YouSaid · the spoken record

Christopher Kirchhoff

lines on the record: 68
first: 2024-10-30
most recent: 2024-10-30
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Economy, it's going to be much more a question of do you have an iPhone 15 versus an iPhone 12? Do you have the most advanced AI versus AI that's a little bit older or maybe from an open source model? And because of that, as an international relations theorist and as the literature would suggest, it's not going to be like nuclear weapons. It's not going to create sudden disequilibria in the international system. It's going to be much more shades of gray, I think, and gradations. And that's good because it means that we will have time among nations to find new equilibria without hopefully finding ourselves in sudden disequilibria that could create an incentive for one nation to start a war against another.”
2024-10-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Christopher Kirchhoff on Military Innovation and the Future of War · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“On the National Security Front, there's been a heck of a lot of conversations about is AI sort of as dangerous as the next nuclear bomb and everybody at Frontier Labs went out last summer and watched Oppenheimer. And it's interesting just culturally coming from the national security community where it was my day job to look at really awful stuff, right? To get up every morning and before the chairman came into the office or on the National Creative Council read the morning intelligence brief about all the things, all the awful things going on in the world every day. So I look at AI as a technology that is not at all like nuclear. I never think it's going to achieve this sort of zero to one point technology as we would call it that nuclear is today where you either have a bomb or you don't. It's going to be much more diffused. It's going to be much more a part of the commercial.”
2024-10-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Christopher Kirchhoff on Military Innovation and the Future of War · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, I got a chance this brain to work at Anthropic and a Policy Residency, working both on AI safety and AI and national security. It was a short-term residency. I was only there for a few months, but I am incredibly enchanted by generative AI. And I cannot believe based on my time inside a Frontier Model Lab what is just around the corner. So I want to learn everything I possibly can about how to steer, democratize, and make safe this incredibly powerful new wave of technology that's about to crash down upon us.”
2024-10-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Christopher Kirchhoff on Military Innovation and the Future of War · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A very high percentage of its recommendations were adopted. And more than that, it forcefully brought into the public light information that never otherwise would have”
2024-10-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Christopher Kirchhoff on Military Innovation and the Future of War · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When everybody knows there's been a huge breakdown, where there's more openness to look freshly. And that commission went pretty well.”
2024-10-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Christopher Kirchhoff on Military Innovation and the Future of War · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, the political science literature divides commissions into three types, the type that you don't want to be on as a disaster management commission. So this is where, oh, there's a giant political problem. We're going to name a blue ribbon commission that will never be heard from again to take the blame off politicians. Hardest kind of commission to be on is an agenda commission. So an agenda commission like the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence wasn't created after a 9-11 or a catastrophic breakdown, but nevertheless is a body that is going to have the bipartisan insights and support and the expertise to tackle AI, a really complex issue that spans government that at least when the AI commission was created, the government wasn't in a position to itself take on in a really rigorous way. The most effective commissions are what are called crisis commissions, the 9-11 commission is a classic example. They happened in the aftermath of a giant political rupture.”
2024-10-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Christopher Kirchhoff on Military Innovation and the Future of War · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A bad day. But what I learned is that expertise is often wrong and settled notions of how business should be done is also often wrong. And those settled notions often kill people. And especially when they kill people, that's a strong signal at its time to go back and take a fresh look at everything and to always be curious, always be skeptical, and always be as rigorous as you can because established ways of thinking don't often evolve in ways fast enough to accommodate changing circumstances.”
2024-10-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Christopher Kirchhoff on Military Innovation and the Future of War · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Behind the physical cause. My second job was a chance to go to a rock and work on a team of historians that was writing an official history of the Reconstruction. Another major breakdown in American foreign policy. In fact, I've gone on to specialize in disaster and a few other areas. I wrote the Obama administration's after action report of Ebola. I used to joke that if I should have been your office, you were really having a”
2024-10-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Christopher Kirchhoff on Military Innovation and the Future of War · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Really grateful I got the chance to go do a PhD and in particular to do it in the bridges system rather than the American system. Why it's shorter that's always nicer three years rather than five, but rather than spend all my time studying for qualifying exams, I actually got to read the classic tomes of political science and sociology and understand them. And I'm so grateful for that chance. And I ended up studying breakdowns in the National Security State. So what do you do after a catastrophic breakdown that the political system, the regular political system can't contain? And I ended up studying government commissions in part because I had had the chance early in my career to serve around a couple after action reports and investigations. My first job out of college in 2003 was for the spatial Columbia accident investigation. I'll look at NASA's safety culture, not only what was the physical cause of the Columbia disaster, but what was the organizational cause?”
2024-10-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Christopher Kirchhoff on Military Innovation and the Future of War · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, there are some people that are allergic to dogs, and so that's why many major tech companies that are dog friendly will have dog free areas. But in my view, you know, especially now at a moment when offices are empty in most of the country, why not make them more fun? And boy, it was fun to watch Secretary Mattis come in, who himself loves dogs and be greeted by my golden retriever. And boy, was it even more fun to see crusty three and four star generals that were very skeptical that Silicon Valley had anything offered to first see my golden retriever and then see the woman who briefed our software demos whose hair was blue? By the end of the day, nonetheless be really impressed by the technology we were putting in front of them.”
2024-10-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Christopher Kirchhoff on Military Innovation and the Future of War · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He's against the dogs. He's against the IU. He's an old school colonel. He doesn't like any of this. So how do we not get evicted? Well, we figure out he's retiring in six months. So what we do is we tell him, oh, you know, we don't actually have a dog-friendly policy. We have a service dog policy, and we're unable, based on the reasons our Air Force physician has declared for each individual to have the three dogs in the office that we had through HIPAA reasons to tell you why, but we can assure you that HIPAA compliant paperwork has been filed declaring these service dogs. So we got our dog-friendly office and Colonel Fear went off to retire and not be heard from again.”
2024-10-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Christopher Kirchhoff on Military Innovation and the Future of War · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“important question. I arrived out in California with my golden retriever and I was jealous of Secretary Leon Panetta, who both as CIA director and as Secretary of Defense brought Bravo, his golden retriever to the office. Bravo, he's proud to say, was one of two canines cleared into the bin Laden operation, the other one being the German Shepherd that flew on the helicopters into Abbottabad. So I thought, here we are. We're in Silicon Valley. We're supposed to come up with an office of the different culture. Let's make our office dog friendly. And we did, but we had to go to war to do it. So we were in a National Guard building and there was some colonel there in charge of, you know, he was kind of our landlord. And even though there's no regulation against having a dog-friendly office in the Department of Defense. And we had published our dog policy, he threatened to evict us unless we ended our policy. His last name started with F, so we referred to him as Colonel Fear.”
2024-10-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Christopher Kirchhoff on Military Innovation and the Future of War · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Calling for Chinese kinetic and non-kinetic means of jamming low Earth orbit space technology. So what's different about their procurement system is however good or bad it is, it's geared at producing the exact kind of technology that will find the chinks in our own armor and could, if we have to go to war in a Taiwan scenario or another scenario, prove to be a potentially catastrophical awakening to the US military.”
2024-10-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Christopher Kirchhoff on Military Innovation and the Future of War · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, you know, I think any large public institution or a large government institution, whether you're communist or capitalist, is going to have inefficiencies in it. I think the Chinese have plenty of inefficiencies. But I think what's different is, you know, they have observed our military very carefully, really ever since the First Gulf War, when the precision strike complex, as it's called, really became debuted on the global stage. And the whole world saw us on CNN dropping bombs down chimneys, right? So today, similarly, the entire complex of Chinese universities that study national security and military institutes are looking very closely at Ukraine. By the time the book was published, I think we had caught something like 120 papers, academic papers being published in the Chinese literature about the Ukraine war, very clearly seeing the decisive use of Starlink, calling for a Chinese version of Starlink.”
2024-10-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Christopher Kirchhoff on Military Innovation and the Future of War · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“China has something different. So, in their system, they don't have one unit that is specifically focused on acquiring advanced technology from the best startups and technology firms in China. They have a, again, this doctrine announced in about 2015 of civil-military fusion that mandates that if you're producing technology that might be dual use, that might have a military application, that you have to notify the People's Liberation Army and perhaps a PLI officer will come and join your board to watch that technology advance. And if they see a use case, they might decide to pull that technology into the military. So in the sense of their command economy, that is how they are deciding to ingest technology.”
2024-10-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Christopher Kirchhoff on Military Innovation and the Future of War · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“New system of contracting. Rajana, I say, you know, this sounds fantastic. This is the biggest problem we have to come up with a bigger system of contract. And if we can't do that, DIU will fail. And Lauren says, well, great. Well, here's the 20-page white paper that I wrote about it. So quite literally, the next day, Lauren and I got on a flight to Washington and we met in rapid order with the head of acquisition policy for the department, with the head acquisition lawyer for the department, and with the Department of Defense General Counsel. And they all agreed, and Secretary Carter blessed a whole new regime of using other transaction authorities, this Apollo era little use contracted mechanism, to let contracts in between 30 and 60 days. And so in two weeks, we got the department to declare DIU could use this new method. And in the eight years since Lorien had that idea, $70 billion of technology has been acquired by the Department of Defense.”
2024-10-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Christopher Kirchhoff on Military Innovation and the Future of War · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Don't work right because you have to show profitability before your next round of venture investment, which you're going to raise inside of that timeline, which is why when we arrived in the valley in 2016, venture capitalist would actively pull funding from startups that tried to go after government contracts because they knew in the end it wouldn't be profitable. So DIU had to figure out a way to break through that. And we did it through the ingenuity of a single person. And this is a story, a heroic story of how one person can really affect change in the Department of Defense, a three million person organization. And her name was Lauren Daly. We met her when she was 29 years old. She's an acquisition specialist, stays up all night reading the newly released National Defense Authorization Act, another dictionary-sized tome of law. And I think it's a giant loophole we can use to create a whole.”
2024-10-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Christopher Kirchhoff on Military Innovation and the Future of War · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, there is this Hegelian dialectic, right, in the history of defense agencies. And so DARPA was created originally to solve a crisis in spaceflight because the Air Force wasn't up to snuff. It actually spent some years in the wilderness before becoming the dynamic institution that we know it today. So far, the trajectory of Unit X has been very successful. Part of the reason for that is we have people that come there kind of like DARPA for a few years at a time on rotation. Our project managers, they're very focused on getting things done. And oh, by the way, we've pioneered a way to buy technology at Silicon Valley Speed. So if you want to go buy a fighter jet or an aircraft carrier or a military radio, you're looking at using the federal acquisition rules, the sort of Old Testament-like system of regulations, negotiating a contract typically takes 18 to 24 months. If you're a startup, that's simply.”
2024-10-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Christopher Kirchhoff on Military Innovation and the Future of War · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As an aid at the Pentagon, I worked on a lot of technology issues, so I was asked by Secretary Carter to run the working group that created the concept for a defensive aviation unit that he then launched. And just a few months after launching it, he asked Rod Shaw and myself to come take it over. He, in fact, ordered me that I would be moving from my then present position on the National Security Council to California, which I promptly did. I had to buy more pairs of jeans. I had one pair of jeans and five suits. five more pairs of jeans and was ready for Silicon Valley. And starting in 2016 began a really exciting couple years at the helm of Defense Invasion Unit where we, among other things, pioneered a new way to buy technology that was much faster and proved through a number of very successful pilots that you could actually use technology on the battlefield in decisive ways.”
2024-10-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Christopher Kirchhoff on Military Innovation and the Future of War · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Shifted away from military labs, away from DARPA, which used to be generations ahead in technology, to the commercial technology ecosystem. The problem is that the entire defense procurement system in the Pentagon's line of vision are tuned in to the military RD labs and to the defense primes, but if they're no longer the ones coming up with the leading edge technology, the Pentagon is not structured to become, in Ash's words, a fast follower of the commercial market. So defense innovation unit, the Pentagon's first ever Silicon Valley office, started by Ash, the first Secretary of Defense to visit Silicon Valley in over twenty years, was an attempt to pivot the entire US military to be able to more quickly adopt commercial technology, which was clearly starting to outpace the technology being built by the Defense Primes.”
2024-10-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Christopher Kirchhoff on Military Innovation and the Future of War · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So unit X is defense innovation unit experimental. And it was started in 2015, the year that Ash Carter became secretary of defense. And it was started off an insight that Ash Carter had when he was just professor Ash Carter in 2001, when he wrote an article Keeping the Technological Edge that was quite prescient about strategic trends. So he noted at the end of the Cold War that federal research and development was essentially flatlining at the exact moment that the technology economy was taken off on a rocket-like trajectory straight up. And so by the time he arrived into office and he forecast this in his 2001 article, the market capitalization of all the major tech companies Apple, Microsoft, Google, Amazon were each themselves individually bigger than the entire defense industry combined. So what does that tell you that tells you that the locus of innovation”
2024-10-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Christopher Kirchhoff on Military Innovation and the Future of War · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, look, whistleblowing is an important function, and there are cases of egregious behavior, and they need to be called out and stopped. But at the same time, leaders in government, particularly those who have to work against the grain of their institutions, are going to ruffle a lot of feathers. And by co-author Raj and I found out that firsthand in trying to start up Defense Innovation Unit on our first flight to Washington, our government credit cards got shut off out of spite because somebody wanted to slow us down, so we had to rebook our hotel reservations and pay out of our pocket. I was just one of many small examples of much larger political attempts to stop DIU. So I think anybody who is working against the grain institution to build something new should be given a lot of authority to prosecute that mission, to make that mission a success and held accountable if they don't. And getting wrapped up in IG investigations.”
2024-10-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Christopher Kirchhoff on Military Innovation and the Future of War · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sort of civil servant speed, and I think that's one of many factors, including, frankly, the solar service act, that is making the talent base of the US government a road. I mean, why is it that governments like Singapore are so much further ahead of the United States in terms of the talent they're able to bring to their governments? It's not just salaries, although that's a big part of it. It's part of the burden that you undergo by becoming a public”
2024-10-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Christopher Kirchhoff on Military Innovation and the Future of War · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So receiving this complaint that their director had potentially violated Department of Defense policy, the Defense Innovation Unit General Counsel undertook an exhaustive investigation, published an eighty two page report, found no substance to any of the allegations that had been met. So you would think case closed. So at that time, the Inspector General decided not to investigate the Pentagon's general counsel and said, fine, you've looked into it. There are complaints all over the place. Case closed. So on the eve of his nomination, this services again the whistleblower goes to the media again. It services in a couple articles, and he had to end up withdrawing. He had done nothing wrong but somebody weaponized the inspector general system against him. So we're in the situation where good minded public servants who are doing the right thing, who have done nothing wrong are caught in this just bizarre sort of process of persecution that runs at its own.”
2024-10-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Christopher Kirchhoff on Military Innovation and the Future of War · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Billion of the Pentagon's budget is spent on weapons. And just days before his confirmation hearing was scheduled, in the news bubbled up this whistleblower complaint that had been filed at Defense Innovation Unit weeks or months earlier, maybe even years earlier, alleging that he misuse hiring authorities to try and pay engineers in Silicon Valley close to market rate so they could come to work for the government, which, by the way, was the mission of defense innovation unit, right? was to bring technologists into the government. It also alleged, among other irregularities, that the Office Snack Fund called SNACO had an insufficient basis of cash accounting. The person writing the complaint was a former comptroller employee.”
2024-10-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Christopher Kirchhoff on Military Innovation and the Future of War · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And we get back from that trip, and I get a phone call from General Dempsey's EA, his top officer, and he says, you know, Chris, can you write me a couple pages of justification for the Silicon Valley trip we just took? And I thought, oh my gosh, sure enough, somebody had filed a complaint with the Inspector General that we had spent government dollars to take a boondoggle to California. And IG was deciding whether or not to investigate. So here's a much more serious example. Mike Brown, the second director of Defense Innovation Unit, the former CEO of Symantec, the largest cybersecurity in the world, somebody who really understands software, which is now the most important element of any military weapon systems, was in a remarkable act of leadership and foresight nominated by president Biden to become the Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment. So the lead weapons buyer in the Pentagon, somebody for responsible for driving how nearly 300”
2024-10-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Christopher Kirchhoff on Military Innovation and the Future of War · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's because you're feeding me, and I have to make sure that you're feeding me less than, I think, $22, or there's some amount that changes every year, right? No sushi, yeah. No sushi, exactly. But here's a couple more pernicious examples. So one of my first jobs for the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Marty Dempsey, when he took over in 2012 a year of incredible change, technological changes, he wanted to go visit Silicon Valley, meet with venture capitalists, go to Google, meet with startups, and see the kind of commercial technology that people were telling him would make a difference on the battlefield. So we organized a phenomenal trip for him to Silicon Valley that really shaped how he, as he was taken over the chairmanship, shaped his agenda as chairman.”
2024-10-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Christopher Kirchhoff on Military Innovation and the Future of War · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, Tyler, thinking back now that I've been in the private sector for a number of years to my tenure in government service, it's remarkable how little executive authority in government anyone has anymore. And I'll just give you a couple examples. One, for me to go out to a think tank, to come to the Mercatus Center for a lunch and listen to a lunch talk. When I was on the National Security Council, I would actually have to file a waiver with the lawyers to declare that I wasn't going to a lunch where I would accept an unethical gift. And that's because we're feeding.”
2024-10-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Christopher Kirchhoff on Military Innovation and the Future of War · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Their Anderole, on the one hand, and another non traditional defense contractor General Atomics, the traditional primes lost to those two companies for this revolutionary contract.”
2024-10-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Christopher Kirchhoff on Military Innovation and the Future of War · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“the solution no no no i think we need to be spending way less money on legacy systems that are demonstrably defeatable today so you know anybody that's been watching ukraine in the last two months should decide that tanks are not a great investment for a modern military similarly anybody that's read even news articles about hypersonic weapons should decide that buying more aircraft carriers is not a good thing but we do need some of that some of those resources shifted to this new defense ecosystem that's very experimental that's building swarming weapons and you know the air force is very commendable under the leadership of secretary frank kendall they now have what's called the combat collaborative aircraft so this is a 10 000 aircraft buy of supersonic stealth drones who will fly alongside manned fighters in the largest change of air force doctrine since really the right military flyer and oh by the way guess who the two finalists are for the production contract for this massive program”
2024-10-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Christopher Kirchhoff on Military Innovation and the Future of War · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's a couple ways to do it. Congress took a great step earlier this year by not only codifying Defense Innovation Unit in law, but also granting it for the first time a really significant budget of just under a billion dollars a year. And there's a really big difference about what you can do in the defense innovation ecosystem with a billion dollars versus $100 million. So for a billion dollars, you can seed programs for long enough to not only demonstrate their success, but to ensure a high likelihood that they will successfully transition in one of the services. You can, in other words, create a springboard. So to spend more money”
2024-10-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Christopher Kirchhoff on Military Innovation and the Future of War · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For years along the E-rain, that has prevented more of the technology DARPA and other of the leading labs have produced into the mainstream of the military”
2024-10-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Christopher Kirchhoff on Military Innovation and the Future of War · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, one of my great frustrations as a young aid in the Pentagon was I got a chance both working for the Deputy Secretary of Defense and then for the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff to be their liaison to DARPA. So I got to be read into DARPA's entire set of programs. And they were doing incredibly impressive work. What was maddening is they were so far ahead of the military services. The Air Force, the Navy, the Army, in seeing the future battlefield. And over the years, at least since I've dealt with them starting in 2009, they've been right way more than they've been wrong. But very few of their visions of operational concepts and the technology to back them have moved to the center of the systems that the services have adopted. So there's a giant adoption program going on. And this has to do with the fact that DARPA is a separate institution for the Pentagon, and its focus is on creating new technology. And there has been a leadership failure going on.”
2024-10-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Christopher Kirchhoff on Military Innovation and the Future of War · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Technology is produced. And you have now, and what's really important is a rise thanks to Ash Carter starting Defense Innovation Unit and starting off a whole new cycle of venture capitalism. You have companies like Andorl and Shield AI and other defense startups that are joining Palantir and SpaceX that are becoming a new breed of product-oriented defense companies that are not burdened by the system of requirements that have turned our defense primes into electric utility companies, to be honest. And I think the real strategic question now before the nation is how quickly can we sway more of the weapon systems we build to this new generation of product companies?”
2024-10-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Christopher Kirchhoff on Military Innovation and the Future of War · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, Bill Perry, who had his famous Last Supper and asked for that consolidation at the time, did it because he was terribly concerned that the so-called peace dividend, the lower end of the military budgets, was not going to be able to sustain the larger defense industrial base that we had in place at the end of the Cold War. So in his seat at the time, that was the call he made. It's turned out to be a disaster for the nation. It's essentially created five large companies that are so burdened by the system of requirements and the auditing and accounting requirements that go in with them to produce modern weapon systems. That the way to think about large defense primes is more akin to a utility company than it is a private sector company. And the result of that, of course, has been very slow innovation, a culture of cost overruns, even as some phenomenal”
2024-10-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Christopher Kirchhoff on Military Innovation and the Future of War · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you sit in the Pentagon and it's your profession as a national security professional to prevent 9-11s, to prevent wars from happening, you are very security-minded and you are very biased towards restricting technology because that does, in the end, help the security equation. But unless you have an argument about what to do with a particular technology with economists and trade experts and the rest of the government, you're not going to reach consensus that it's going to be best for the nation. So these arguments are going to have to be fought out in the Situation Room with a variety of expertise. And having said, in both places on the National Security Council and in the Pentagon, I am firmly in favor of dual use to the absolute extent we can, because I think the net assessment of that is for the best.”
2024-10-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Christopher Kirchhoff on Military Innovation and the Future of War · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is certainly a part of the role that we're heading in. But I think an even more fundamentally tricky part of that world is just the dual use nature of powerful AI. So a model that's really powerful for figuring out military solutions might well also be able to cure cancer. And so we're caught in these dilemmas, which are common, actually, with technology of is it better, is the net assessment of technology, encryption is one of these to just let it out there because we know on the whole it makes the world a better place, even though we know with encryption, there are going to be moments when terracells or nation states are going to take advantage of it to successfully prosecute a small attack. So this is the dilemma that we face with AI on a grand scale.”
2024-10-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Christopher Kirchhoff on Military Innovation and the Future of War · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it says, why are you polygraphing my political appointee just because he's in a same sex relationship with a foreign national? And so she calls the head of the defense intelligence agency responsible for granting our security clearances. And he ruffles around a bunch of papers and looks my file up and says, well, his girlfriend is a dual citizen. And Sandy said, excuse me. Boyfriend, right? So, no, I mean, our security clearances will pick up very obvious irregularities. If you have extreme debt issues, if you have mental health issues, I mean, that the system will pick that up, but it probably won't pick up much else”
2024-10-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Christopher Kirchhoff on Military Innovation and the Future of War · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, this is top secret specialized compartment information. It's the James Bond clearance you get before they let you see the spy satellite pictures and all that. And you basically need it to go into any meeting on the E-Rain and the Pentagon where I had just been appointed a young aid in the Obama administration. And the security manager and the Secretary of Defense's office where his managing got all flustered because my partner at the time, first of all, we were a gay couple, so that was one issue for him. And then the second, my partner at the time was an Indian economist. And he did not like the fact that I was cohabitating as the security clearance forum calls it with a foreign national. And so he decided that I should have a polygraph test, which is very unusual, a counterintelligence polygraph, which, by the way, don't work, right? Polygraphs are demonstrable. You can't put them in court. So my chief of staff gets upset.”
2024-10-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Christopher Kirchhoff on Military Innovation and the Future of War · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There have been some arguments made in the last couple weeks by people that have been employed at places like OpenAI that perhaps the National Labs should step in and take a role. And I think that's a mistake. Our national labs do something very well. On the other hand, they're a place where good science goes to die. If you want to see the difference between the tech sector and the national labs drive from Lawrence Livermore to the campus of Google and see what's going on, they are very different ecosystems. One is ruled by the Civil Service Act, the other is ruled by the free market. And I think we have to be very careful exerting government control over breakout technology. But that doesn't mean that the law enforcement agencies like the FBI and our intelligence agencies can't cooperate very closely to help protect certain private firms from the nation-state threats they are most certainly facing.”
2024-10-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Christopher Kirchhoff on Military Innovation and the Future of War · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And yet, it's so critical to our security. And guess what? Initially, none of the operators of that infrastructure and none of the CEOs and CTOs of those cybersecurity companies even had security clearances. They couldn't talk to the parts of our intelligence community who knew about the kind of exploits that our adversaries were fashioning to go after our infrastructure. Now, eventually we solve that through, among other things, a really extraordinarily public-private cooperation mechanism called the Enduring Security Framework, where we got everybody clearances and we met and information was exchanged. And there's one example that's been declassified as extraordinary that I'd be happy to talk about that made safe U.S. computers from an attack an adversary had ready. The argument I would take a shot at, though, is there is this sense that the AI models that are being produced today by the Frontier Labs are so important that somehow the government should sort of nationalize them or maybe, you know,”
2024-10-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Christopher Kirchhoff on Military Innovation and the Future of War · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think we have to be very careful. And, you know, I've seen, I'll bring up one historical parallel and then take a shot at one argument that I hear circulating. So the historical parallel is actually with cybersecurity, where we ended up in the 2000 aughts and 2010s with this extraordinary situation of realizing how vulnerable critical infrastructure.”
2024-10-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Christopher Kirchhoff on Military Innovation and the Future of War · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“two thousand twenty seven AI is going to beat 2026 AI on the battlefield, then you had better be getting your AI from the commercial system of production, not from the bespoke military-industrial complex system of production.”
2024-10-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Christopher Kirchhoff on Military Innovation and the Future of War · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, this is similar to a conundrum that we face ourselves. And so on the cover of Unit X, we have two images. One is of the iPhone, the other is of the F35 fighter, you know, the most advanced fifth generation stealth fighter in the world. And what most people in America don't realize is that these technologies are produced from completely separate technology ecosystems. And they work very differently under very different incentives. So the design of the F-35 was actually frozen in 2001 when the Pentagon awarded the production contract to Lockheed Martin. It didn't become operational until 2016. That's a long time in technology years. Look at the iPhone, its processor has changed every year. So now we're in a situation where a $2 trillion program of record is producing jets whose processors are slower than what we're all carrying around in our pockets. And this matters because if it turns out that”
2024-10-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Christopher Kirchhoff on Military Innovation and the Future of War · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, but that's certainly true for the population facing AI. So the stories that we've all read this past week about generative language models in China being held up to make sure that 60,000 censored matters wouldn't come up by delaying their deployment. But that is a system of enforcement and censorship that is focused on the civilian population. There are also large institutions in China that are focused on solving military problems and advanced in AI in the military that are not operating under those constraints. And so it's important to split off what we see happening with the Chinese government's attempt to control its own populace and what they're doing to try and make the PLA a fighting force that can meet the military objectives that GI has set for them.”
2024-10-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Christopher Kirchhoff on Military Innovation and the Future of War · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Far more freedoms, and none of the suppression, right, that G has exerted over the tech industry at arguably his political peril the last few years in his quest to suppress dissent China-wide.”
2024-10-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Christopher Kirchhoff on Military Innovation and the Future of War · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's really remarkable, you know, I got a chance to serve on the National Security Commission for Artificial Intelligence, which studied this issue, particularly the AI competition between China and the US, quite rigorously. And China as a state, of course, is making enormous investments in AI through the doctrine of civil-military fusion that she announced. He is essentially directed any technology and company in China to ensure its open, its technology is open and available for use for the People's Liberation and Army. So you have a lot of things happening in China that are a deliberate strategy to make them the most competitive nation that can be on technology on a variety of fronts. And yet, today, particularly with generative AI, the United States does seem to have a breakout advantage. And my best guess for that is, you know, in the end, we have structural advantages in a far freer market.”
2024-10-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Christopher Kirchhoff on Military Innovation and the Future of War · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that autonomous weapons are here to stay. This is how wars are likely to be fought. And if you decide not to pursue autonomous weapons, you're going to lose.”
2024-10-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Christopher Kirchhoff on Military Innovation and the Future of War · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh sure. And you wouldn't want, you know, I mean, you wouldn't want everybody in the world to have access to nuclear weapon, but it shows you that sometimes technological parity can have a stabilizing effect in international relations. And so the question about killer robots is, I think, very similar. If we were to, for instance, unilaterally disarm in a field of technology where you really can't have verification that the other side is also disarming. And you can do this with nuclear weapons because of the specialized technology that goes into them. You can do it a little bit with chemical and biological weapons. You certainly cannot do it with software. It's just too difficult. And so I think had that group of people been successful in, for instance, pausing military development using AI, I think we would be even more imperiled in Ukraine today.”
2024-10-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Christopher Kirchhoff on Military Innovation and the Future of War · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And asking us not to go down that path. And I actually got to sit in a couple meetings with Stuart at the White House, and it was interesting to watch him make his argument. And, you know, although I respect him incredibly as a technologist, what was interesting to me about the way he made the argument, it was without any sense of the literature on strategic stability. So out of the Cold War, we have this fascinating part of political science that has studied what is the consequence of the spread of nuclear weapons amongst states. And to the best that you can study this question in the world, the consensus in the literature is nuclear weapons of actually lessened great power conflict in the modern world because nobody's a frequency.”
2024-10-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Christopher Kirchhoff on Military Innovation and the Future of War · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source