well I don't necessarily want to say that I'm like a lite and we we should all go back uh to the Stone Age or things like this but I think uh there needs to be like an actual public discussion on this particularly on the fact that our outof control National Security State um in Silicon Valley are have essentially been fusing over the past few decades and what necessarily that means um because a lot of people be you know will say stuff well it's Ai and the private sector but when that private sector company has multi-million
dollars conflicts of interest with the national Security State I think that should um you know be part of the discussion uh necessarily and I think also there needs to be a way to sort of know um whether some of these algorithms are hyped or whether what the company says their accuracy is for example is actually accurate uh before uh decisions are made to Outsource major decision-making whether at the government level or the local level or really on any level you know to an algorithm so you know as an example uh during covid-19 uh Thee the
governor of Rhode Island Gina Rondo sort of gave a green light to this Israeli company called diagnostic robotics uh to use you know the health data in the state to predict uh covid-19 outbreaks uh before they could happen right and Gina R by hi laws well uh I'm I'm sure a lot of those were sort of suspended uh under the emergency a justification of covid-19 but I'm not exactly familiar with the legal or potential legal snap F of that um at the time or maybe they Justified it by alleg you know saying they de they
sort of took anonymized the data I don't really know but the idea was to sort of use that data to identify local hotpots and predict outbreaks before they happen and so obviously if you know the algorithm of this company predicts an outbreak there would be sort of these localized lockdowns and people would lose their ability to uh engage an inperson Commerce and freedom of movement Etc so you know consequences that are pretty significant to the people uh living there um and when I reported on at the time as I recall but it's been a few
years but I do know that the algorithm per the company was under 80% accurate I think it was somewhere in the 70s and so that's the company right so if it's not independently vetted um and this is sort of you know company PR um at the end of the day is that overinflated it's quite possible right and so what if the accuracy of that isn't really in the 70s it's in the 60s or near the 50s it's no better than a coin toss right is it really worth putting uh that kind of power in the
hand of an algorithm that isn't necessarily going to be more efficient and accurate but all this hype that's been generated around AI as an industry suggests that has sort of created this public perception that AI is inherently um smarter than human decision makers and more efficient and more cost effective for example um I think these are kind of problematic scenarios that need to be considered and I'm not trying to be a Debbie Downer or poo poo on on Innovation but I think you know civil liberties do matter and I think people need to be uh
very mindful of that especially considering again the Silicon Valley fusion with the National Security State and the National Security State's tendency uh to opportunistically whittle down American civil liberties uh for their benefit it's a really interesting intersection that I clearly need to start thinking more about the way that I would look at that and this ties into uh something you mentioned earlier uh during the inauguration of Donald Trump you had all these Tech billionaires there by him and it gave it certainly gave me like oo this is why people are paranoid about oligarchy Vibes uh
and I'm not super prone to that kind of thinking so the fact that it hit me like that I was like okay definitely it's good that people are being paranoid uh but the intersection feels like it's a very natural intersection to me so the reason that naal security would be fusing with technology is that technology is going to be the front where these battles are fought and so anybody that's seen you know the however many thousands of drones uh that China can launch and get to you know dance like a dragon is very compelling when
you see it it looks so cool uh and then you imagine well what happens when 10,000 drones like that are able to go over uh aircraft carrier and each one drops a uh reasonable size payload that by itself would do next to nothing but you drop 10,000 of those uh little something things on that ship and you turn it into swiss cheese you realize oo the way that we've been doing uh National Defense is not going to work in a modern combat scenario and so it is going to be these Tech guys that we're going
to need even if you just grant me that AI is going to get really good at hacking which there was a recent uh announcement I forget if it was from Deep seek uh I can't remember but there was a company that was doing this where they wanted to see um how well their AI was at hacking and it was unbelievably good and so they were doing it as a red team inside of a company so they can say okay here's how we broke our own systems now we need a blue team that can come in
and Shore these up uh but you're going to have to have that like if you are living in a world where one country has Ai and another does not uh the country without it will lose and so to me this feels like an arms race we can not afford to not engage in uh and so it just becomes a question of all right well given the stakes how do we actually navigate this so I I would not want to pull apart the National Security apparatus from uh the tech Bros to be dismissive um so what
do you do I don't know if you want to stay in the lane of like I just want people looking at the right things or if you actually have an insight there uh but I'd be very curious um you know I do prefer to to stay in in my Lane as much as possible uh frankly um especially on sort of these uh sticky stickier issues but I do have some opinions so um first of all um as I referred to earlier with the national submission C uh Comm National Security Commission on artificial intelligence and some
of these Foyd documents that came out of there there is the promotion of the idea that essentially the US needs to do what China has done and in replica this civil military Fusion model in order to win the AI arms race and sort of the argument inherent in that is that in order to beat China we must become China even more than China is um and and you know a lot of the justifications um you know around um China as an adversary are related to how uh China uh is not as um protective of civil
liberty as the as the United States at least postures itself as being for example and a major difference in the value system between the China between China and the United States and so if you're willing to adopt exactly that model civil military fusion and my opinion is really not that different than um fascism at the end of the day um it's it's the corporatist model and I don't think it's uh necessarily what what Americans want um and yeah there is a trade-off and I think people should consider it um but again I'm not um in
the business of telling people what to think but what happens if we go so far out of a desperation to win an AI arms race with China for example uh that we completely surrender are the value system that supposedly makes us a freeer better Society in the process I think uh that is complicated um and I would also point to the fact that uh you know transnational capital A lot of that enabled China's AI arms race there is a lot of cross-pollination in these uh you know Chinese government adjacent Tech corporations um and the United
States uh you can look at people like Larry thinkink for example um who definitely have a lot of eyes at to Chinese industry uh for example and people like Steve schwarzman um quite similarly very much uh tied there who's you know head of Blackstone and uh they're both very close personal friends of Donald Trump and also of course F has ties to the Democrats um as well um and a lot of you know Henry Kissinger who I mentioned earlier a lot of top CCP officials have pictures of them with Henry Kissinger and their offices they
love the guy um and there was that effort of course to open up China uh to to Commerce and uh Partnerships with uh Western companies for example um you know back several decades ago and a lot of that involved um you know uh US capital and in some firms like Beal for example that were very much tied to the National Security state of Ronald Reagan for example a lot of top people that served in his in top national security positions under him were involved in Beal which was building a lot of the infrastructure that helped
enable China to become uh this you know the power that it is and why is that not being talked about and I mean this is really isn't exclusive uh to Democrats either though they often get rightly pointed out for having some conflicts of interest of this nature but someone like Howard lutnick for example who was head of the transition team for Trump and as his uh incoming Secretary of Commerce um has the same his his company he runs um has the same uh tie arguably a more direct tie uh to a Chinese government majority owned
uh Financial entity that was a big Scandal for conservatives when Hunter Biden's Rosemont Sena was also tied to it but there's been no conservative uproar over this tie um and you have to kind of ask why that may be and why you have a lot of um these big tech people Elon Musk included who has a major role in the National Security State of the United States as one of the top contractors to space force in the Pentagon for example and starlink and all of these things um had you know through Tesla has a lot
of ties to you know Chinese Commerce and and Tech Giants that also have uh rather cozy relationships with the Chinese government as well why is that not being discussed as you know a potential National Security risk if we do really need to become China to beat China you see what I'm saying like if it was really that was really the key driver of our issue shouldn't we be scrutinizing the ties of these oligarchs to both China and you know some and our own National Security State
