I am looking at this from Europe, and when I read things like this I feel like the US have not realized that their standing on the international scene has changed in the last 30 years.<p>Most of the research and advances in the technologies listed has not been made in the US, and even when it has it often hasn't been mostly by US nationals.<p>You were the country that defined globalization, and now you refuse to see the state of the world and actively harm yourselves with protectionist decisions like this. You have already lost business with regulations like Cloud Act, and now China is quickly eating your share of the pie.<p>You still have a major influence in the West because of two things: capital, and the historical fact that the large market leaders in tech which control distribution (Google, Apple, Microsoft) are American. Would you bet this will still be the case 20 years from now? I wouldn't if I were you.<p>I know a lot of the Americans here on HN probably do not agree with a lot of what their current government does, but still. Export controls don't work except to cut yourselves out of entire markets abroad and foster the adoption of competitors to your domestic companies. I don't understand how this is a viable long-term strategy.
The US Department of Commerce is putting together an expanded list of technologies deemed important to national security, and hence subject to export controls. Because the US interprets sharing knowledge of a technology with a non-US person as a "deemed export", technologies on this list cannot be discussed with any non-US person unless Commerce approves.<p>While this might make sense with the right set of technologies, flipping through this list, it seems to be written by someone with either a minimal technical background an excessively ideological bent.<p>Some technologies are plainly not "sensitive", such as:<p>1. "Distribution-based Logistics Systems" - aka JIT logistics like UPS and DHL<p>2. "Position, Navigation, and Timing technology" - clocks and GPS baseband receivers<p>While others are defined in an excessively broad way:<p>1. "Mobile electric power" - aka golf carts? or does it only cover phased plasma rifles in the 40 watt range?<p>2. "Audio and Video manipulation technologies" - so... Instagram filters? Or only "deepfakes"?<p>3. "Planning" - scheduling, like x.ai?<p>4. "Systems on Chip" - the whole category?<p>What is troubling is that were this list to go through, immigrants from entire countries would be effectively barred from the US tech industry, as they could not collaborate with their peers. What's more, US tech companies would be effectively banned from interacting with companies in countries the US government doesn't like but doesn't have the political capital to sanction. I'm reminded of Ming China at this point, and not in a good way.
Ouch. I mostly looked at what AI techniques are being proposed for blockage by export controls (most deep learning, etc.). Specifically this would, if enacted, make it difficult for foreign workers to collaborate on projects and shut the USA out of progress made elsewhere.<p>Pardon a non-technical comment but this goes exactly against where I want to see the world going: I believe in the value of countries maintaining their own culture and traditions while also cooperating with other countries on a global scale.<p>I think there is a lot of fear in our government over our losing dominance in things like 5G and consumer AI driven by vast amounts of data. I think these fears are valid but I would take a long view by making our educational system better starting in kindergarten, making it easy for very high skilled workers to get visas, etc. Also, we should look to what advantages we have in farming, water supply (yes, we love the Great Lakes), what we can offer the world culturally (yeah! Avengers End Game!), and relax our egos to not need to be ‘the best’ because in some ways we are not.<p>When family or friends ask me how I am doing, my usual response is ‘good enough’ and I wish as a nation we could realize how most of our lives are ‘good enough’ and also work hard to provide opportunities for people who don’t have it good enough.<p>Anyway, I look at the proposed export control list, and I see bureaucrats acting out of fear.
Clicking on the "public comments" link on the federal register page provides some interesting reading.<p>Facebook was fairly agitated about the impact of some of the proposals on the PyTorch project.<p>The director at CSET pointed out its kinda a wasted effort to try to censor source code in 2019.<p>Uber claims that broad classification doesn't work anyway for developing tech as a general rule by the time it can be classified accurately its no longer developing tech, and classifying the result of government sponsored research grants would work a lot better than first amendment violations ever would, anyway.<p>Any inaccuracy at summarizing a position above, is my failure, not the failure of the corporate comments, etc blah blah.<p>General public comments on a govt proposal are more interesting reading than either the proposal OR general public social media comments. I actually learned a few things about PyTorch because of this. Interesting stuff.
Wow, that's a neat little list. The impact of this on the start-up scene will be considerable. Given that almost every AI development is dual use it will be hard to make a clear ruling on what is and what is not 'national security' related.<p>I remember when crypto was export restricted and how that ended, this will likely go the exact same way.
Do these controls actually work? As in, do they prevent banned states from getting this technology or papers describing how to build it? My intuition says no.<p>And even if they are effective, is it worth the bureaucratic overhead?
I have a couple questions about this:<p>- How would this affect a largely foreign-based company with branches or subsidiaries in the US? Would the subsidiary be prohibited from sharing knowledge with its parent without prior approval?<p>- Or what about a publicly traded multi-national company with many shareholders (both American and non-American) which has R&D offices in many different countries? How would you treat a company like that? There are many large companies which are <i>de jure</i> registered in tax havens, and have offices and staff spanning multiple continents.<p>- Lastly, what is the constitutional authority on which the federal government is able to do this? This seems to conflict with the U.S. Constitution's First Amendment guarantee of freedom of speech. Especially, considering this affects private speech. We're not talking about leaking TOP SECRET / SECRET / CONFIDENTIAL classified privileged information that's shared with you after getting a security clearance. This has to do with limiting the freedom speech <i>of private individuals</i>, and the freedom of Americans to converse with non-Americans as they wish.
At first reading, this seems like it was a non-committal RFC on a government based broad-strokes approach for a list generated from the Gartner Hypecycle and various other buzzwords; the use of 'Smart Dust' rather than generic reference to MEMS is telling. Some of the established industries operating in most of these sectors are already self-regulating and more than likely know how to deal with export controls.<p>It is probably easier to blanket-ban/restrict everything and then work from that position to approve it on a case-by-case basis, thus maintaining ambiguity and retaining a degree of power. There is no doubt that there will be a scope for abuse by creating favourable environment for some in the name of politics, and to frustrate progress for others by using red-tape and it won't be the first time either!<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Export_of_cryptography_from_the_United_States" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Export_of_cryptography_from_th...</a>
Ultimately, atm, the US is about as far from conflict with a technologically capable adversary as you could hope for.<p>Despite rivolrous rhetoric, china-US interests mostly aren't opposed. Russia & the US play spy games, possibly election meddling.., but it's still fairly small scale. Maintaining a small edge in these technologies is, currently, as unimportant as it's likely to be.<p>That could change. Stakes could rise. This is the peacetime list/policy. What happens if & when the risk of war grows.<p>This list hints at the kind of cost we will pay for escalating risk of major conflict. New discoveries in computer science, biology, material science, manufacturing or anything with obvious breakthrough potential could become restricted, secretive, balkanized, and ultimately limited.
A lot of people are missing that the list given is not a list of things they are considering for export controls. It is a list of categories for which they want to know if they contain specific technologies that should be under export control.
My group is heavily involved in swarming technologies at a big old lab you've heard of. We reply to these and other calls for comments, and apart from a few bad actors, this process is pretty clean and sensible.<p>The end result is often not a ban on sales or exports, but rather a sliding scale of licensing regulations, up to a ban on sale to e.g. Iran or China. Do you really want to sell your AI powered surveillance swarm to Iran? No, you don't. You can develop and sell to UK though, because they're the "Good guys".
Does this apply to already existing systems or just new stuff? Tech like expert systems and non deep learning rl have been around for years if not decades, are they suddenly going to be subject to export controls
This is cool, I didn't know we were really there yet:<p>(11) Brain-computer interfaces, such as<p>(i) Neural-controlled interfaces;<p>(ii) Mind-machine interfaces;<p>(iii) Direct neural interfaces; or<p>(iv) Brain-machine interfaces.
I know this needs to be done.<p>But it’s quite hard.<p>Preventing bits from being exported is harder than preventing atoms.<p>What compounds the export problem, is the classification problem.<p>In the past, when military R&D was dominant, military technology was often aggressively classified despite the challenges of acquiring/replicating it.<p>Nowadays so much is recombined commercial duel use tech that discussing it is often enough to point adversaries/competitors in the right direction.
Don't make mistake if you apply for US Visa. When your research area is Deep Learning/AI, it may take longer to get B1/2 Visa and additional documents might be required. Simply Software Engineering is sufficient.
How does this compare with how nuclear weapons technology was being invented and safeguarded? AFAIK there was a lot of cooperation amongst everybody before they became practical, but after the initial breakthroughs happened the government quickly classified most of the research. I believe during postwar interrogations of Nazi nuclear scientists they mentioned how the drying up of research and publications in nuclear fission in the public arena meant somebody had broken through. Isn’t that all you really should be looking for, or does the government no longer trust Einstein letters?