Uh… it’s either a very good thing or bad thing. As the Chinese quote goes, it is too soon to tell. If I had to come down on one side, right now, I think I would come down on ‘good’; slowing down Chinese AI, which would by default hand AGI to Xi & generally pays even less attention to safety than everyone else does, is good, and while ‘CCP destroys TSMC’ is far from the ideal approach to restricting compute growth, it is at least going to make a difference—unlike almost all other proposals. The upfront cost in economics, human welfare, peace, rules-based global order etc is going to be exorbitant, however. In my lifetime, wars have not had a good track record of producing solutions at low costs. (The situation reminds me of nukes, Seoul, or EU dependence on Russian gas: it could probably have been prevented cheaply early on with the stroke of a pen, but several decades later...)
So is this a good thing for AI x-risk? Do you support a broader policy of the US crippling Chinese AI?
Uh… it’s either a very good thing or bad thing. As the Chinese quote goes, it is too soon to tell. If I had to come down on one side, right now, I think I would come down on ‘good’; slowing down Chinese AI, which would by default hand AGI to Xi & generally pays even less attention to safety than everyone else does, is good, and while ‘CCP destroys TSMC’ is far from the ideal approach to restricting compute growth, it is at least going to make a difference—unlike almost all other proposals. The upfront cost in economics, human welfare, peace, rules-based global order etc is going to be exorbitant, however. In my lifetime, wars have not had a good track record of producing solutions at low costs. (The situation reminds me of nukes, Seoul, or EU dependence on Russian gas: it could probably have been prevented cheaply early on with the stroke of a pen, but several decades later...)