One strong reason to think the AI case might be different is that US national security will be actively using AI to build weapons and thus it will be relatively clear and salient to US national security when things get scary.
For another thing, I feel like there’s a normal playbook for new weapons-development technology, which is that the military says “Ooh sign me up”, and (in the case of the USA) the military will start using the tech in-house (e.g. at NRL) and they’ll also send out military contracts to develop the tech and apply it to the military. Those contracts are often won by traditional contractors like Raytheon, but in some cases tech companies might bid as well.
I can’t think of precedents where a tech was in wide use by the private sector but then brought under tight military control in the USA. Can you?
The closest things I can think of is secrecy orders (the US military gets to look at every newly-approved US patent and they can choose to declare them to be military secrets) and ITAR (the US military can declare that some area of tech development, e.g. certain types of high-quality IR detectors that are useful for night vision and targeting, can’t be freely exported, nor can their schematics etc. be shared with non-US citizens).
Like, I presume there are lots of non-US-citizens who work for OpenAI. If the US military were to turn OpenAI’s ongoing projects into classified programs (for example), those non-US employees wouldn’t qualify for security clearances. So that would basically destroy OpenAI rather than control it (and of course the non-USA staff would bring their expertise elsewhere). Similarly, if the military was regularly putting secrecy orders on OpenAI’s patents, then OpenAI would obviously respond by applying for fewer patents, and instead keeping things as trade secrets which have no normal avenue for military review.
By the way, fun fact: if some technology or knowledge X is classified, but X is also known outside a classified setting, the military deals with that in a very strange way: people with classified access to X aren’t allowed to talk about X publicly, even while everyone else in the world does! This comes up every time there’s a leak, for example (e.g. Snowden). I mention this fact to suggest an intuitive picture where US military secrecy stuff involves a bunch of very strict procedures that everyone very strictly follows even when they kinda make no sense.
(I have some past experience with ITAR, classified programs, and patent secrecy orders, but I’m not an expert with wide-ranging historical knowledge or anything like that.)
One strong reason to think the AI case might be different is that US national security will be actively using AI to build weapons and thus it will be relatively clear and salient to US national security when things get scary.
For one thing, COVID-19 obviously had impacts on military readiness and operations, but I think that fact had very marginal effects on pandemic prevention.
For another thing, I feel like there’s a normal playbook for new weapons-development technology, which is that the military says “Ooh sign me up”, and (in the case of the USA) the military will start using the tech in-house (e.g. at NRL) and they’ll also send out military contracts to develop the tech and apply it to the military. Those contracts are often won by traditional contractors like Raytheon, but in some cases tech companies might bid as well.
I can’t think of precedents where a tech was in wide use by the private sector but then brought under tight military control in the USA. Can you?
The closest things I can think of is secrecy orders (the US military gets to look at every newly-approved US patent and they can choose to declare them to be military secrets) and ITAR (the US military can declare that some area of tech development, e.g. certain types of high-quality IR detectors that are useful for night vision and targeting, can’t be freely exported, nor can their schematics etc. be shared with non-US citizens).
Like, I presume there are lots of non-US-citizens who work for OpenAI. If the US military were to turn OpenAI’s ongoing projects into classified programs (for example), those non-US employees wouldn’t qualify for security clearances. So that would basically destroy OpenAI rather than control it (and of course the non-USA staff would bring their expertise elsewhere). Similarly, if the military was regularly putting secrecy orders on OpenAI’s patents, then OpenAI would obviously respond by applying for fewer patents, and instead keeping things as trade secrets which have no normal avenue for military review.
By the way, fun fact: if some technology or knowledge X is classified, but X is also known outside a classified setting, the military deals with that in a very strange way: people with classified access to X aren’t allowed to talk about X publicly, even while everyone else in the world does! This comes up every time there’s a leak, for example (e.g. Snowden). I mention this fact to suggest an intuitive picture where US military secrecy stuff involves a bunch of very strict procedures that everyone very strictly follows even when they kinda make no sense.
(I have some past experience with ITAR, classified programs, and patent secrecy orders, but I’m not an expert with wide-ranging historical knowledge or anything like that.)
‘when things get scary’ when then?