s extremely hard to define.”

I think a large part of the problem is that when it comes to the “sudden” release of LLMs like ChatGPT onto the world, people are thinking “the rise of Skynet”–but what we’re seeing is an amazing bit of automation that can manipulate words very well. But the more we see it in action, the more we realize the text it generates is mediocre and full of cliches, and prone to hallucinations and providing false data. And the best advice I’ve seen so far on using ChatGPT is as a way to find all the common tropes, so as to avoid them. (That is, if ChatGPT tries to take your story one way, figure out how to take it a different way.)

And none of this is likely to change outside of some very specialized fields (such as with mathematics) simply because we have yet to figure out how to model reality beyond language.

Though it does give a lot of insight into how wrong philosophers were with respect to structural linguistics, or rather, with the theory that human thought and human perception is entirely shaped by language. It’s clear we have a model of the world below ‘language’ that allows us to understand things like cause and effect, or object relationships, that LLMs like ChatGPT simply don’t have.

And all this makes any sort of executive order rather stupid.


These Pandemic-Era Habits Just Won’t Die

We’re now entering what might be called a “hybrid” era of tech-based conveniences, in which consumers modify their behavior to reflect a changing balance of cost against time and effort saved. For example, ordering food from apps is more popular than ever, but more people are opting to save themselves a few bucks by picking it up rather than having it delivered.

The implications of these shifts are all around us, and represent a profound change for many parts of our economy. To put it in terms a social psychologist might appreciate, habits are hard to acquire, but also hard to extinguish. The biggest barrier to adoption of new technology is typically our own ingrained ways of doing things. But that same stubbornness and inertia means that once we’re forced to adopt new tools and ways to get our needs met, we aren’t about to abandon them.

I said this elsewhere at the start of the pandemic: anything you do for more than a few months becomes a habit. And we did the lockdown thing for two years, with some places doing it for more than three years. Once you do something for more than a year, it’s not just a habit; it’s a new lifestyle.

It’s why places like downtown San Francisco are in a ‘doom loop’: people asking workers to return back to the office in downtown San Francisco are asking them to give up their current lifestyles for the economic benefit of wealthy land-owners. Hell, some of those workers don’t even live in California anymore.


The IRS Makes Another House Call.

We all know there are bad cops.

We forgot, however, that there are bad agents regardless of the branch of government or the agency. And that includes IRS agents.

Remember: IRS agents (as well as other agents of the government) are all restricted by the same rules that restrict law enforcement officers: if an IRS shows up at your door, it is entirely within your right to tell them to go pound sand and come back with a warrant. And that warrant had better be signed by a judge; no just showing up and waving paperwork in your face. Further, that warrant must describe the place and items to be searched for.

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