There's even books written about it. Shame on IBM for this. I suspect in the future we'll have lots of books like this, for other companies enabling this genocide: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust
The same author wrote Nazi Nexus, with separate chapters for different US companies' (Ford, GM) dealings with the Nazi regime. It can always be a case of "let's not bring politics into work" attitude or the belief that "tech is a tool only, can be used for good or ill" but at least in the years leading up to WW2 there was a lot of support for eugenics, antisemitism (Henry Ford was a notorious one) and other Nazi tendencies in the US too. I would not be surprised if many of those working on killer AI today were politically motivated and not just developers caught in projects they don't really have their hearts in.
Only recently someone here on HN posted a video about some big hall in the US, where nazi supporters gathered in droves. It made it seem like they had significant ideological footing in the US as well. Unthinkable what could have happened, if they had had even more support. Not exactly this video that was linked, but this seems to be about the same gathering: https://invidious.baczek.me/watch?v=r4zRZ7XLYSA
You’ll find these bad ideas never really die. Look and you’ll see it throughout time and location. Russia, Germany, the U.S., Japan. Tyranny isn’t something accidental, exotic or mysterious. People take their eye off the ball and get clobbered with it from time to time.
I’ll always argue we’re better off with a world war than tyranny, but the whole goddamn point of the UN Charter is to prevent both. The lesson was learned. It was written down. And we’re still fucking it up again.
Don't forget Japanese Unit 731, all the scientists involved were whisked away to the US if they would give up their research on human subjects to the US military and help translate.
there's a lot of "these are some tested to failure limits for humans" results that are of use in medical settings, but they aren't really needed and end up being more of a "fatal dose" style measure.
The most used one I've heard about is studying hypothermia because they took quite detailed notes on the different stages and how the body reacted.
Years ago I read a blog post by a Jewish doctor who was trying to do hypothermia research without relying on Nazi data. His ultimate conclusion was that it was not reasonable to discard this data, because treatment would be very inadequate without it. It would unnecessarily hurt people today to give lesser care, and it would not be a positive testament to the memory of those victims to throw it all away.
I haven't been able to find that blog post again, but I often think about it and would love to bookmark it.
It's in a similar vein of ethical question to embryonic stem cell treatments, but certainly with very different aspects between them.
The weird thing is, I’ve seen this author post factually incorrect things about early Islamic history. I just wish he was more careful about things outside his area of expertise.
There's such a premium on outlining the crimes of the Nazis. Condemning eugenics and the culture of blind adherence to institutional norms is valuable. However the concerns ring hollow when we apply it in the retrospective or accusatory rather than the introspective sense.
For decades, Nazi-adjacency has been just another insult to be hurled at the political opponents we've othered. Depending on where you are on the political spectrum, "Nazi" could be synonymous with Elon Musk. In one breath we trivialize the evil humanity is capable of inflicting upon itself. In the next breath we exclaim, "Never again!"
The American Eugenics Society rebranded itself into, "Society for Biodemography and Social Biology". Ambiguous terms like, "bioethics" are used by eugenicist think tanks like "The Hastings Center" where explicit appeals to eugenics are undesirable. The Club of Rome evolved into the WEF. Paul Ehrlich's ideas are as popular as ever. The same eugenicist appeals for population control remain in the forefront of public discourse. Even here on HN, you will regularly find posters lamenting the impending doom of climate change. The answer, if you ask many here is the eugenicist policy of population control.
There are other themes in parallel, but I'll try to keep it somewhat concise and less controversial.
It isn't only the "Banality of Evil" or an engineer only who wants to go home to watch Netflix after designing a killer drone. Similar authoritarian ideas are celebrated in our popular discourse. Instead of examining these ideas critically, we accuse political others, dehumanize them and finally rationalize them into the Nazis.
In the future, AI will be so good that it will detect criticism of IBM as you are typing and threaten to lock you out of "your" computer unless you delete your work.
Either that or genAI will be used to publish a bunch of books telling fantasy stories about how IBM personally arrested Hitler. :)
already the AI detects criticism of itself. except its response it's to shadowban you meaning you can continue to post but nobody sees your opinion online.
eventually, you're "bubbled" by AIs.. all your interactions online are surrounded by an AI and you'd think you're interacting with other people when you're just AI-bubbled so to not disrupt the rest of the workers.
you'll still see likes, and other interactions with the social media posts you leave behind, but as a flagged critic of the system, all these interactions are merely faked to keep you calm. as the AI advances you'll even see responses, retweets and other interactions.... all AI driven in order to keep you busy while IBM keeps a calm overwatch over all. the end.
they don't have to, they bought it. or hired it? dunno. for all you know I'm an AI intended to keep you distracted while at the same time you're just an AI bot keeping me occupied with pointless online discussions.
even if neither of us is actually an AI, this interaction will surely aid in training some LLM in the end...
Maybe some day in the future this will amount to an "organic" way of accidentally building up a simulation of human society, that will be the only thing remaining for some far into the future aliens, who come to visit our planet. And what conclusions they would draw from this.
Maybe that's the new Turing test; true AGI is reached when computers are smart enough to dismiss the possibility of IBM returning to competence. For a warm-up task, ask the AI about a hypothetical scenario involving an honest and ethical Oracle sales rep.
i think the only plausible solution is that we don't know but we're just about to find out? as soon as the singularity hits we can ask the AI (...?)
then again, and thinking more broadly, all of life is one giant contest to guess the future, and later, to determine the future by taking precise action
so what you're asking means to try and guess how much of my current reality is predicted by AI (and more generally, by any possibly conscious actor) and how much is wildly unpredictable and chaotic?
Yes, loosely I think what you're asking at the end is somewhere slippery that I've been thinking as well. By introducing chaos or randomness in one's life it may be a way to incur computational cost to the "Sentinel AI" that is optimizing for predictive behavior (which humans are pretty predictive day to day).
Oddly this led me to realize that historical magic related to randomness may actually be a "thing" in such a system, and it was kind of a "wow" moment.
tl;dr use randomness to attempt to distort reality and run experiments, if results show anomalies then you may be in a reality at the very least "modulated" by an AI.
Not today, no. But remember that IBM is critical to SERN due to the importance of IBM 5100 for time travel, so there's a bit of technological back and forth going on within the ~100 year period we happen to be at the center of right now.
It is both, and also a way of acknowledging that GP's comment points out that the main/only ridiculous fantasy in GGP's comment is that IBM specifically is involved, and not the whole AI part.
I do regret making the joke now, though, given the wider context of the thread.
like the reddit "shadowban", where your comment isn't shown to others but is visible to you in the thread.
fudge the up/down votes to make it look like it's been seen but not reacted to.
but do you need to burn cycles on AI to keep these people engaged? if someone is spamming stuff you don't want seen have them throw out a basic response and then shadowban or just straight-up ban them. if they're very negative bad actor types just give em the boot
Welcome to the future of racial / political / ideological / social status segregation.
On platforms like Facebook or YouTube where the feed is algorithmically generated and you can't easily view a filtered list of topics (like Reddit) something like this would be very easy.
The interactions don't even need to be generated by AI, it just needs to keep you seeing interactions with other people in your social status circle. And if you try to venture too far outside of that it shadow bans you.
Heck I'd be surprised if the way the news feed algorithms work today they don't already do something like this, as a byproduct of optimising for viewership.
They'd just need to take it a bit further by preventing you from seeing viewpoints outside your circle. So taking the WWII example, people in the Nazi group would not be able to see pro-Ally content. All they'd see about Allies would be content that paints them in a bad light, and vice versa.
It is already happening, just recently Instagram pushed out an update to 'quietly' limit political content (ie. pro Palestinian voices) to all users by default without informing them.