- The Trump White House has announced its executive order on the Genesis mission
- They want to build a government AI platform
- It could compete with existing models and be used to solve problems in everything from nuclear fission to manufacturing.
“What exactly is Genesis? Well, to put it simply: Genesis is life from lifelessness.” This is not a quote from Trump’s new White House quote. Mission Genesis issued… uh… Executive Order. No, this is where this revealing idea comes from. Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khanwhere Genesis is a biome or torpedo full of biology that can start life on a dead planet.
The White House’s new Genesis mission is a torpedo of ideas aimed at strengthening the US government’s position in the global AI race and perhaps putting us on equal footing with China, which launched its own mission. New Artificial Intelligence Master Plan 2017 and has since invested money in its development in infrastructure and the private sector.
With the Genesis mission, led 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 that began months ago. announces billions of dollars in the private sector Invest in companies with artificial intelligence.
Not exactly a new moon photo.
But the Genesis mission is also different from any previous White House AI initiative. This is somewhat reminiscent of the beginning of the space race and the founding of NASA, as well as developments in 1969. ARPANET under the direction of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).
NASA’s goal was to take our satellites and ultimately humans to space and the moon. ARPANET, which eventually gave rise to the Internet and our World Wide Web, aimed to build the first network that could connect computers in the United States (mainly university computers).
The stated goal of the Genesis Mission is to “build an integrated artificial intelligence platform to use federal scientific datasets (the largest collection of such datasets in the world, developed over decades of federal investment) to train basic scientific models and develop artificial intelligence agents to test new hypotheses, automate research workflows, and accelerate research.” »
As I understand it, this is the US government’s first attempt to create its own AI platform, with its own infrastructure and its own models, and different from what, for example, Google is building with Gemini, OpenAI with ChatGPT, or Elon Musk with Grok.
More importantly, Genesis Mission plans to use government data for educational purposes. Since the government is owned by US citizens and the government has many services that serve US citizens, it is reasonable to assume that much of this educational data belongs to us or, more accurately, concerns us.
While it appears that the US government will work with universities and private companies on some of these tasks, it is clear that the Genesis mission will determine much of the inner workings of the platform itself. The executive order describes the creation of the American Science and Security Platform as an infrastructure that includes:
- High performance computing resources
- Modeling and Analysis Framework for Artificial Intelligence.
- computer tools
- Basic domain-specific models
- Experimental and production tools to enable AI-powered autonomous experimentation and production in high-impact areas.
In this way, our data will train models in a US government facility, a kind of black box for AI creations, a genesis that revives dormant data.
Areas of interest for the Genesis Mission AI include:
- Advanced manufacturing
- biotechnology
- Critical materials
- Nuclear fission and fusion energy
- Quantum Information Science
- Semiconductors and microelectronics.
Neither of these categories is surprising, but a government agency building massive AI networks that can “automate research activities” in sensitive areas like nuclear fission and biotechnology should give us pause.
I’m not saying I don’t want AI to solve some of our biggest problems. Of course, cancer is at the top of my list, as is sustainable energy in the context of climate change. But these two current issues are not mentioned in the execution. Genesis’ mission is much more about winning the global AI war and promoting the AI industry than solving real human problems.
This brings me back to what Genesis’ mission is and what it could achieve. It is an administration They have stolen more than a billion dollars from universities conducting vital health research.but will spend taxpayer money (through the DOE) on this work. There is nothing in the Genesis mission that mentions the common good or humanity. In fact, the words “humanity”, “people”, “people”, “citizen” and “life” are missing from this approximately 3,400-word document. It’s a lifeless construct better suited to omniscient artificial intelligence than a life-changing “mission” that empowers humanity.
In short, it has all the ingredients of Skynet V.1.
Interesting fact about Wrath of Khan’s Genesis Torpedo: Although it was designed as a seed of life technology, it also served as a weapon of doom, as its “life-giving” capabilities could also be used to crush civilizations.
The question we must ask ourselves about this new Genesis mission is: will it bring us new life and new possibilities, or will it ultimately use what it knows about us to destroy our existence?