> Thiel, a Facebook Inc. board member, argued that the kind of AI developed by DeepMind, which like Google is a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc., should be thought of as a potential “military weapon.” “We’ve been a lot more dishonest about that in Silicon Valley than the nuclear physicists were in the 1940s,” he said in the opening speech at the National Conservatism conference.
If one believes this to be true, then how you consider its use to be weaponized can dramatically alter one's view of both Google and Facebook.
If it's a weapon like strong encryption, then it is a defensive measure for the benefit of their users, as they are sheltered and made safe by its use.
If it's a weapon like any other, then its use is an attack upon those it tracks and analyzes, as they are made less private, more vulnerable, and easier to manipulate.
Somehow I don't think Thiel is arguing that Facebook is attacking American citizens, though.
I mean, he started his talk[1] out by posing the question "Is Big Tech good for the U.S.?", which frankly seems like a question worth exploring - especially since the reflexive position of most everyone (e.g. those who post on HN) would be in the affirmative, and likely emphatically so. Being contrarian to a fault, I expect that there's something Thiel thinks is under attack here. Be it more broad things like the general fraying of social and civil cohesion through social media use, or more specific things like Google's enabling of the Chinese surveillance apparatus, Thiel at least has a starting point in this argument. I can't find a video so I don't know what he actually said but below are some notes I found (that seem to mostly rehash what he's said in a bunch of other places, so he obviously seems to think it's an effective rhetorical payload).
I don't think he's really making a point about social cohesion here. It seems like what he's asking is "has the US captured Big Tech well enough to make sure the gains don't leak out to other countries?"
Thiel has switched his allegiance to New Zealand from USA so I don’t understand his talks of treason. He is founder of Plantir which has mission for spying on American citizens and using tech for military without any concerns to ethics whatsoever. This is a guy who bankrupted journalist news media because they dared to publish about him. I am not sure how far Thiel can go to establish himself as one true tech villain.
Peter Theil's actions are pretty questionable without your incredible attempts to paint gawker as anything besides a trashy, disingenuous tabloid. I've heard other parts of the company were decent but their bread and butter was the trashy stuff. He can still be wrong to have funded their destruction even if they suck too.
People need to stop thinking everything is about picking between 2 teams. Its quite possible to dislike Theil and Gawker at the same time. Its also possible to like some things that each does while disliking other things that they do.
Pretty much every journalist outlet is trashy these days, even NYT. That’s not the point. The Gawker’s article on him was expose which he couldn’t stomach. This is the guy who paints himself as torch bearer of ultra-freedom and libertarian but harbors tendencies of Pharos that includes beefing up authorities with tech to control its citizens. His actions are much more than “questionable”.
The "attack" part of any ransomware is how they were able to get to the point where they can execute arbitrary command on my computer. Because once that is achieved, all bets are off.
A good argument could be that the NSA is violating the intent of Congress by weakening encryption standards which are essential to online commerce. Could even be extended to authentication standards which there can be no legal restriction on.
I mean, he has a point. It's clear U.S. tech companies have become hugely susceptible to hiring foreign spies and the issue of foreign governments stealing IP is real. There was a very recent public case of Apple's autonomous driving unit stopping a Chinese engineer from leaving the country just as he was bound for China after detecting he had uploaded a bunch of code to a personal account. And most likely many more cases like that we've never heard of publicly.
1. Almost every tech company has been acutely aware of China stealing IP for decades now. It's not a new point.
2. Where did Thiel make this point? Thiel does not make the point that the Chinese are stealing US IP. He makes the charged point that Google executives (and somehow not Facebook executives) are Chinese agents. To that claim, I don't think he "has a point".
It's in very bad taste to me that Thiel would point this out, and claim the Valley "is getting a little bit of a bad conscience" when he sits on the board of the biggest troublemaker.
When Google leaks the personal data of millions of Americans, then maybe should Thiel start throwing stones.
>when he sits on the board of the biggest troublemaker.
Why is this some kind of detraction from his larger point? If he has a problem with how Facebook is being run - or has concerns with their implementation of AI - then of course he'd want to retain his seat. How else would he influence the company?
I find it highly improbable that the board of Facebook would do anything besides act as yes-men to Zuckerberg and Sandberg who are making them boatloads of money.
I suspect that fixing the bug would have cost more then G+ was making them. Which is a pity because the world needed a nonfacebook social media platform.
1. If negligence in this case means treason, there are several companies you can investigate then - it makes less sense to single out Google when Cisco has likely suffered more. Huawei was literally founded on stealing foreign technology and is allegedly built by Cisco engineers.
2. Rather than investigating if Google negligence is treason, would Thiel agree to charge Zuckerberg with treason due to the Cambridge Analytica scandal? There's hard proof right there, why not get the quick win with Facebook?
Being hypocritical actually often means you are wrong... or more so that the listener is wrong in entertaining the hypocritical thoughts. That's because hypocrisy is often a form of manipulation. A method of distraction, pointing out one issue elsewhere so that the listeners look away. For the listeners, it means they might lose sight of the true opportunities, so it could be an opportunity cost loss. A good hypocritical manipulation would need to distract the listeners in a plausible way, so maybe there is a point..., but we'd be wrong to let ourselves be distracted by it. (Not saying this is the case here, just that maybe it is, I don't know)
The article says "He then suggested Google’s actions were “seemingly treasonous,” asking whether DeepMind or Google senior management had been “infiltrated” by foreign intelligence agencies."
To clarify, by stealing I also mean infiltrated by spies that are hired as employees who in turn provide information to foreign governments...
And yes, of course this could happen to Facebook as well, but as of today Google/MSFT/Amazon/Autonomous vehicle companies/chip manufacturers are in a different league than Facebook as far as IP that is interesting from a military perspective goes.
>To clarify, by stealing I also mean infiltrated by spies that are hired as employees who in turn provide information to foreign governments...
Again, this isn't new. This has been happening for decades - just ask Cisco. Wether is treason is one thing, but I'm not arguing it doesn't happen.
The radical statement Theil is making here, is that the _executives_ are compromised, and that they _actively_ sabotage the USG in getting Google tech while also sending that information abroad. This is an extraordinary claim that I'm less inclined to take seriously from someone who has been been both negligent in how his own company has handled the data of Americans in his own country and also stands to gain, via Palantir, the weakening of Google's relationship with the USG.
>Google/MSFT/Amazon/Autonomous vehicle companies/chip manufacturers are in a different league than Facebook as far as IP
I think what is effectively surveillance data on 90% of Americans is a far higher bar than Autonomous vehicle data that hardly works outside of Palo Alto.
Why is it easy to believe all tech companies are filled with foreign agents but hard to believe that any of them could rise to senior management? If anything, a desirable goal of getting hired as a foreign agent at one of these companies would be to rise to an executive rank
What Thiel is alleging isn't merely that some VP in Google is leaking secrets. He's suggesting Google leadership has been "thoroughly infiltrated", to the point that Thiel can see the infiltration based only on Google's public behavior.
Because Thiel is making the claim, that not only are they senior management, but they are both actively influencing the company from working with the USG as well as transporting, what maybe now Google's most important IP back to China. This would mean either large swaths of Google senior management are complicit or negligent, and that Google has no, or easily defeated safeguards around that IP. If Google had a track record of playing fast and loose with data, I'd more seriously consider his claim. In fact if it was coming from anyone else I'd consider the claim more seriously.
Aside: I'm not downvoting you as you have a fair question - I don't know why you are negative.
But aren't they stealing IP from the companies? In that case it's not treason, is it? In fact, in these cases it's the government's job to help the company affected.
I find it hard to believe that there AREN'T droves of spies from every single country working at Google, Facebook, Apple, etc. If there aren't, they're not doing their jobs.
Isn't that a problem that Google should be themselves be seeking to solve? Is it typical for the government to help protect companies' IP by investigating them for treason?
I would say that the government should be trying to help companies in these situations. That's what all the rules about foreign trade are for after all, but it should be in a way that helps the company, not hurts it.
Bloomberg goes a long way to avoid saying that Thiel was speaking at the National Conservatism Conference, a conference with a very biased audience in mind.
Just look at the other speech titles like "The Nationalist Awakening". Can this be taken as anything but pure propaganda?
I suspect so-called facts when the framing is bonkers. The assumption that I'm a nationalist would be false, therefore the "facts" aren't really facts.
The treasonous-ness seems like an exaggeration/distortion of [1].
> “The work that Google is doing in China is indirectly benefiting the Chinese military,” Marine General Joseph Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said during a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing.
I once met Peter Thiel at an event and kindly asked him if he ever had a 'Robert Oppenheimer moment' with his investment in Palantir. Not surprisingly he diverted and did not provide an answer at all. His non-answer was most telling to me and made me think about his ethics.
At least a certain level of reasoning or even PR spin about the positive effects would have been better than this.
I left deeply unimpressed about our first and only encounter.
Anyone who thinks Google executives are exfiltrating core IP to China clearly hasn't ever used Baidu, the leading Chinese search engine that makes Bing look good.
Microsoft and Apple do business in China, yet somehow it's Google that's apparently working with the Chinese. These people are honestly out of their mind.
The logic is really not too complicated. China is using AI to spy on citizens -- Google is creating and freely publishing state of the art versions of this AI. It's pretty clear that there is a worry here.
Perhaps it is Linus Torvalds who is the real villain, making freely available a crucial piece of software that China is using to power its surveillance infrastructure. I say we put him to death for his treasonous actions against the free world.
So are a lot of other people. We are in yet another AI bubble. It is far, FAR from the first, and will not be the last. Thiel is just yet again trying to paint the ordinary, boring daily activities of his ideological opponents as somehow bad and use the military-industrial complex and national security apparatus of a country he defected from to try and violently suppress them. Another right-wing terrorist isn't news and we should stop giving their insane ramblings coverage.
The reasons why you consider Baidu not as good are probably not technical, but are due to censorship and Baidu's abandonment of non-Chinese websites and pages.
Probably worth noting that deliberately aiding the Chinese military is not treason in America right now because America and China aren't at war. It might be other things: unpatriotic, espionage, etc. But not treason itself. Even the Rosenbergs didn't get convicted of treason (America and the Soviet Union were not actually at war. It was illegal to give nuclear secrets to the Soviets, but it wasn't treason.)
So generally whenever somebody in America mentions treason, they're being hyperbolic or misleading, or have themselves been mislead. Generally.
> So generally whenever somebody in America mentions treason, they're being hyperbolic or misleading,
Some people simply don't need to understand the distinction between similarly used terms. In the end, prosecutors can file multiple charges but practically pick and choose based on a variety of factors.
Prosecutors in the US can't validly charge treason in all but the most extremely rare circumstances, though.
"Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court."
(This comes straight from the Constitution, hence the weird capitalization and punctuation.)
The Supreme Court has clarified the definition above, and indeed, it can't apply where no actual assemblage of force against the US was being prepared or used by either the defendant or the enemy to which one is being accused of adhering and giving aid or comfort. Maayyybe the Supreme Court will extend this to cyberwarfare, but that's hard to predict and they certainly haven't yet.
Anyway, regardless, the two-witness requirement for every single overt act involved is a very high bar.
> "Some people simply don't need to understand the distinction between similarly used terms."
e.g. [...] or have themselves been mislead
There won't be any treason charges here. Federal prosecutors know that wouldn't work, so they won't bother trying it. Whether or not Thiel knows this, I cannot say.
> So generally whenever somebody in America mentions treason, they're being hyperbolic or misleading
Let's face it, vocabulary in main stream America is on the table with No chance of resuscitation. I mean according to popular news sites, there are probably 97 races on Earth now, and if one white gal thinks that immigration on the southern border should be enforced than she is a racist... I didn't know that being from Mexico was a race different than my own (I'm an adopted American most likely of Irish descent).
If Google trade secrets are relevant for national security, non US governments shouldn't allow Google to operate without revealing those trade secrets to their intelligence agencies.
I would assume because the Bloomberg article and Gizmodo article have rather different levels of bias, and that Bloomberg and Gizmodo have significantly different levels of credibility.
I think both should be investigated. They're just too big and with how they're so vehemently trying to get themselves on every page in the world with recaptcha v3 it doesn't spell well for our privacy.
They even changed their motto from don't be evil to "Do the right thing" which is pretty close to "the ends justifies the means" in nature.
I think both companies benefit from the other generally being shifty too, since it let's any discussion about one get derailed with "what about the other?"
Really Thiel's frankly fascistic rhetoric is far more treasonous than even the absurd worst case of "Google gave access to literally all of their technical data to gain market entry". And here he is calling for abusing power to stifle dissent for exercising their rights of who they work with. What they and the nationalist bedwetter coalition forget is that the Military serves the Civilians. Not the other way around.
The whole accusation is recursive bullshit if not fractal bullshit on so many levels. Essentially anything can be considered weaponized. Not only would cars count but when it came out freeze dried food would count as 'weaponized' because of logistical advantages. US government's efforts at promoting cybersecurity have been pretenses to gain power while making it less secure.
The whole point of democracy is to be ruled by the people. Calling for those who dissent to be cudgeled with serious crimes is essentially a threat
Part of the nominal democracy to dictatorship transition involves restricting dissent through abuse of power - like aggressive libel laws to jail those who state inconvenient truths.
That sort of "step toward usurpation" is far more worthy of the label even if it doesn't fit the deliberately narrow formal legal definition.
Compared to exercising their right of who to work for and dealing with perfectly legal partners?
Not OP, but I'm guessing in the same sense that communist activists used to (still are?) be considered treasonous. Like any active promotion and support against a free democracy and towards another means of organizing society, so fascism, dictatorship, feudal, communist, etc., could be seen as treasonous in a way.
I see, I was not aware that Thiel was "active promotion and support against a free democracy and towards another means of organizing society" - if that is the case then I guess it would make sense to say he is treasonous. Seems like that would be a relevant tidbit of information to include in the article.
Oh, I don't know if Thiel is or isn't. But the parent comment implied that he had Fascistic rhetoric. I don't really follow Thiel, so I can't confirm or deny if he's rhetoric is fascistic or not. If it were though, with his level of power and influence, it could be seen as a challenge to the US democracy.
Edit: After doing some quick research, there definitely seem to be evidence of support and active involvement in anti-democratic circles. Now to what extent I can't say. It is also unclear if it is intentional, as in, he could be accidentally promoting and contributing to those circles. But I found sections describing his beliefs that women suffrage was a mistake (because they tend to vote against his agenda), that monarchies aren't so bad and startups are a form of them, that democracy prevents libertarianism and are thus incompatible etc. Now, those could all be misquoted or out of context ofcourse. Even then though, he seems pretty open about the fact that he is not in agreement with the current democratic system and wishes to change it. It all feels a bit my way or the highway. Like since he hasn't been able to have people democratically agree with him and pass the laws and rules which he believes in, he started to look for other alternative means in order to achieve putting those laws and rules in place, which are anti-democratic and tend towards forceful.
Got on the short list by telling the recruiter that "Palantir is a bunch of really smart guys run by a Bond villain". Not sure if that ever got back, but not being thrown out of the process tells me a lot about the company.
It's hard to take anyone with such a cutthroat capitalist mindset as anything but the sum of their incentives. That goes for Thiel especially because he's promoted this as a strict political belief system.
There was a time in San Francisco when everything was blamed on "Chinese steel" until we suddenly found out that Dyson Steel is from Ohio. Then there was deafening silence. Tribalism is a powerful drug.
Having canceled Project Maven and dropped out of competition for the DoD cloud contract on principle, Google continues to operate an AI center in Beijing. They host conferences with Chinese companies and research institutions who they tutor on the use of Google's ML tools.
How much of this knowledge (much of it focused on computer vision and image understanding) has been applied to China's surveillance program in Xinjiang, which has put over 1 million ethnic Uighurs in concentration camps? Why has Google continued to operate their China AI center, which aids and educates China's state-controlled enterprises, while refusing to work with the US government even on vanilla I.T. systems?
It seems that you're using HN primarily for political/ideological/national battle. Would you please not? We ban accounts that do that because it destroys the curiosity this site is supposed to be far. Admittedly there's not much curiosity in a highly charged thread like this one, but there's a difference between accounts that lapse occasionally into this and accounts that primarily propagate it.
Google certainly needs to be kept in check. We've been too trusting. It is obvious that their search engineers are not simply cool-headed logicians systematically analyzing the foundations of knowledge. They are deeply involved emotionally in their attack on truth and reality.
> Thiel, a Facebook Inc. board member, argued that the kind of AI developed by DeepMind, which like Google is a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc., should be thought of as a potential “military weapon.” “We’ve been a lot more dishonest about that in Silicon Valley than the nuclear physicists were in the 1940s,” he said in the opening speech at the National Conservatism conference.
If one believes this to be true, then how you consider its use to be weaponized can dramatically alter one's view of both Google and Facebook.
If it's a weapon like strong encryption, then it is a defensive measure for the benefit of their users, as they are sheltered and made safe by its use.
If it's a weapon like any other, then its use is an attack upon those it tracks and analyzes, as they are made less private, more vulnerable, and easier to manipulate.
Somehow I don't think Thiel is arguing that Facebook is attacking American citizens, though.