“What Do You Do After ‘Winning’ an AI Arms Race?”, 2024-11-23 (; similar):
…So, this description of Chinese science & AI raises an important question for the arms race people: if you believe it’s OK to race, because even if your race winds up creating the very race you claimed you were trying to avoid, you are still going to beat China to AGI (which is highly plausible, inasmuch as it is easy to win a race when only one side is racing), and you have AGI a year (or two at the most) before China and you supposedly “win”… Then what?
race to AGI and win
trigger a bunch of other countries racing to their own AGI
(now that they know it’s doable, increasingly much about how to do it, can borrow/steal/imitate the first AGI, and have to do so “before it’s too late”)
???
profit!
What does winning look like? What do you do next? How do you “bury the body”? You get AGI and you show it off publicly, Xi Jinping blows his stack as he realizes how badly he screwed up strategically and declares a national emergency and the CCP starts racing towards its own AGI in a year, and… then what? What do you do in this 1 year period, while you still enjoy AGI supremacy? You have millions of AGIs which can do… ‘stuff’. What is this stuff?
Are you going to start massive weaponized hacking to subvert CCP AI programs as much as possible short of nuclear war? Lobby the UN to ban rival AGIs and approve US carrier group air strikes on the Chinese mainland? License it to the CCP to buy them off? Just… do nothing and enjoy 10%+ GDP growth for one year before the rival CCP AGIs all start getting deployed? Do you have any idea at all? If you don’t, what is the point of ‘winning the race’?
(This is a question the leaders of the Manhattan Project should have been asking themselves when it became obvious that there were no genuine rival projects in Japan or Germany, and the original “we have to beat Hitler to the bomb” rationale had become totally irrelevant and indeed, an outright propaganda lie. The US got The Bomb, immediately ensuring that everyone else would be interested in getting the bomb, particularly the USSR, in the foreseeable future… and then what? Then what? “I’ll ask the AGIs for an idea how to get us out of this mess” is an unserious response, and it is not a plan if all of the remaining viable plans the AGIs could implement are one of those previous plans which you are unwilling to execute. Similar to how von Neumann’s ‘nuke Moscow before noon today’ was—whatever its other problems—a viable plan which at least could in theory maintain nuclear supremacy and be a long-term solution; it just had the minor defect that that plan was never going to happen, and overall, it would have been much better for the USA to have not put itself in that position in the first place.)
View External Link: