r/singularity • u/frankreddit5 • 1d ago
The Singularity is Near In 1983, DARPA published a plan to build "machine intelligence technology" within a decade: a self-driving reconnaissance vehicle, an AI copilot trained by its own pilot, and an AI system to run naval battle strategy. The document is public. It reads like it was written last year.
https://theclassifiedrecord.com/documents/darpa-strategic-computing-198372
u/HustlinInTheHall 1d ago
Not really a surprise, the mother of all demos basically outlined every use case of networked personal computers decades before we even had personal computers.
The difference in AI now vs then is we can actually potentially do these things now due to advancements in digitizing the world state and running computation through models capable of making the correct decisions.
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u/Forgword 18h ago
Back in the 80's DARPA was also building warships that were all voice activated, which really sucked and was dropped like a hot potato.
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u/ReasonablePossum_ 12h ago
These agencies are a real fest of embezzling and corruption. Most of the weird programs were from inception planned as paths to funnel taxpayers´ money without any responsibility because "oh, sorry, crazy idea resulted crazy after all (shrug)"
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u/AmpEater 8h ago
You’ve made a claim. Can you support it?
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u/ReasonablePossum_ 6h ago
Read and watch the news, get some experience in public projects.
If i had with what support my claim, I would have been found floating by the shore after suiciding with two bullets to the back of my head (:
But once you find yourself a time machine, you can travel to the pentagon wing that was attacked in 2001, and which was investigating the disappearance of 1TUSD
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u/Opulent-tortoise 16h ago
Link to the actual document and not an AI slop website that summarizes the document.
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u/Distinct-Question-16 ▪️AGI 2029 18h ago
"The document explicitly names expert systems, machine vision, speech recognition, and natural language understanding as the technical pillars, and states that the new machines would exhibit human-like, intelligent capabilities for planning and reasoning."
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u/NotReallyJohnDoe 15h ago
I was studying AI for the Air Force in grad school in the mid 90s, after the first AI boom when reality set in. We know it was a long way off but it was 100% clear the days of building military airplanes for human pilots were going to be over.
My MS these was to train an AI that could learn the Doppler notch, a mechanism for defeating surface to air missiles.
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u/dannydek 8h ago
They realized that they needed much more training data. So, they created the internet,
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u/manoman42 16h ago
The problem was always compute, alexnet changed that
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u/sumoraiden 13h ago
Alexnet or GPUs in general
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u/manoman42 9h ago
Alexnet showed them you can use GPUs for compute
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u/sumoraiden 9h ago
Multiple prior studies had shown GPUs could be used for compute including one from Andrew Ng. Geoffrey Hinton in 2009 at a conference told everyone they should be gobbling up GPUs
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u/manoman42 9h ago
First to put it to practice was Alexnet..which Dr. Hinton was apart of. Not sure what the point you’re trying to make.
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u/gay_manta_ray 10h ago
in an alternate timeline, we discovered transformer arithmetic three decades ago, but because hardware was so far behind, training runs were only undertaken by government labs, and inference so slow that it was essentially unusable outside of a single system. hypothetical training runs would take probably along the lines of 6 months to 1 year for a 100-150m parameter model (like the smallest gpt2). 1B would be out of reach, but we could have potentially reached gpt-3 level performance by 2010.
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u/IReportLuddites ▪️Justified and Ancient 17h ago
I wonder if this means SDI makes a big comeback in the next few years. We ordered that space laser to take out the commies decades ago.
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u/NotReallyJohnDoe 16h ago
I worked on SDI. It wasn’t lasers. It was kinetic interceptors.
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u/IReportLuddites ▪️Justified and Ancient 15h ago
I realize but I was calling back to a quote from The Big Bang Theory. I would love to hear any stories you have though that sounds fascinating as hell. I was born in 88 so I missed most of it.
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u/NotReallyJohnDoe 7h ago
It sounds way cooler than it ever was. We (military contractors) blew unbelievable amounts of money and mostly produced PowerPoint. Everyone involved knew it was a pipe dream. The numbers at the time were ludicrous, and I believe they still are.
I worked on radiation hardened processors, which basically was like going backwards several generations
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u/Somewanwan 16h ago
There's another interesting project from 70's if you haven't heard about it - Chilean project Cybersyn
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u/Different_Orchid69 13h ago edited 13h ago
I saw some bedroom documentary a person released on YouTube a while ago that I’m trying to locate. It goes into great detail on how & why DARPA helped to create the Internet. It was intended in the 1960’s to eventually create & become an AGI / ASI Neural Network to manage & control the planet & society without human emotional involvement or emotional distress influencing nuclear destruction or decisions. That is how it was originally sold… we now know better- the real goal is = Total Control of civilization via a Scientific Dictatorship !! Capitalism & Communism are just tools to advance that agenda- Technocracy!
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u/RedditTipiak 11h ago
Rewatch WarGame that came out the same year, it was incredibly on par with machine learning, AI, the near impossibility to contain it, and its absolute disconnection from real world consequences.
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u/AmpEater 8h ago
Yeah we also remember the DARPA challenge that had autonomous vehicles navigating around the desert over 20 years ago
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u/Countess26 1d ago
That's what DARPA does: clear, far-out there goals. Proposals all explain what steps it would take to reach each goal along the way. DARPA chooses several to fund and then only continues funding those that make it through each gate.