I dont know. My close relative works as infrastructure engineer at major automotive company, and about every 2 years they are buying new computation clusters (think tens to low hundreds thousands of cores, along with network and storage infra). Every time a public tender is held, and every time there are several companies promising to achieve required results with whatever hardware.
Last decade I know of three different firms being selected, where they guaranteed to succeed on speed requirements (some even saying its tested inhouse), only to admit failure after year of trying, taking all their hardware back with no pay. IBM at higher price was selected as backup, and every time was the only firm actually able to deliver on their promises and meet the benchmark requirements.
I often see IBM getting a lot of flak here for whatever reasons, just sharing some counterweight.
It seems EXTREMELY unlikely that Cray would be unable to meet performance requirements and promises. They've consistently done so for decades in all manner of government and private institutions.
No, they've consistently paid penalties for not doing so, especially during the decade or so their network stack tended to implode, taking the shared filesystem with it. They also benefited, during those decades, from an NSA program explicitly designed to fund US HPC OEMs in order to maintain American industry leadership in the space. I think it was a good policy, but it doesn't mean that Cray was hitting home runs right up to the HPE acquisition.
I've sat in on plenty of B2B sales pitches, and am fairly certain that no salesman ever believes that you will actually run those tests. And if even if you did, that you would actually throw away a full year of integration work to go with the backup plan.
Plus, having seen/heard a lot about how salesman are employed - all too often their commission/compensation is locked in when the contract is signed. They get their money regardless of what happens a year or two down the road, and are thus incentivized to "misrepresent" performance and capabilities.
Any sane HPC program has an acceptance testing phase in the delivery terms of the contract, with specific penalties (IBM calls them "considerations") for failing to meet the technical requirements. Sales teams in the HPC are extremely aware of this.
Quantum computers, cutting edge crypto, cutting edge physical reseach just to name a few? I think we are pretty much at the forefront of a lot of things.
disclaimer: I work at IBM Research but this is my own opinion.
BWAHAHAHA! Nothing about that program had any redeeming quality, the fact that everything was based on solidity was enough to confirm this: I knew IBM would be split into 2 companies when the upper brass refused to wise up to the obvious scams like ETH and eventually with Stellar. So much is put behind short term gains selling Z mainframes and empty promises of Watson for everything that nothing gets left over for anything actually innovative.
Tell me, for all the anti BTC propaganda in the training and talking points, it must really have humbled a few people and hopefully got enough people fired to see that the SEC and even Blackrock ended up on our side and not yours.
Instead all IBM has is a place amongst all the other s** coins no one uses with nearly no utility/volume or value to speak of [0]: whereas BTC keeps breaking hashrate ATH.
You guys really dropped the ball on this one, and to be honest the fact that it's a bunch of dinosaurs running that place made it apparent it was never going to live up to it's promise: I just wished the rank and file had taken more effort to make this happen, some of us did try, as so many corps IBM services were willing to pilot-test this tech.
I hate being this crass, I really do, but seriously you guys really screwed this one up.
They will never sell off mainframe. That's the one thing they can reliably tweak to hit their numbers and/or push other software that people don't want as a "bundle".
What is IBM's competitive position? I always assumed they were in the assurance business. I.e. they have well tested systems with close support. Anyone with more insight?
They're one of the few, if not only, technology vendor that is willing to sell something with a written 6 nine's reliability guarantee (e.g. 99.9999% uptime and conformance with advertised specifications/features), or your money back.
No companies in SV, or Microsoft/Amazon, offer a single product that has that kind of guarantee, that I know of.
Maybe they caught on with all the youngsters who call software and AI stuff "tech" instead of technology, and make a clear distinction between the two.
When will people learn that companies will almost always sell stuff as long as it’s legal and profitable. They have no morals. If we declined into a dictatorship they would sell equipment for total surveillance and oppression. If we don’t make it illegal to pollute they will pollute if they think it makes money.
I believe people should take care to add "men and women at" before talking about companies. Companies and corporations are abstractions. There are real people taking these actions.
- "Men and women at IBM promised to back off facial recognition, then signed a $70M contract for it"
- "Men and women would sell equipment for total surveillance and oppression"
etc.
The reason I think this is important is that there's actually a very small number of people relative to the general population that are capable of producing this technology. It's easy to be angry at the suits, or at the broad abstraction "IBM" for enabling this, but the fact of the matter is that there are spineless cowards out there getting up every morning to go and build facial recognition software. They deserve the ire of thinking people. No matter what the era is, there will be sociopaths running large organizations looking to control everyone, but these days there's a huge coterie of nerds getting paid handsomely to help.
It's hard to be brave when you have to support a family, pay for a mortgage, pay for the kids' college, etc.
I remember feeling queasy, almost 20 years ago, when I got hired for a very good salary to do helpdesk, and realized the customers I had to support included some Bad Actors: big mining, big arm manufacturing, even big spying... but I could finally afford to buy a small house, marry my partner, and start a family. So I sucked it up, and without that experience I wouldn't be where I am now.
Point taken, but an important point here is exactly that companies are abstractions, and they exhibit emergent behavior -- cases where the the company as a whole, responding to "its" incentives, "does" things that no individual at the company would necessarily do or even condone if it were all up to them.
At the end of the day, some engineer has to sit down and say "I'm going to make this evil thing because the boss is paying me to do it". That's a breach of ethics. That emergent behavior is enabled, at every step, by complacency.
“there are spineless cowards out there getting up every morning to go and build facial recognition software.”
Almost any technology can be abused. There are a lot of good uses for facial recognition and also a lot of bad. I don’t think the people who develop technology are responsible of cowards for how it’s being used. That’s up to the big guys. If you want to work on stuff that’s for sure only used for “good” purposes, your world will be very small.
This isn't a case of "we're making this for some noble purpose, but it might be abused". This is "we're making this so that we can use it for evil". Like the engineers at Palintir who were working on the whole predictive policing thing. There's no good that can come of that (I suppose the same could be true if you left out everything after "Palintir" in that sentence). The core motivation of developing the technology is evil.
Predictive policing feels like something that someone could think would be noble but could be abused though? Like to me, most things that we consider "evil", someone else could conceivably consider noble or useful or at least a net positive.
I think you’re vastly underestimating how many people can figure it out with a little research and on the job training. The basic government consulting model is to take fresh collage grads and have them muddle through. And while yes it’s a horrific waste of taxpayer money, it also works surprisingly often.
I don’t believe that treating these orgs with kid-gloves solves anything and in fact only serves to perpetuate the ineffective repercussions leveraged against organisations that do the wrong thing.
“Oh no they’re just people, let’s be nice”: ok if they’re just people then they can hear the responsibility and the blame. They did the wrong thing and deserve the shame that comes with that. If we’re expected to remember the humans in the org, then the humans don’t get to hide behind nebulous, faceless, corporate veils.
You are right. This was settled with the Nuremberg principles and code
in the wake of the last world war. Group apologetics are cowardly and
unacceptable. People of excellent character, some of them genuine
leaders, step up and accept responsibility for the moral failures of
organisations they head. Those "merely following orders" deserve no
protection.
We must stop blaming "the system", or "inevitable progress", or
"capitalism", or whatever abstraction. It is terribly weak and
avoidant to do so. It seems perfectly fair to put names to actions
having broad effect. I think the (as you say) _few_ people who make
far reaching decisions in technology deserve treating as de-facto
public figures, as worthy of public scrutiny as political
representatives.
Want to "invent" some disruptive new technology that changes the
world? At least have the decency to put your name to it, stand by it
and defend it ethically. Otherwise what you're doing looks more like
terrorism than science.
Actual individual _people_ make awful decisions, knowing that they are
awful, and hoping to get away with it through "safety in numbers". We
should welcome whatever puts moral pressure on such individuals to act
properly, and not to hide behind their "gang". Corporations have
become a rock beneath which rather little sunlight shines nowdays.
Businesses straight up killed a reporter with a car bomb a few years back. They don’t give a fuck.
How many companies blatantly break the law only to pull some accounting magic to entirely avoid consequences (Canada oil is legally required to clean up their mess, but never do. It always falls to the taxpayer with zero business consequence).
How many times to they break the law, only to get a small slap on the wrist while running away with billions in profit?
Companies don’t give a shit if something is illegal.
I’d be mad rich if not for my stinkin’ conscience. Doing evil is where all the money is, always has been. I need a pill so I can quite my conscience and get on with getting rich.
Nature knows no morals, so I guess acting without morals is a more natural state, thus provides fewer constraints.
Morals and ethics are purely human constructs, thus to follow your conscience is to be more human and less inhumane. That makes me feel good. Maybe we need a pill to improve one’s ability to hear their conscience.
IBM already helped the Nazis in the Holocaust. They never had morals to start with. If we elected Hitler's reanimated corpse, IBM would gladly help again
Capitalism in a nutshell. It will always do this. It can't be reformed. Aside from the fact that we will eventually run out of resources to exploit. Infinite growth is just not possible.
I think it s impossible to hold off the oncoming onslaught of Big State powered by AI , but i think we are doing a very bad job of telling the public to prepare for it, starting with AI powered online manipulation
Just tell folks on the right that ai is going to take their rights, freedoms and guns and let them run with it. I am not joking, the only way to "wake" people up is to leverage those that, oddly enough, have predicted many of the upcoming changes. The issues with their conspiracy theories are with the how, whom, and why. There's no cabal of folks injecting people with microcips to control them and covid wasn't it. It's just regular corporations and corrupt politicians selling them technological sweets in order to extort them for money. Easy. Let them run wild, and hopefully the left and the right find middle ground and change this trajectory.
alas they are very selective about which rights they are concerned about. e.g. very territorial about physical space, but largely numb to big tech surveillance.
but indeed this issue is not aligned with traditional political divisions. there is simply no meaningful part of society that is better of from this large scale digital surveillance that is being inflicted against all people's best interest. the only beneficiary is the small oligarchy that is orchestrating this.
The only problem with that plan is that it's going to warp in ways that make us facepalm, especially because they like to have a named antagonist. Impossible to predict how it would go, but one thought might be that it will turn into "Bill Gates is investing in facial recognition so he can put us all in prison camps" or something.
Unfortunately the damage from that will be severe and will probably make everyone on the left double down about how AI is "safe" and all that. Remember Alex Jones et al conspiracy theories about powerful people being involved in a pedophile ring? For years it was widely mocked and dismissed (including by me) and then Epstein came to light. The prediction was far from perfect, but was right in overall gist, but the suicide was largely the end of the reporting. A lawsuit here and there but very little news coverage and a lot of weird stuff was happening around that, to the point that even "regular" people think it was a conspiracy and Epstein didn't kill himself. But it went nowhere.
That is a very real risk, but I suspect that's partially because these people have been contanstly berrated or ignored. Let's look at it this way. They felt something was wrong. Couldn't tell what but they felt it was (well some things were obious - massive job losses, ignored by the government and the media, etc). Heck even we, "highly paid" tech workers are now facing the same issues - housing is expensive, corporations want to squeeze every penny out of us, we are being manipulated, etc.
Then there come people like Jones, and fill in the void, and suddenly name the issue (naturally they name a false issue, but nonetheless it sounds plausible to the untrained), and they do so in terms easy to understand. Now if they do this for a decade or longer they've successfuly radicalised people and polarised society just like we have been radicalised into thinking that these folks are just idiots and have no value.
That's why we need patience, active listening to their concerns, and actual real solutions that take into account the needs of both sides.
> people think it was a conspiracy and Epstein didn't kill himself
The guy is not interesting nor is the gossip. What I am worried about is that there is a climate that can even lead to a conspiracy theory. It means a good chunk of people don't trust any of our institutions (EU/US/UK) - the police, the government, the media, the prison system, are all rightfully prone to being suspected of dubious acts. We haven't been therein that cell, and the revelations surrounding Epstein have shown that even people that once were considered to be trustworthy beying doubt are now less than 90% trustworthy. Us saying he did kill himself is as ridiculous as those saying he didn't. We simply don't know, we paid investigators to do their jobs with no room for doubt. Why aren't they doing it?
I agree completely with everything you wrote. The "war" is going to just continue to heat up as long as people are strawmanned, mocked, and dismissed. That hasn't worked out well historically, it's not going to in the future either and it's something I'm very concerned about.
Re: Epstein, if I meant to imply that I thought Epstein did kill himself, that was a mistake. I have no idea of course, but it seems pretty reasonable to me that he didn't...
the logical endpoint of that is some crazy guy shooting up a pizza place, not civil society taking back control of technology pointed at them. Ever played the original Deus Ex? There's a reason Musk on his Bob Page arc loves to stoke conspiracy nonsense and it isn't because it produces effective, rational governance reigning powerful people in
> the logical endpoint of that is some crazy guy shooting up a pizza place
That's the likely outcome if people are lead towards that outcome and if that's the only given option. And so far the only voices that validate their concerns are those that would benefit from such outcomes. Those that want a "better world" are too busy berrating those that have genuine concerns and as a result the only people they can take refuge in are those like Musk. It's time for genuine innovation and genuine conversation without losing track of the good in both sides.
Social platform that indexes each user based on their belief system. Create a bunch of these cells, explicit echo chambers and watch people radicalize like never before. Reddit but for fascists and only fascists; Reddit but for liberals and only liberals; Reddit for communists and only communists.
Each cell acts as its own social media platform similar to how Mastodon works. The primary differences are:
A. Cells are centralized on the platform, not federated. Makes it easier for users.
B. Cells are dynamic. People can make cells, merge cells, split cells. If 50 percent of people in the R++ cell want to be more racist, they can vote to split and be moved to another cell.
C. Cells are relative i.e. they exist on a map, people can compare their cell to others, any cell that exists is public and can be related to another cell.
Then provide tools for organization and communication, provide tools for policing and enforcing cell dogma, and then provide the tools to allow for fundraising of whatever causes the cell deems just. Add competition between other cells. Allow it to be integrated with other social media. Make it go viral.
Powerful populist movements have been built on solidarity. This is impossible in current social media which fragments political blocs creating detractors of every belief in every comment section. Remove the detractors and you have progress, radicalization. Thoughts?
The more I think the more I realise that some of those people's hearts are in the right place. And the amusing part is that I am starting to realise that a lot of the surveillance tech was developed under either left and right governments and politicians. Thus we can find common ground. The enemy of enemy and all that :-)
The thing that AI has already made possible is a total police state. Communication analysis can now feasibly be carried out on all text/spoken dialogue transmitted within a given domain, whereas in the past it was limited by the number of human agents available for this work.
I am actively moving away from any type of serveillance device and software, where possible of course. Moved away from the data scraping OS made by windows to linux. De google, de apple, and spread the word. There may not be much we can do against the sheer amount of public surveillance we enjoy, a level that makes the STASI and KGB pale in comparison, other than voting voting and voting. Protesting and vandalism would only ridicule any attempt.
Oh and I feel that there may also be a market for people that want an online presence but in a protected way. So starting businesses around that may also help. Nothing fancy. Just simple stuff such as not tracking users and not manipulating them. Requires avoiding venture capital, and that's fine. No point in being a paper millionaire with no life anyway.
You 're probably in tech so you already know. But the public isn't even aware how easy it is to e.g. copy someone's voice with AI. The mainstream news are uninterested
> But the public isn't even aware how easy it is to e.g. copy someone's voice with AI.
I always demo it where people are open to it, I show them how it can used to steal their banking data (that has been the case already for many years), explain how everything they do is tracked (to those a little bit savy i show them the "hidden" tracking pixels here and there), I demo how people can talk about certain topics or search on site A and then similar content is shown on site B, and so on.
Spread the word, demo, explain, educate.
The mainstream is interested but they don't know how it works. They imagine cabals of people in secret dark chambers when in fact it was product managers in daily standups planning and delivering all this and an all too open to corruption politicians happy to keep the maases obedient and numb.
> when in fact it was product managers in daily standups planning and delivering all this and an all too open to corruption politicians happy to keep the maases obedient and numb.
there is no "general public" just like there is no 2.5 children. More than 1 million working adults in the USA are in uniform or under non-disclosure to security sensitive things.. you will never address those people in the same breath as lowest-common-denominator fear mongering, as is immediately and unwisely suggested here by "good" people.. oh by the way .. "caring about human rights" people will start to behave in a mob like any other mob.. in many cases.. crowds make bad decisions.. etc
And never leave. No going to the store. No driving. No friends coming by. No servants. Every supply run is a clandestine operation.
Individualist solutions don't work here. Only regulatory solutions can address the source of the problem and those require solidarity and collective action.
Who the hell is signing a large contract with IBM and expecting them to deliver working tech?
> IBM signed a $69.8 million (£54.7 million) contract with the British government
Ah, just good old fashioned grift. Nothing to be concerned about. The money is being spent on executive bonuses and government official kickbacks, not developing facial recognition.
1. Risk aversion. "Nobody gets fire for buying IBM" still has some truth to it. Even if they don't deliver, the fact that IBM is one of (or the?) largest consulting firms in the world is in itself a defense for selecting them.
2. The government bid process. I don't know how this works in the UK, but in the US you have to jump through a lot of hoops if you want to work on government contract, so the same few firms tend to get selected a lot not because they are good, but because they know how to work the process.
> Who the hell is signing a large contract with IBM and expecting them to deliver working tech?
Considering they have tens of billions in revenue every year, a lot of people. But what's IBM's niche? I remember they promoted watson a few years back and nothing seems to have come out of that. IBM is such an iconic name in tech but I don't remember them doing anything noteworthy for a long time. At this point IBM is just famous for being famous.
IBM doesn’t market services… they market solutions. You contract with them and they figure out how they build something for you. And it may include Watson.
Yeah, though it's not really what people think of from the Bob Dylan ads. Watson started as a specific piece of technology (an attempt to turn the Jeopardy-winning system into a general AI engine) and later morphed into just a catch-all brand for everything IBM offers in AI and ML.
No, it's corruption. The UK has a reputation as a low corruption state as it's pretty good with petty corruption. The corruption indices are based on corruption perception and the UK has historically been less corrupt so much of that perception is dated. The general public in the UK is not involved in the big ticket items so they tend not to see the machinations. It doesn't take much digging which is why it's ridiculous that the SFO abandons so many investigations due to 'insufficient evidence'.
It's a reasonable explanation, but not the only one. You're taking a huge organization or organizations (UK government departments) that have a revolving door of top-level leadership, plus ever-evolving technology, plus another huge organization (IBM) with a huge cast of people constantly being shuffled around...
Incompetence, disorganization, bad management, bouts of good management trying to re-rail things, new leadership undoing old leadership decisions... I can think of lots of reasons why government projects fail that aren't directly tied to corruption. (And just because there's corruption in a deal doesn't mean the vendor won't deliver, the two aren't necessarily mutually exclusive.)
Once corruption has set in the other explanations like 'apathy' and 'incompetence' are no longer reasonable as it is very much in the interest of someone to leverage that apathy and incompetence for corrupt reasons. The idea that people who professionally siphon off public money will let $70M slip by without getting a piece of that action does not hold water.
I've actually worked on a failed-ish (or at least put on pause) development for a government (no names!).
There's plenty of other explanations that don't include corruption.
Lack of scope, mismanagement, what's developed isn't what they wanted, the people who decided the specs aren't the people using it so it's useless, etc.
We actually ended up delivering the first phase of the project (well, the 2nd iteration as the first was completely fluffed up by other developers trying to make a really complicated SPA that wasn't needed), but declined to bid on the second as we actually lost money and it was by that stage obvious they wanted the moon on a stick for phase 2 for very little money.
One of the Big Four were looking over the architecture in the 2nd iteration to make sure it could "scale" appropriately. But they knew exactly the load the app would face. 120,000 applications every year in the space of two months. It would never increase significantly as it was a factor of the total population. And it was basically a glorified 10 page form (admittedly each page had some complicated question routes depending on answers).
The architecture, which included event-sourcing, API gateways, load balancing and an inexplicable use of the mediator pattern (didn't make the slightest bit of sense), was utterly pathetic. Yet signed off as "best practice" by two separate software architects in the big four.
Within weeks I was pointing out serious bottlenecks in the code plus violations of GDPR that the client had explicitly said to watch out for. Any time we had to add a new property to the most important classes we had to change about 30 odd files, it was "best practice" gone nuts.
All that crazy architecture when a simple, normal, sane, "monolith" web app could have handled that load easily on a small VM. For a lark I refactored the DB saving code to see how much simpler I could make it and think I got rid of 25 of the 30 files and thousands of lines of pointless code in a day or two. Of course, it wasn't signed off by the "architects" so I didn't bother trying to check it in.
Knowing IBM’s consultancy track record, this will serve as a money and time honeytrap for any government interested in this while not actually delivering any useable tech.
It is foolish to think that an assertion without an incentivizing contract is anything other than marketing. What, is a public corporation going to turn down 70M because of something a leader said when it was popular? They have legal fiduciary obligations against not making money, not against changing directions.
Even at the granularity of individual humans, what people want to do is largely orthogonal to what they do. In James Clear's book Atomic Habits one of the more hard-core ways of pre-committing to a course of action is to write a contract with an "accountability partner."
"IBM CEO Arvind Krishna announced a hiring pause in May, but that’s not all. Later that month, the CEO also stated the company plans to replace nearly 8,000 jobs with AI.
Krishna noted that back-office functions, specifically in the human resources (HR) sector, will be the first to face these changes. In recent weeks, the company has opened up dozens of positions for AI-based roles to help develop and maintain these systems."
Funny, some people in the Arab world are fighting required Hijab use. In the US and Europe, with this happening, I could see many people outside wearing Hijabs that cover your full face in the future.
Iran is in the Middle East and and is also where the most recent and high profile protests against the forced wearing of the hijab have taken place. I’m pretty sure most Iranians wouldn’t take too kindly to being called Arab unless they are from the minority Iranian Arabs.
There are sunni and shia arabs too, that's a separate distinction.
It's more that Iranians and Arabs are two distinct cultures with different languages and histories (though a lot of the more recent history is common or shared). It's like confusing Spain and Poland, yes, they're both European nations that use the latin alphabet, but you'd be wrong to call them both Iberian because of that
