If the government wanted to put iPhones in missiles, and apple said "we won't sell you iPhones to put in missiles" would the correct government response be to say "no government contractor can ever use an iPhone".

The DoD and US military does not allow contractors to use iPhones or anything else that is not backed by government-hosted or compliant infrastructure, such as GovCloud. The fact that the Pentagon and Anthropic could not come to an agreement on the usage and deployment to GenAI.mil means that it can't be used.

The reasons why are incidental to that requirement for defense contractors.

> that is not backed by government-hosted or compliant infrastructure, such as GovCloud

Go into a random defense contractor office and (assuming you can get in to do this) ask them how many of their iPhones are managed by the company. The percentage who say theirs are will be close to 0%. Most are personal devices, and they use them to call into meetings with DOD officials all the time with no special precautions taken.

Wym "backed by"? This makes no sense. I am a contractor, use an iphone, and never connect it to govcloud.

Sure why not? The government is just exercising its power as a purchaser.

Exercising its power as a purchaser is "not buying it" or "choosing a competitor." Instead, this is arbitrarily and capriciously using an administrative mechanism in a novel way to punish a company.

The "administrative mechanism" here is just a way of exercising purchasing control. A private company could do the same thing.

> A private company could do the same thing.

Probably not, no private company has the ability to tell all its suppliers "thou shalt not do business with <some other company>". They lack the pull to compel them to do so. The closest would be things like what MS did back in the 90s, and got them in hot water with the anti-trust case against them.

That's not what happened here. It was "you can't use <some other company> for stuff you do for us."

That's not what happened here and you know this. It was, literal quote, "“[e]ffective immediately, no contractor, supplier, or partner that does business with the United States military may conduct any commercial activity with Anthropic.”

Fair, and still not something most companies can pull off. Again, without risking running into anti-trust laws like MS did.

Do you seriously think that you can go to all your vendors (if you were a business owner) and tell them, "You can't use Atlassian when working on anything you sell us." How will your business actually compel all those vendors to drop their use of Atlassian for that work? How will you verify compliance and why should any of them sign a contract with you with these restriction? And if they do, how will you avoid anti-trust violations because almost certainly the only way you could talk them into signing such a contract would be to be a massive company throwing your weight around (like MS did with hardware OEMs back in the 90s, among other things).

Private companies are not bound by the first amendment, the fifth amendment, the administrative procedure act, etc.

'why not'? It's retaliatory beyond all proportionality, for one.

"Lay down on my couch and take off your shirt, or you'll never find work in this town again"

>I'm just exercising my power as a purchaser.

No shit. The point is it shouldn't be used that way and that is not what this law is for.

Should the government be able to designate a company supply chain risk if they don't like the price?

They are not "just a purchaser" though. It's the world's most powerful organization that is funded by the people and is supposed to be for the people. I'm all for businesses making FAFO decisions, but expect a lot more here.

The fact that it’s a publicly funded entity is more reason for it to adopt hardball tactics, not less. It’s similar to FDR’s comments on public sector unions. When the government is the buyer, it’s even more important to get the best deal and terms possible, because it’s the public’s money’s you’re spending and the public’s interest you’re serving.

Exactly, setting policy for Americans and American companies is extremely important and should not be ego driven. These deals are to improve America, not to look strong.

The U.S. military’s policy has always been to secure the absolute best technology for killing people. So the DOD quite reasonably believes that it’s in America’s interest to have the best technology for building AI killing machines with no restrictions from non-military people on how it’s used.

when you say 'quite reasonably', you are aware that no-human-in-the-loop AI kill chains are war crimes, right?

"maximum lethality, not tepid legality."

There are limits.

I bet they could get a better deals if the military went and started taking hostages to aid in price negotiation.

After all, getting the best price is in the public interest.

As someone ethically against the Mafia killing people, why would I want to watch a TV show that reminds me of the Mafia killing people?

Somehow people who think open models will lead to infinite abundance and people who think open models will kill AI development are both liking this post.

"Why bother regulating the production of uranium isotopes, killing people with nuclear weapons is already a crime"

That is not what I’m saying.

Your statement is a logical puzzle about responsibility.

It implies that a law prevents responsibility. The opposite is true. Preventing harm is a concern that might form laws. But for many forms of harm, existing laws suffice and should lead to responsibility.

Shifting responsibility can be done in many ways, such as calling for a regulator. Like the law isn’t a regulator in the first place.

Mens rea?

What probability of beneficence would you want before kicking off RSI? I'd probably want more than 99%

The optimistic outcome is the machines do the work and people can be freed from drudgery.

That requires abolishing capitalism, and since these AIs are going to hyper-empower the already powerful capitalist ruling class, that utopian outcome seems unfortunately extremely unlikely.

Feeding ever more amazing technology and science into a broken social/political/economic system does not result in a better world unfortunately.

How does that coexist with Capitalism? I just don't see a path.

Regardless of where you fall on the alignment chart, if you are looking backwards from now to the industrial revolution, it's pretty easy to make the claim that from a standpoint of pure technological progress (discounting all other things, like quality of life, environmental impact, etc) that capitalism "won". But going forward, if the need for labor is completely crushed, and capital continues to get concentrated into the hands of the elites, I just don't see how that is viable long term. It seems like for things to shift to the world Keynes (wrongly) predicted, where we all have abundance of leisure time, then there's a massive distribution of the fruits of automation into the hands of the masses, which needs to be controlled by an entity who does not purely exist to acquire more capital, which is sort of the end of capitalism as we know it.

Or maybe AI kills us all before we get there, who knows.

Cool, I like Keychron products, but can people really not even write a single tweet without using AI to speak for them now?

I appreciate the article, even though I disagree. The number of people who are absolutely certain of their position is just way too high.

Anyway, I do think the heart of the practical question is what distinctions between machine / human / other biological intelligences are critical versus incidental. In this article the meat of the argument comes only right at the end

> Digital computers employ signal quantisation along with a variety of other error prevention methods in order to neutralise holistic physical effects like crosstalk between circuits. The purpose of digital logic is to make computational output invariant to the underlying physics – up to some thermal noise floor. This discretises their behavioural space – perturb the electric field slightly and this shouldn’t flip any bits. This is great – this is what permits reliable, deterministic computing in a wide variety of physical environments. However, if what we are interested in is phenomenal introspection, these error prevention systems prevent the exact kind of holistic behaviour we value.

There could be something here, but I am not convinced. Why is "varies in behavior with respect to arbitrary perturbations" a critical feature of consciousness? And is this even true for brains? If a perturbation is small compared to a neural impulse, will it affect anything?

Slowing down helps China catch up though. I'm also not sure that the CCP is really the most enthusiastic supporter of unlimited access to arbitrarily powerful LLMs