If the best defence against AI is more AI, this could be tech’s Oppenheimer moment | Artificial intelligence (AI)

S.Scar Wilde’s Quip, “Life is a much more tradition of art than art imitates life”, needs to update: replace “art” with “AI”. the Amazon page Alexander C Carb and Nicholas WW Zamska, the new, Technological Republic: solid power, soft faith and the future of the WestAlso narrates: “Classified” containing “main meals” of the folder; The second volume is on how “karp/zamiska tome” “can help you move in life”; Another “compiler” that includes a “major plan to move in the digital age and the future of society presents. It is imagined that these parasitic works were written by humans, but I will not bet on them.

Mr. Karp, author of The Big Book, is an interesting man. He has a bachelor’s degree in philosophy from the American Liberal Arts College, a certificate of law from Stanford and a doctorate degree in the New Classic Social theory from Goethe University in Frankfurt. So it is not your normal obsessive. However, it is a goal of obsession with people inside and outside the technology industry. Why? Because in 2003 – along with Peter Thil and three others – he founded a secret technical company called Balnter. Some of the initial funding came from the investment arm – waited for that – the CIA!

The name comes from Balrieri“Seeing Stone” in Tolkin’s fantasies. This is logical because the USP of Palantir is a machine learning technique-which seems very good in seeing patterns in, and extracting predictions from data oceans. The company was established because at that time all Silicon Valley Either the technology companies are offered to the government, or were operating by engineers who strongly opposed work in the US military. This was created by an opening that KARP and its colleagues were brilliantly used to build a company and it appears to be simultaneously prosperous (the current market value: 200 billion dollars), while the industry critics also consider it to spoil the devil.

These critics will read the book with a kind of giving that extends to the decades of public sector. Civil service employees who consider employing Palantir may be interested in describing the approach adopted by its employees when working in the customer organization. Interestingly, it is a pseudonym from the executive Toyota Company, Tayishi Ono, as a way to reach the fundamental cause of a problem that occurs in part of the organization’s operations. It is called “Five Whys”: Ask why a problem occurred, then ask why four times.

“Why didn’t the basic update of the Foundation’s programs not charge the deadline on Friday?” Participating authors write. “Because the team had only two days to review the symbol project. Why did they only have two days for review? Because it lost six software engineers in the budget review session late last year. Why did its budget decreased? Because the group’s president has turned the priorities elsewhere at the request of another group. Why was the application made to transfer priorities? Since a new compensation model has been put up in stimulating growth in some areas. Because of the ongoing conflict in the company between two senior executives. “You get the idea. It is not missile science. Or Amnesty International, come to that. Care Starmer may try. It will be cheaper than McKinsey.

But I go. The book’s argument is full of discontent with what Carb sees as a small arrogance and anxiety of the Silicon Valley, which collected the largest concentration in the engineering skill that the world has seen-and then published to create consumer games and the United States that make technology founders rich instead of using this talent to create technologies that would surpass Welf National Welf and Security of the National. What is going on around it in particular is the fact that the Silicon Valley’s wealth was built on a technological basis that has been set – and its price was paid – by the state, yet it seems that the beneficiaries have only contempt for the government. He gave priority to satisfying consumers and creating their wealth on everything else.

“The cry of a crowd of generations was the founders of the Silicon Valley simply for construction,” writes Carb and Zamiska. “He asked few people to be built, and why. For decades, we took this focus – and indeed in many cases – by the technology industry on the culture of consumer as a Muslim by it, we hardly wonder about the direction, and we believe that the wrong guidance, talent and talent of the charge and the Fear. Much of what is going through innovation today, which attracts huge amounts of talent and financing, will be forgotten before the contract is expired. “

The support of many of the lament of the book are permanent topics. The first is a kind of longing for nostalgia for cooperation in wartime and post -war between the American state, scientists and engineers who made the United States of technological languages. For a carb, as for many other thinkers like him (including Dominic Kamings in the United Kingdom), the Manhattan project that created the atomic bomb appears to be the lost Nervana.

The second topic is the history of what the authors call “the cavity of the American mind”: abandoning the belief, and the urbanism of technology, and “the assumption that the health of the individual views is from an ethical or moral perspective that prevents the need to participate in the most popular convergence over the relative force related to geographical guarantee, which is another matter in particular. The desire of the current moment and many of its political leaders may ultimately be their decline.” This is the “soft belief” of the sub -order of the book, which is why this section of the book sometimes raises the echoes of the conservative philosopher Alan Bloom On a song.

There is a lot of dominant anxiety in carb’s reflections. For him, the American precedence is the key to the survival of the civilizational values ​​he sits. He is also a student of Nobel Prize -winning economist Thomas ShilingHe shares his point of view as “to be forced, violence must be expected … The ability to harm is bargaining power. To exploit its diplomacy – evil, but diplomatic.”

But the ability to harm is the privilege of “difficult” force (i.e. military), and KARP seems to be especially angry at what it sees as “precious” reservations for Google employees about the possibility of putting their technologies in military hands. (It may also be one of the motives for establishing Palantir.) Its irritation seems harsh for me. All these employees (and their parents and grandparents) have lived through an era in which the idea that the United States may participate again in a comprehensive war that seems useless like the idea that their inventions may be used in the battle. In this sense, the West was on a 80 -year vacation of history, and Putin woke up from us rudely.

The lesson that KARP and its co -author of all of this is that “the most intimate cooperation between the state and the technology sector, and is more closely consistent with the vision between the two, will be required if the United States and its allies want to maintain an advantage that will restrict our liabilities in the long run. Often the pre -conditions of solid peace come from a trusted threat to the war.” Or, to put it more, perhaps the arrival of artificial intelligence makes this “moment Obenheimer. ”

In the summer of 1939, Albert Einstein and Liu Szilard Send a message To President Roosevelt, and urged him to explore the construction of an atomic bomb – quickly. It also seems that the rapid progress in this technology, “appears to call for throat, and if necessary, a quick action by the administration”, as well as as a continuous partnership with “the permanent communication that was preserved between the administration” and the physicists.

In this historical context, the arrival of this book may be in time. For those who have criticized decades of technology companies, and who believed that the future of liberal democracy requires control of democratic control, it is a troublesome moment. If the technology of artificial intelligence owns by the giant companies that they possess to a large extent and control becomes an essential part of the National Security Service, what happens to our fears about fairness, diversity, fairness and justice as these technologies are also published in “civil” life? For some activists and critics, the re -visualization of artificial intelligence as an essential technology for national security will seem like an indisputable disaster – the older brother on steroids, with the resistance that the resistance is useless, if not criminal.

On the other hand, some Western opponents (Russia, China) are already using this technology against us, and we urgently need the tool to address the threat. When these ideas were placed on Mr. Karp by A. New York Times He answered: “I think many issues are due to:” Are we in a dangerous world where you have to invest in these things? “And I came down to yes. All of these techniques are dangerous. The only solution to stop the abuse of artificial intelligence is the use of artificial intelligence.” Choose Hobson, in other words.

• Technological Republic: solid power, soft faith and the future of the West Posted by Bodley Head (25 pounds). To support Guardian and observer Ask your copy in Guardianbookshop.com. Delivery fees may apply