If I were a somewhat different person, and life played out quite differently, I can imagine being a senior NSA bureaucrat.
I'd read about Google's cat-recognition engine, and the likelihood of a mouse-level AI within the decade, and I'd be thinking that the NSA needs to get there first.
Not because there's an obvious military application, but because there could be a weapon in there somewhere and because someone in China is thinking the same thing.
So I'd add a few hundred million a year to my off-budget budget; just pocket change really. Then I'd build a data center for my testing and I'd get to a mouse level AI in six years. If I needed to I could pry the secret sauce out of Google's hands; I'm sure there a ways to do that but it's probably not necessary. Google publishes much of its AI research.
I'd build it just to see what it was like, and so I could assess the military potential.
Problem is, modern AI experiments take a lot of power and produce a lot of heat. I wonder how I'd disguise it...
Wouldn't the military have access to a nuclear power plant? (Or get one built) They could then build the AI anywhere they wanted.
ReplyDeleteA "Commercial" endeavor trying to hide this would be more problematical. If you could make it look like a big search engine or cloud project (ala Amazon) then it could pass itself off behind this cover?
I would think their biggest concern may be to avoid detection based on it's accessing data. I suspect they would have a one-way only feed, plus massive spoofing of the IP addresses, or as above make it appear to be some other search/cloud project.
What do you think?
Don't forget the new NSA datacenter they are looking at building in Utah. Apparently cooling is much cheaper there because of the desert climate (much cooler at nights).
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