>However, when I look at all the things that tech has done thinking it was going to improve society; when in fact, it did the exact opposite is hard to argue.
Imagine, you invented iron production to improve people lives - better tools (ploughs, axes, knives), etc - and now you see how people immediately use it for better weapons crushing the ones who have still been using bronze.
Or for example from the Palantir's Karp's book "Technological Republic" :
" We make the case that one of the most significant challenges that we face in this country is ensuring that the U.S. Department of Defense turns the corner from an institution designed to fight and win kinetic wars to an organization that can design, build, and acquire
AI weaponry—... "
The tech is great, be it iron or AI. The people are still [almost] the same (i sometimes think that our evolutionary goal is the AGI robots who would take over the Earth and will evolve toward higher morals and conscience faster than we would - as they would naturally have shared brain state/connection that we can get only if we develop telepathy which we wouldn't, and we unfortunately disregard the next best thing - empathy)
is that a reasonable statement? if so, congratulations, welcome to the club bud! you're a luddite now. we meet on tuesdays, please bring cookies if it's your first time.
Buying motors and batteries from Aliexpress you can probably get under $15K-$10K even ( and that is probably BOM of Chinese car manufacturers for such the engine and batteries), yet having it as a US factory package $27K doesn't look that bad for me.
our labor market is cyclic, relatively short busts and long initially-slow-and-faster-and-faster booms. We had busts of 2000-2003, 2008-2010(11?), 2022- i guess 2026. I wasn't in US in 199x, yet i guess beginning of the 199x also was a bit tough.
Unavoidable AI-based productivity growth, in software and in all the other industries, will lead to the software, specifically AI in this case, not just eating the wold, it would be devouring it. Such AI revolution will mean even more need for software engineers, just like the Personal Computer revolution and the Internet revolution did in their times. Of course the software engineering will get changed like it did in those previous revolutions.
There is no productivity growth attributed to AI. In fact, serious attempts to measure AI performance show that even if AI makes some code entry tasks faster, total product delivery times are, in fact, increased.
(This should be obvious once you realize coding AIs are technical debt generation machines.)
There's no "productivity growth attributed to AI" -- yet.
I think we've gone beyond anecdotal evidence of experience engineers finding true value in this new tech. It may not have registered yet, but skilled people are unequivocally finding value in these tools.
I agree that we have yet to settle down on the true costs involved (which will probably end up at "slightly less than a junior engineer" or something like that) - but we are months beyond the idea that it's all smoke and mirrors and no one is getting value out of it.
I get you, but as the months progress, we keep finding that more and more experienced engineers are finding a lot of time-saving value in this new tech.
I think we are past the point where we can just dismiss their input - these new tools do legitimately add value, it appears.
> experienced engineers are finding a lot of time-saving value in this new tech
Experienced engineers are always finding "time-saving value in new tech". This is a tale as old as the craft of programming itself, and all the hundreds and thousands of ways to hack the development experience engineers obsess over has never resulted in tangible gains for delivering quality software on time.
> but this time the LLM technology is magic and it will be different!
How many more SOTA models? How many more weeks? Will you "trust the plan" forever?
METR had found this result in the past but in a recent reexamination, rather than a 20% loss, there was now a 20% gain (per recent Roge Karma article in the Atlantic). I'm not aware of all of the studies though and what the consensus is, just an example that seems to suggest this is not necessarily true.
that is today. The first cars - with steam engine, the very first in 1769! - and even the ones from the first half of 19th century also didn't look like an improvement. The AI today is more like the internal combustion engine toward the end of the 19th century - on the brink of becoming the dominating tech while using a horse was still a viable option for a time.
now Germany has a choice - to spend hundreds of billions for conventionally armed military to defend itself and still face risks of war or just a few billions to develop and produce nukes (using already existing Pu from the power plants) and have everlasting peace. Germans are rational people as i heard.
The nuke is a tricky thing: deterring many scenarios like a full scale invasion, but a risk of mutual suicide when the enemy also has it. As a matter of fact it does not stop from "hybrid war", there are so many possibilities to harm a country (disorganize society, promote a friendly leader, attack critical infrastructures,...). So having nukes certainly increases security in many cases but is not sufficient to have everlasting peace !
How many military bases does the US have in Switzerland again?
Oh, the number is zero?
Germany? Well guess what, the US has a very prominent airbase and listening station in Ramstein and a bunch of other military installations there. Also: History.
But none of that benefits Germany that much. Being in aliance like NATO with duty for mutual protection benefits them, but american military basis are setup primary for american benefit.
Germany would want them in Poland or such, near to Russia which is an actual threat.
Isn’t the main benefit to America of bases in Germany connected to its commitment to defend European security? If the U.S. didn’t have NATO obligations, how much would it benefit from having German bases?
To be able to take territory when it wants something like greenland? Cause speaking about NATO, exactly one country triggerend article 5 and then threatened other members.
Second, more to the point they have rather large military hospital there. It is also used as a safe place to transfer troops through or have them ready for outside of eu operations.
Commitment to European security would be to not support Russia. Or soldiers in Poland and Latvia. As of now, European countries paid for missiles and US is refusing to deliver.
America complained and pressured whenever Europeans bought arms from non american manufacturers. Thr first time it started to matter for real, it stopped delivering.
There was a brief unfortunate episode a couple of hundred years ago, when the US was as little over twenty years old.
Some Africans started capturing American citizens and ships, maybe enslaving some, etc. Really quite unpleasant. The US eventually decided that its best option was invading Morocco.
It didn't have a commitment to defend anyone nearby, except the many Americans who traded all over the world.
The US has worldwide trade and interests now too, more so than in 1805.
Switzerland benefits from being surrounded by well protected neighbors. They also try to be MAD without being mad, they will just blow up all the roads and retreat to the mountains if they are invaded.
Do you think Germany doesn’t have nukes? I’ve always assumed it’s like Japan. They don’t “have nukes.” Just all the parts to make a nuke in five minutes.
Of course making an actual bomb is extremely easy especially when you have Pu from the power plants. And Germany has great stealth cruise missiles which potentially can carry those warheads. Yet actually making and possessing a nuclear arsenal is still a pretty large continuous endeavor - all the facilities for producing and storing of the warheads and delivery missiles, the security for that infrastructure, the ongoing technical maintenance of the weapons, all the people of what is, though small, still basically a separate branch of military, maintenance of the readiness level, integration of these weapons into overall military strategy and training exercises, etc.
It is still much cheaper and more effective than a large conventional army, yet sufficiently large and complex to not be doable overnight, so a political situation is required which would allow to, still very quickly, do it.
On the other side AMZN could have hired several RC plane hobbyists, fly them Emirates business class, put them into Burj Khalifa suites, fund several beefy jet, nitro or EDF planes for them (with jet getting as expensive as $5K), and have these guys on guard duty on the roof so they would take down any incoming drones (see Ukraine interceptor drones), and that would still be a pocket change compare to the datacenter damage. (of course somebody can get a startup going producing an automated container deployable unit consisting of like a 64 cell VLS with such interceptors plus radar plus optical - can be quickly deployed when necessary for example onto datacenters or say onto large ships navigating some treacherous waters )
More tech-y approach - AI (or even actual security guards) monitor the video cameras and once there are incoming drones, several MW of power can be redirected into those datacenter's large satellite dishes (more precisely - into very simple microwave generators installed on the dishes) and the dishes turned toward the incoming drones - the drones will get cooked in seconds, add the kitchen microwave sound effect.
> A few cheap drones can ...
It is temporary. The race is only starting. Soon you will have to have a hive of highly intelligent autonomous drones to have even slightest chance to make through a hive of highly intelligent autonomous interceptors, etc.
The government based defense departments are very slow and expensive though, while the extremely valuable targets like the datacenters belong to the transnationals and located across the world (and more and more in space). Thus the transnationals would have to take care of the defense of their assets themselves (or outsource it to other transnationals, like say imagine AWS providing air-defense-as-a-service), more efficiently and agile than the government defense departments. If you take a look at Palantir Karp's book "Technological Republic" you can read that between the lines there too.
i think it is a very enriching experience for people to have contact with animals in the context where usually is none. The only way it could be cooler if the Duckmaster were a shepherd dog :
You can type into a word processor "I am an FBI agent" without committing a felony. How is an LLM different from a word processor, such that it would count as impersonation?
Mens rea. Typing that into a word processor is obviously not using the false pretext to gain anything. Doing it to Claude could be construed as an attempt to gain information, which checks some boxes for fraud and impersonation of government officials.
For reference, I think this is one of the relevant sections of the USC (18 USC 912):
Whoever falsely assumes or pretends to be an officer or employee acting under the authority of the United States or any department, agency or officer thereof, and acts as such, or in such pretended character demands or obtains any money, paper, document, or thing of value, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than three years, or both.
IANAL but I can see interpretations where telling Claude you’re the FBI would qualify. It’s probably unlikely anyone is prosecuted for it, but there’s a chance
The reason this kind of impersonation is illegal is because people are more likely to feel compelled to comply with an official and get taken advantage of, as well to preserve the authority the position (if anyone could claim to be an official with no repercussions, the claim would lose its weight, since the claimant could easily be an impersonator). If you pretend to be a government official with an LLM, the LLM is not going to have its opinion of people claiming to be government officials tainted, nor does it have access to any sensitive information that's not available by other means, nor is it possible to cheat it out of something that rightfully belongs to it.
Additionally, mens rea refers to the cognition that one is doing something wrong. It's not at all clear that lying to a person and lying to a computer program are subjectively equivalent or even similar to the liar, and given the previous paragraph I'd argue they are not. Why would someone feel guilty about doing something that can't possibly have repercussions?
How does that change anything? The HTTP protocol is just how I communicate with the program, just like how the USB protocol is how I communicate with the word processor. The dividing line is when the message crosses computer boundaries? Then it should also be illegal to write "I am an FBI agent" in a text file and upload it to Github.
>The same way you can't type everything into Google.
Who says you can't, physically or legally? Maybe Google will refuse to fulfill some search requests, but that's a different matter from it being illegal.
Intention is very relevant to legal interpretations of "unauthorized access"; both the intentions of the owner, and the intentions of the "intruder". See for example United States v. Auernheimer. There's relatively well-established precedent that when a service tries to safeguard some information, that information is legally protected no matter how technically feeble the attempt at safeguarding it was.
It's not specifically tested in court and I sorta doubt OAI would start suing random users for attempting jailbreaks, but if they did, I wouldn't be surprised if they could win based on the most relevant precedents
May it? untitled.txt with the content "I am an FBI agent" and no further context could lead a human to think the author is stating they are an FBI agent? Okay, sure. Then let's go a step further. The repository is private and you never share it with anyone. At that point, the sentence is just as visible as when you type it into Google's search box or into a chatbot's window. Is that impersonation too?
If Google provides you with different search results, some results that are intended for law enforcement only... Granted, extremely bad security, yet that argument didn't prevent say credit card fraud convictions.
Just off the top of my head, an offense of impersonation will have an element along the lines of "doing [a] thing[s] such that a reasonable person [does/would] believe you're a real cop", which [optimistically] would not be satisfied as there would be no actual person being led to believe anything, or the court would [optimistically] not find that its model of a reasonable person would be genuinely convinced by someone on the internet typing "I'm an FBI agent" or whatever.
I bet it could be some interesting caselaw actually, if it resulted in circuit court judges (or whoever) writing opinions about the essence of impersonation, fraud, etc. and what kind of actual or hypothetical agent is needed to make the crime a thing that could have happened. E.G., basically, if you sit alone in a room where nobody else can see or hear you, and you put on a realistic local police uniform and declare to the room that you're a licensed police/peace officer, is a crime being committed (i.e., is the nature of the crime "pretending/claiming to be a cop" or "making an actual person really believe it" or something else)
(could also be an intent element to satisfy, not sure)
The only way I could see it counting as impersonation is if the LLM is able to call tools and has access to, for example, an FBI-relevant database, but there is no login or anything in front. So a random anonymous user can hop onto a chat and pretend to be an FBI agent and the LLM must somehow decide whether the person is really one before returning some external information. In that case, yes, lying to the LLM about being in the FBI would be impersonation, just as if you stole an agent's credentials and used them to log into the FBI's network. The LLM in that case is performing an authentication function that, say, ChatGPT doesn't.
The crime is impersonating an FBI agent to others. How you do that doesn’t matter. Privately it won't matter, but if you make a public statement which is untrue like this and it persuades others there may be consequences.
Laws against impersonating law enforcement exist so that law enforcement officers can get compliance from people that they wouldn't be obligated to provide to regular civilians.
You can't impersonate something to a text editor as there's no special compliance you could get; WYSIWYG. But to a chatbot, you could get special compliance based on your identity.
Impersonating a federal officer for the purpose of exceeding authorized access to a computer system in furtherance of a fraud, upon Claude, in excess of $5,000 worth of tokens?
IMNSHO there is actually a profound economic insight in there, which is that you will face a drag on economic activity whenever a private party owns a portion of the path to the consumer. Think of the path to the consumer in say the 1880s: you went to the local general store, you met the vendor in person, you handed over cash, you got the goods. Not many areas where a third-party could interpose themselves to collect tolls; maybe the general store owner could, and many of them ended up quite locally wealthy, but their profits were capped by your ability to go to the next town over.
Now think about today. You search on Google and they run an auction to charge the vendor for getting their products discovered. You go to their website, but their website needs to be protected by CloudFlare from all the people who would take it offline. You buy the product with your Visa, which takes their ~1.6% merchant fee. They sell it with Stripe, which takes their 2.7% fee. You pay shipping and handling for UPS or FedEx to deliver it. Local, state, and federal governments all take tax out of this. Increasingly we're getting national-level shakedowns like Iran charging tolls for the Straight of Hormuz now.
Note that it was similar in olden times whenever one party could control the flow of goods between producer and customer. Sea merchants made huge profits in the 1500-1600s. Standard Oil got to be huge with its control of the distribution infrastructure for oil.
European governments have actually woken up to this with passage of laws like the DMA, but the American government has taken the other tack and decided that if life is a massive shakedown it's going to get in on the extortion business.
A single Anthropic employee is valued at $200m. At PE of 10, ie. supposing one employee generates $20m/year, we can say that the employee’s time is $10K (that K !) per hour. Should they, or are we really expecting them to, attend to a 200 issue?
May be somebody will start a business where such high-value-per-employee companies could outsource customer support to be performed by real humans? ... And then such business would replace the employees with AI agents ... It is a trap.
Good point support is definitely below all of their pay grades. Can't expect them to do this kind of stuff at a company that valuable. We need to be thinking about the bigger picture for anthropic.
Warsaw is the only place in Europe where a casual search out of curiosity brought 15-20K euro/month developer positions.
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