- Trump White House unveils Executive Order on Genesis Mission
- They want to create a government artificial intelligence platform
- It can compete with existing models and will be used for a variety of applications, from nuclear fission to manufacturing.
“What is Being? Well, simply put, Being is life out of lifelessness.” This is not a quote from the new Trump White House statement. Genesis Mission proclamation… uh… decree. No, this insightful concept comes from Star Trek 2: The Wrath of Khanwhere Genesis is a biome or biology-filled torpedo capable of causing life on a dead planet.
The White House's new Genesis Mission is something of a torpedo full of ideas, designed to jump-start the US government's position in the global AI race and perhaps put us on equal footing with China, which has launched its own New overall plan for artificial intelligence in 2017 and has since invested money in its development through infrastructure and private business.
With the Genesis mission, which will be carried out by the Department of Energy (DoE) but overseen by Assistant to the President for Science and Technology Michael Kratsios, President Donald Trump is codifying an effort he began months ago when he launched announcing billions in the private sector Investments in AI companies.
Not exactly a new lunar image
However, the Genesis Mission is also different from any of the White House's previous artificial intelligence initiatives. In some ways, this is reminiscent of the early space race and the creation of NASA, as well as the development in 1969 ARPANET under the auspices of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).
NASA's goal was to send our satellites, and eventually humans, into space and to the moon. ARPANET, which eventually gave birth to the Internet and our World Wide Web, was dedicated to creating the first network capable of connecting computers across the United States (mostly university computers).
The stated goal of the Genesis Mission is to create “an integrated artificial intelligence platform to use federal scientific datasets—the world's largest collection of such datasets, built over decades of federal investment—to train models of scientific foundations and create artificial intelligence agents to test new hypotheses, automate research workflows, and accelerate scientific breakthroughs.”
If I understand correctly, this is the first attempt by the US government to create a owned and operated AI platform with its own infrastructure and models, and it is different from, say, Googlebuilt with TwinsOpenAI, built with ChatGPTor Elon Musk is building with Grok.
Even more tellingly, Genesis Mission plans to use government data for training. Since US citizens own the government, and the government is full of services serving US citizens, it should be assumed that most of this training data is ours, or more accurately, about us.
While there are indications that the US government will be working with universities and private companies on some of these tasks, it is clear that Genesis Mission will handle much of the platform's inner workings on its own. The executive order describes the creation of the US Science and Security Platform as an infrastructure that will include:
- High Performance Computing Resources
- AI modeling and analysis frameworks
- Computing tools
- Specialized fundamental models
- Experimentation and production tools that enable autonomous experimentation and production using artificial intelligence in high-impact areas.
Following this path, our data will build models in the US government's own facility, a kind of black box of AI creations – Genesis, which brings inert data to life.
As for Genesis Mission AI's areas of interest, they include:
- Advanced Manufacturing
- Biotechnology
- Critical materials
- Nuclear fission and fusion energy
- Quantum information science
- Semiconductors and microelectronics
Neither category is surprising, but a government agency building vast artificial intelligence networks capable of “automating research workflows” in sensitive areas such as nuclear fission and biotechnology should take some pause.
I'm not saying I don't want to AI to solve some of our biggest problems. Of course, cancer is high on my list, as is sustainable energy in relation to climate change. However, the executive order makes no mention of these two ongoing issues. The Genesis Mission is far more concerned with winning the global AI war and growing the AI business than solving real human problems.
This brings me back to what the Genesis Mission is and what it can create. This is the administration that siphoned more than a billion dollars from universities doing critical health research.but it will spend tax dollars (through the Department of Energy) on these efforts. There is nothing in the Genesis mission that mentions the common good or humanity. In fact, the words “humanity,” “people,” “people,” “citizens,” and “life” are missing from the approximately 3,400-word document. It is a lifeless construct, more suited to an omniscient AI than a life-changing, humanity-elevating “mission.”
Simply put, it has all the ingredients of Skynet V.1.
Fun fact about the Wrath of Khan: Genesis torpedo: although it was developed as life-origin technology, it was also used as a doomsday device, as its “life-giving” capabilities could also be used to rewrite civilizations.
The question we have to ask ourselves about this new Genesis mission is: will it give us new life and opportunity or will it end up using what it knows about us to rewrite our existence?
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