4-19-19
Alex Joske, a researcher studying the Chinese Communist party at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, said: “Scientists like . . . those who visited Princeton are among the thousands of [Chinese army] officers and cadres who have been sent abroad as PhD students or visiting scholars in the past decade. “I think it’s really concerning because the universities have no way of ensuring the tech they’re helping these [entities] develop and improve are going to be used in ethical ways.”
The papers primarily focus on developing human tracking technologies, including person re-identification, which is the process of following a given individual through a collection of images, taken by multiple cameras at different times. Other topics include machine comprehension of text and 3D scene reconstruction for robots. …
Researchers that co-authored the papers have ties to institutions including Nokia Bell Labs, Princeton University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and University of Sydney in Australia. They all declined to provide comments for publication. Experts say that research collaborations are a major blind spot for export control laws and an easy way for the Chinese government to leverage overseas expertise in AI.
……………………………………………………………………………………
27 boys and four girls, all aged 18 and under, were selected for the four-year “experimental program for intelligent weapons systems” at the Beijing Institute of Technology (BIT) from more than 5,000 candidates, the school said on its website.
The BIT is one of the country’s top weapons research institutes, and the launch of the new program is evidence of the weight it places on the development of AI technology for military use.
Each student will be mentored by two senior weapons scientists, one from an academic background and the other from the defense industry, according to the program’s brochure.
After completing a short program of course work in the first semester, the students will be asked to choose a specialty field, such as mechanical engineering, electronics or overall weapon design. They will then be assigned to a relevant defense laboratory where they will be able to develop their skills through hands-on experience….
Eleonore Pauwels, a fellow in emerging cybertechnologies at the Centre for Policy Research, United Nations University in New York, said she was concerned about the launch of the BIT course. “This is the first university program in the world designed to aggressively and strategically encourage the next generation to think, design, deploy AI for military research and use.…Think of robot swarms capable of delivering harmful toxins in food or biotech supply chains….You could envision students starting to think about how to harness the convergence of AI and genetics systems to design and deploy powerful combinations of weapons that can target with surgical precision specific populations”, she said….
The Chinese government submitted a position paper to U.N. on the use of AI weapons in April. “As products of emerging high technologies, development and use of lethal autonomous weapons systems would reduce the threshold of war, and the cost of warfare on the part of the user countries. This would make it easier and more frequent for wars to break out,” Beijing said, appealing for more discussions. https://www.politico.com/story/2018/11/08/china-children-ai-killer-bots-955424
…………………………………………………………….........................….
6-6-2018 Google recently bowed to employee protests by deciding to wind down involvement in a U.S. military initiative called Project Maven next year. The Pentagon project focuses on harnessing deep learning algorithms--specialized machine learning technologies often described as “artificial intelligence”--to automatically detect and identify people or objects in military drone surveillance videos.
Company emails and internal documents obtained by the New York Times show Google’s attempts to keep its role in the U.S. Department of Defense project under wraps. By early April, more than 3,000 Google employees had already signed an internal letter voicing concerns that Google’s involvement with “military surveillance” could “irreparably damage Google’s brand and its ability to compete for talent.” On June 1, Gizmodo reported that Google’s leadership had told employees that the company would not seek renewal of the Project Maven contract after its 2019 expiration. http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/lovesick-cyborg/2018/06/06/google-decides-not-to-renew-military-ai-contract/#.XU87WLQ-BE4
No comments:
Post a Comment