If an LLM is used for military purposes, then the datacenters hosting the LLM become legitimate military targets.

@monsieuricon the question is finding datacenters that doesn't host these LLMs 🫠

@monsieuricon I have wondered at what point Ashburn, VA becomes a primary target just based on disruption potential in general.

@monsieuricon Mr. Yudkowsky, you won't fool me! Please log in!

@monsieuricon

Yes, and well how are all those datacenters (and/or Amazon nuclear power plants) protected against foreign missiles?

@mcepl You don't need power plants, just the pipe bringing the water in for cooling.

@monsieuricon But that means we might start seeing attacks on AWS data centers, and who would do that?... Oh... 🤔

But think about how much damage happens to US operations when US East 1 has a DNS problem. If you have control of a rogue plane, landing that on the Pentagon might be a symbolic thing, but landing that on the data center would have huge economic impacts.

I think tech nuts have long understood these risks. But they were always tail risks that businesses like to ignore. This attack is going to bring a lot of those tail risks to the forefront.

@monsieuricon fair enough

@monsieuricon

Yes, folks! Even your little town can now take its place on the Mutually Assured Destruction target map.

@monsieuricon And they're often trying to locate them in neighbourhoods.

@monsieuricon good job they're not massive buildings that can be seen at night with thermal imaging and are absolutely bloody everywhere.

@monsieuricon "The datacenter hosting my girlfriend was obliterated. Now I'm in mourning and I have to recreate her from scratch."

Who would have imagined this sentences possible a few years back?

@monsieuricon Now, don't go giving someone ideas... 😁

@monsieuricon

@notting @monsieuricon Honestly, I think it already was. That corridor had been DoD since I moved away in the 80s. Consolidation with the cloud has made destroying obviously critical civilian infrastructure now co-habituating there makes it a go to for “warfighters”.

@notting @monsieuricon And that’s not even taking into account the location of gov.cloud

@monsieuricon

Good to point this out to craven legislators when you're explaining why they should not allow these in your town.

@monsieuricon
I wonder is this one of the reasons they plan them near where people live so militaries would be less likely to strike them down.

@monsieuricon But those same data centres are holding my photograph collection.

@monsieuricon
> legitimate military targets.

For everyone conducting "legal" wars.

@monsieuricon actually doctrinally true, according to Law of Land Warfare, yes.

@monsieuricon I hear you, but why would that be more true for an LLM than any computer system in general?

@monsieuricon

??? How come you don't need more power? Those computers don’t run on water …

@monsieuricon Does that mean that defending data centers becomes a concern? We deploy troops to those giant warehouses?

@monsieuricon Absolutely true and not even a new category of threat.

It didn't get much airtime past local media, but folks in the greater Philadelphia area were not excited to learn that the drones in the Afghanistan war were being piloted from non-publicized facilities in their backyard. As far as I know, they still are.

@mcepl @monsieuricon taking down the cooling of a data center at a minimum will cripple its ability to function as equipment overheats and shuts down. Depending on how badly overheated the equipment gets you could end up with destroyed hardware and even fires in the data center.

Taking down power infrastructure would force the data center to use local backup power generation but otherwise keep running. It would also likely cause a lot of collateral harm

@monsieuricon if software is used for military applications, software developers become valid military targets

@monsieuricon @jwz if the war is fought by drones the people that manufacture drones or parts of drones become targets to. You see this in Ukraine. Russians target civilian workers not soldiers.

@monsieuricon …and so does any data center where such an LLM may not currently be hosted, but where it might conceivably be shifted if its primary data center were disabled.

Which is, uh, basically all of them.

@monsieuricon It would be such a shame is something were to happen to those. Such. A. Shame.

@mark @monsieuricon kinda sounds like a natural consequence of Sherman's "total war" theory. War is a logistics and production problem, thus all industrial and logistics infrastructure are potential targets.

@monsieuricon that's why we need small federated, street or neighbourhood level appropriate civic tech data nodes rather than big commercial data centres. They could still access citizen data for a fee and if the data owners agree..

@monsieuricon @arclight And that means your business isn’t insured against that risk!

@monsieuricon @mcepl

I know data centres are designed with multiple fibre and power circuits/ routes to them.

Do they also have multiple water pipes to them as well?