Jess Riedel has the most useful answer here to this question:
So, this 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 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’?
You’re one year ahead on an economic growth curve whose doubling time is getting shorter and shorter. So after one year, your economy has a 30% advantage, and the next year you have a 80% advantage, etc. So whether you have war or peaceful growth or a negotiated AGI pause or whatever, you’re in a strictly stronger position.
Yes ofc if you think multipolar AGI = doom (in the same way, not necessarily wrongly, many though multipolar nukes = doom), then any move to accelerate AGI brings us closer to doom. But racers and accelerationists don’t think that.
I think it’s a very brave claim to say that the country with some of the consistently highest growth rates in the world and which is far more able & willing to repress savings [and consumption] to drive investment, would obviously lose a GDP growth race so badly as to render it entirely harmless.
Jess Riedel has the most useful answer here to this question:
in the tweet below:
https://x.com/Jess_Riedel/status/1862573814988579057
To copy over my Twitter response: