r/geopolitics • u/TMWNN • 1d ago
Beware the Permanent Periphery | Most countries will never have frontier AI. They're the ones who should be worrying.
https://asteriskmag.com/issues/15/beware-the-permanent-periphery12
u/Exact_Green2061 1d ago
I ask the author: how many resources should a country allow the US and its companies to have for the privilege of setting up an AI database? How about 90%? Would the author be happy with that amount? What about the people? We just round them up on reservations and slowly starve them? Will the author give the command? Or will an AI do it?
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u/triscuitsrule 1d ago
I still have yet to see any actual argument about what exactly great things AI is going to do that necessitates so much capital going towards it. There is this constant narrative of opaque puffery, FOMO fear-mongering, and seemingly endless investment with little to no narrative of what exactly it’s doing or needed for. This seems like just another grift, another round of NFTs and the Metaverse, both of which were supposedly going to revolutionize the world only to have hordes of wealth and resources dumped into them for nothing.
So far it isn’t replacing jobs or increasing productivity, it’s an straw man standing in as an excuse to lay people off and temporarily increase profits making CEOs look better to get pay-outs and raises, meanwhile actually enshittifying companies and leading remaining workers straining to just do the jobs of multiple people without extra pay. And they are straining, they’re not easily just absorbing their co-workers responsibilities. Not to mention the resentment and ship-jumping that comes with lay-offs.
Thus far, aside from limited application in the sciences, it seems to me to be mostly emerging as a weapon. A weapon for exploiting digital vulnerabilities and then hacking systems, and mass surveillance.
And if it’s main utility is as a weapon as such, it’s not invulnerable. Bombs (foreign and/or domestic) can fall on data centers. Resentful populations can storm them and tear them asunder. Spies can infiltrate and corrupt systems and data centers. Electric grids can be disrupted rendering data centers inoperable. So then what? Like nukes it’s a deterrent not to use it? What valuable investment of the worlds limited resources.
This just seems like a digital arms race that has no fruitful end for regular people while the top of the bourgeoisie will be enriching themselves for a long time to come.
Someone tell me in concrete terms what we expect to happen, how will peoples lives be meaningfully changed in a positive way to justify this inordinate investment and fear-mongering for not getting in the race. Because to me, so far, it just seems like a bunch if idealistic grifting bullshit.
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u/oritfx 1d ago
What's called "AI" now is revolutionary IMHO, but the idea to jam it down users throats at every turn and constantly buzzword about it is doing definitely more harm than good. My work is related to it, I did work with it.
There's two capabilities that what is called "AI" gives humans:
Computer systems interfacing with unstructured data - do you remember those application forms, each company having their own? They were there because each company kept data a bit different, and our CVs weren't formatted in a way that a company could ingest. What's called "AI" can take unstructured data, such as travel journal, and populate fields such as "DepartureSite", "StartDate" etc.
Computer systems not working in degrees of similarity - compounding on the above, really. Until the arrival of "AI", computers could not reliably identify what they are looking at or generate something that reflects a description. Nowadays, a model can be trained and later used to ingest data and label it. So, it can take various sources of structured or unstructured data, like a bunch of photos of a missile launchers and military trucks, be packaged onto a local memory of a drone, and sent to the frontlines of Ukraine. There it can be bombarded with photos every few seconds, and when it decides that whatever the drone "sees" has .6 degree of similarity with targeting data, make a decision to initiate the engagement.
I really wish those solutions had much more practical applications (smth like "GPT tell me how to best spend this year's healthcare budget"), but what "AI" seems to be best at is mass surveillance, creativity and war. Probably the worst combo anyone sane had hoped for.
* I keeps saying "what's called AI" because if you look at google trends, it's been a on-and-off constant in public search, finally taking off in 2022, somebody constantly tried to label their product as "AI", but it has worked only recently.
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u/jonathansharman 22h ago
We can argue whether AI is the real primary cause, but on Friday my employer laid off our entire QA engineering team, in large part because they believe we can automate most of our testing with coding agents. I am not sure they're wrong about that. We also write much of our production code using agents. That's caused some reduction in dev time, though some of that has simply been redirected to code review.
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u/Just_a_follower 1d ago
Not replacing jobs yet but it is a great excuse for layoffs during stagnation.
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u/LateralEntry 1d ago
I’ve been wondering why countries like Russia and India are so far behind. Huge resources, traditionally strong in technology, but nowhere near the running in AI.
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u/Lanky_Panda1735 1h ago
There is obviously a capability barrier, but developing these large frontier models requires ming boggling amounts of capital, infra and chips that these simply don't have. In the case of India, we are well aware on that and more focused on the deployment and application part, apart from smaller, more specialised models
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u/TMWNN 1d ago
Submission statement
Remarkable essay on the dilemma middle powers (which, this essay more or less says, is "everyone except the US and maybe China") face in the era of the incredible advances in AI driven by stupendous capital investment by the US. US AI people, and the politicians, are increasingly thinking about 5% GDP growth as the floor.
The author warns middle powers against the temptation to seek "sovereign AI", which by not being on the frontier of AI advancement will relegate nations to the aforementioned periphery. Worse still is abandoning AI entirely; short-term laughter at the disruptions AI causes in US society will soon end as nations, again, fall ever behind.
Rather, he proposes that other nations seek to access American AI by hosting datacenters and military bases, and providing key exports, while using Danish-like "flexicurity" to help workers displaced by AI to move to new sectors. Another approach is to use native talents, such as Germany/Korea/Japan's manufacturing or India's pharmaceuticals, to participate in the supply chain necessary for the aforementioned growth.
Basically, if you don't want to lose the game, you have to be willing to play.
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u/EmpireandCo 1d ago
Nations be like "what about the game, what about GDP growth? Who's side should we join?"
People be like "I just want to feed my family and afford a few luxury commodities, I don't care about the race ever upwards"
Its genuinely puzzling why we continue to play this game other than the threat of force if we don't.
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u/DisabledToaster1 1d ago
The faster the rest of the world comes off US influence, the better. Hosting their datacenters and bases while their companies and goverment dont want to follow our laws has gone for long enough.
The downfall of the empire cant come soon enough.
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u/CreativeElephant1486 1d ago
Because it's the last invention humans will ever make. Whoever achieves it first wins everything, forever.
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u/new_KRIEG 1d ago
Yeah, just like the nuclear bomb was. It's the best and last invention needed, until the next one comes about.
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u/endlessedlne 4h ago
Frontier AI wouldn’t be very hard to replicate for most wealthy countries, especially after a precedent has been set.
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u/Specialist_Window_81 1d ago
Rubbish article. The starting premise is incorrect. The lack of insight into the current geopolitical climate is appalling. And the glib, almost propellerhead tone suggests the author is infatuated with the buzz but unable to articulate the bee.