I think I get what you’re saying. Is it roughly the following?
“If an AI race did occur, maybe similar issues to what we saw in MAD might occur; there may well be an analogy there. But there’s a disanalogy between the nuclear weapon case and the AI risk case with regards to the initial race, such that the initial nuclear race provides little/no evidence that a similar AI race may occur. And if a similar AI race doesn’t occur, then the conditions under which MAD-style strategies may arise would not occur. So it might not really matter if there’s an analogy between the AI risk situation if a race occurred and the MAD situation.”
If so, I think that makes sense to me, and it seems an interesting/important argument. Though it seems to suggest something more like “We may be more ok than people might think, as long as we avoid an AI race, and we’ll probably avoid an AI race”, rather than simply “We may be more ok than people might think”. And that distinction might e.g. suggest additional value to strategy/policy/governance work to avoid race dynamics, or to investigate how likely they are. (I don’t think this is disagreeing with you, just highlighting a particular thing a bit more.)
I think I get what you’re saying. Is it roughly the following?
“If an AI race did occur, maybe similar issues to what we saw in MAD might occur; there may well be an analogy there. But there’s a disanalogy between the nuclear weapon case and the AI risk case with regards to the initial race, such that the initial nuclear race provides little/no evidence that a similar AI race may occur. And if a similar AI race doesn’t occur, then the conditions under which MAD-style strategies may arise would not occur. So it might not really matter if there’s an analogy between the AI risk situation if a race occurred and the MAD situation.”
If so, I think that makes sense to me, and it seems an interesting/important argument. Though it seems to suggest something more like “We may be more ok than people might think, as long as we avoid an AI race, and we’ll probably avoid an AI race”, rather than simply “We may be more ok than people might think”. And that distinction might e.g. suggest additional value to strategy/policy/governance work to avoid race dynamics, or to investigate how likely they are. (I don’t think this is disagreeing with you, just highlighting a particular thing a bit more.)
Yup, I agree with that summary.