In 2013 I was a student at the national intelligence University in Washington DC for a masters program in “technical intelligence” [1] while also building my first full time startup focused on expanding egocentric computer vision data collection.

Technical intelligence has nothing to do with artificial intelligence. It specifically has to do with assessing how does intelligence community around the world use technology to help the intelligence cycle [2].

As it so happens, the intelligence planning cycle mimics a Markov decision process. Specifically - much of the work of the intelligence community is to try and discover hidden markov models.

The sad part is that the majority of the intelligence community doesn’t recognize that fact and generally doesn’t care about efficiencies or accuracy.

However a very small subset of that intelligence community does. Richards Heuer was leading this work in 2010 [3] and I spent quite a bit of time communicating with him about what the future of intelligence analysis looks like given what is happening in the artificial intelligence

The thesis I was proposing in 2013 was “Impacts on the defense intelligence community of the creation of artificial general intelligence” was literally impossible to find a advisor for. To such an extent that I asked Ben Goertzel if he would be my advisor - And luckily, he agreed and signed the paperwork to be my advisor.

It was clear at every step along the way that there was literally nobody throughout the entirety of the United States government who could coherently describe a pathway for understanding what it would take to get to general intelligence what the impacts would be, etc.

You would think that from a research perspective with all of the research happening starting in 2012 and Alex net and the growth of computer vision. This would be an obvious pathway to be very interested in. but at least at the time, literally nobody cared, who was in any kind of position to care about this issue.

as a result, I put in my separation paperwork from the United States military and went full-time as a CEO trying to expand AI capabilities and I haven’t looked back since.

Fast forward to now, and I am constantly being asked to have these discussions with government leaders and military people, and despite all of that, people still don’t get it and still don’t care enough to actually put the work in to understand it.

Something to consider: as early as two years ago, I was spending a significant portion of my professional time as a government CTO explaining to high-ranking generals, congressman, and the White House with the cloud was and how software development worked

The DOD’s largest AI effort at the time asked me to put together a video on what it takes to do AI and so this is effectively the last thing I did on the behalf of the government to help expand the concept or understanding of artificial intelligence. [4]

However at this point, I know where Congress and the executive sit with respect to investments and understanding or developing modern AI - and frankly, the needle hasn’t moved in any way that is even barely keeping up with the conceptual understanding of the impacts of the systems over the next hundred years.

I used to have high confidence that the United States government was ahead of industry across almost all technologies and I think that that was true up until about 2019.

I no longer have faith that government labs across the world are leading or have the ability to lead technologically going forward on “AI” as we have totally ceded this responsibility to giant private corporations. - specifically MSFT, Meta and Google

So in my opinion, even given the fact of the power of the United States, military and government, etc. I do not believe there exists community or government mechanisms that could “contain” artificial general intelligence, if a private corporation achieves it - and the fact that we didn’t start working on that in 1990s, when we knew better, is why we’re in the state that we are in.

[1] https://www.ni-u.edu/about-niu/

[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_cycle

[3] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richards_Heuer

[4] https://youtu.be/jK-SBu1iiHo?si=0_0CuCwvgo2a1mNT