I think the lesson of history is that strong multilateral or bilateral agreement, backed by credible threat of enforcement, is in fact sufficient to dissuade nation states from taking actions in their own self-interest.
An agreement on AI is potentially easier to make than one on dissuading a country from attempting to e.g. expand its national borders, since there’s another avenue: convince them of the true fact that building an unaligned AGI is not actually in their self-interest. If it’s impossible to actually convince anyone of this fact, then this just degenerates back to the case of dissuading them from taking actions that are genuinely in their own self-interest, which has happened over the course of history.
I think cold war incentives with regards to tech development were atypical. Building 1000′s of ICBMs was incredibly costly, neither side derived any benefit from it, it was simply defensive matching to maintain MAD, both sides were strongly motivated to enable mechanisms to reduce numbers and costs (START treaties).
This is clearly not the case with AI—which is far cheaper to develop, easier to hide, and has myriad lucrative use cases. Policing a Dune-style “thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind” Butlerian Jihad (interesting aside; Samuel Butler was a 19th century anti-industrialisation philosopher/shepard who lived at Erewhon in NZ (nowhere backwards) a river valley that featured as Edoras in the LOTR trilogy) would require radical openness to inspection everywhere all the time, that almost certainly won’t be feasible without establishment of liberal democracy basically everywhere in the world. Despots would be a magnet for rule breakers.
I was thinking of the lack of large-scale wars of territorial expansion in the post-Cold War era, relative to all other times in history. (The war in Ukraine is an alarming reversal of that trend.)
So first of all, most of eastern Europe was under Soviet control and only a cold war and the limits of communist empire building prevented it from being all of Europe.
Second, Ukraine is what happens when you don’t have enough guns to protect yourself or allies.
Once a party reaches a certain amount of AGI capability, all the world becomes underprotected.
Finally I see no evidence of any prevention of internal or secret bad acts.
I think the lesson of history is that strong multilateral or bilateral agreement, backed by credible threat of enforcement, is in fact sufficient to dissuade nation states from taking actions in their own self-interest.
An agreement on AI is potentially easier to make than one on dissuading a country from attempting to e.g. expand its national borders, since there’s another avenue: convince them of the true fact that building an unaligned AGI is not actually in their self-interest. If it’s impossible to actually convince anyone of this fact, then this just degenerates back to the case of dissuading them from taking actions that are genuinely in their own self-interest, which has happened over the course of history.
I think cold war incentives with regards to tech development were atypical. Building 1000′s of ICBMs was incredibly costly, neither side derived any benefit from it, it was simply defensive matching to maintain MAD, both sides were strongly motivated to enable mechanisms to reduce numbers and costs (START treaties).
This is clearly not the case with AI—which is far cheaper to develop, easier to hide, and has myriad lucrative use cases. Policing a Dune-style “thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind” Butlerian Jihad (interesting aside; Samuel Butler was a 19th century anti-industrialisation philosopher/shepard who lived at Erewhon in NZ (nowhere backwards) a river valley that featured as Edoras in the LOTR trilogy) would require radical openness to inspection everywhere all the time, that almost certainly won’t be feasible without establishment of liberal democracy basically everywhere in the world. Despots would be a magnet for rule breakers.
Do you have an example?
I was thinking of the lack of large-scale wars of territorial expansion in the post-Cold War era, relative to all other times in history. (The war in Ukraine is an alarming reversal of that trend.)
So first of all, most of eastern Europe was under Soviet control and only a cold war and the limits of communist empire building prevented it from being all of Europe.
Second, Ukraine is what happens when you don’t have enough guns to protect yourself or allies.
Once a party reaches a certain amount of AGI capability, all the world becomes underprotected.
Finally I see no evidence of any prevention of internal or secret bad acts.