Ukraine and AI

 As a child, I loved studying military equipment and war. My parents would buy me books on the latest and greatest equipment and military strategy. Machiavelli advised monarchs and rulers to study war b/c it is essential for a nation to keep up with technology. One consistent pattern throughout history is that whenever and wherever there is a war, there is a technological leap. Sadly, the question 'war, huh! War! What is it good for?' can be answered with...' actually a lot in capitalism.' War technology, born of desperation, spreads to every corner of capitalism. The American Civil War had the rudimentary forms of trench warfare, proposals for chemical agents to smoke out Confederate soldiers, and a crude version of an armored tractor to break through entrenched lines, which became the tank. All three prototypes appeared 40 years later in WW1. Advancements in aviation, communication, and healthcare (lasers, radiation), transportation... all came from war. Decisions made in military HQs have a "Devil Wears Prada" cerulean effect, trickling down to every part of society.

The biggest war in the last 20 years is the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The unintended consequences for civilization are massive. Russia inadvertently sped up the Ukrainian innovation of drone robots in the air, sea, and on land. Ukraine has advanced so far in the last 4 yrs that the US is now copying them. And the drones are being powered by battle-tested AI advances. Why is this important?

If AI is an engine, data is the gasoline fed into it. So you can build a perfect engine, but if you fuel it with poor-quality gas...the engine won't perform well. Eventually, it will break down. The same is true with data. For all the talk about Nvidia chips and massive data campuses, they still need the gas of data, and it has to be of good quality. Claude has now surpassed OpenAI b/c it was data trained on a better source (granted, the source was stolen, copyrighted books, but the point still holds). OpenAI had a larger pool of data, but much of it was low quality from scraping the bottom of the internet. Over time, it has led to lower results and more erratic AI responses. And once bad data is trained into a system, it's almost impossible to get out.

Inadvertently, Russia has handed Ukraine a goldmine. They have data the entire world wants, and they know it. The EU is making arms deals with Ukraine, and it's not out of pity. They want that premium, fresh-off-the-battlefield intel to train its AI. US opposition to funding the Ukraine war has grown quieter and quieter b/c Silicon Valley realized there's nothing Russia has to offer b/c Putin is still using 1950s tactics mixed with some poor quality Iranian drones. Meanwhile, Ukraine has continually innovated. They now have a functioning Navy with only drones. Sea and air drones have destroyed most of the Russian Black Sea fleet and forced the remaining ships to flee. Ukraine has introduced land drones to replace soldiers, and these fighting robots are getting 'real training' in hunting down Russian soldiers. Right now, robot companies are competing for military contracts to replace soldiers with killing land drones. But they'll pivot to using those advancements in manufacturing and mining... until it trickles down to household robots.

Silicon Valley has its hands deep in Ukraine as well as Israel. Once again, it's not b/c they have some allegiance to one country. They are going where the data is. Israel is securing a deal to weld itself permanently to the US Armed Forces b/c the Mideast has been a war hotspot for 80 years. In the AI age, that means the US will have access to fresh data. As horrible as it sounds, that's the way war economy/technology goes. Even in the midst of the American Civil War, European generals were taking trips over to see how Union soldiers were killing Confederates...and taking these notes back home on how to kill Prussians or Serbs.

We are in the middle of a data race. And companies are looking for conflict hotspots to test out their latest technology in real time.

I fear that the next wave in AI will involve instigating conflicts and war... to test new products on humans. We will become the lab mice of our own creation. And the flip is happening right now in Israel and Ukraine. For now, Ukraine has the advantage b/c they are fighting an actual army, and that intel is key to our tech overlords. Russia's attempt to turn Ukraine into a colony has resulted in it becoming an AI superpower and being patched into Silicon Valley.