Oh, it very possibly is the wrongest part of the piece! I put it in the original workshop draft as I was running out of time and wanted to provoke debate.
A brief gesture at a sketch of the intuition: imagine a different, crueler world, where there were orders of magnitude more nation-states, but at the start only a few nuclear powers, like in our world, with a 1950s-level tech base. If the few nuclear powers want to keep control, they’ll have to divert huge chunks of their breeder reactors’ output to pre-emptively nuking any site in the many many non-nuclear-club states that could be an arms program to prevent breakouts, then any of the nuclear powers would have to wait a fairly long time to assemble an arms stockpile sufficient to launch a Project Orion into space.
Interesting! You should definitely think more about this and write it up sometime, either you’ll change your mind about timelines till superintelligence or you’ll have found an interesting novel argument that may change other people’s minds (such as mine).
I think I’m also learning that people are way more interested in this detail than I expected!
I debated changing it to “203X” when posting to avoid this becoming the focus of the discussion but figured, “eh, keep it as I actually wrote it in the workshop” for good epistemic hygiene.
Oh, it very possibly is the wrongest part of the piece! I put it in the original workshop draft as I was running out of time and wanted to provoke debate.
A brief gesture at a sketch of the intuition: imagine a different, crueler world, where there were orders of magnitude more nation-states, but at the start only a few nuclear powers, like in our world, with a 1950s-level tech base. If the few nuclear powers want to keep control, they’ll have to divert huge chunks of their breeder reactors’ output to pre-emptively nuking any site in the many many non-nuclear-club states that could be an arms program to prevent breakouts, then any of the nuclear powers would have to wait a fairly long time to assemble an arms stockpile sufficient to launch a Project Orion into space.
Interesting! You should definitely think more about this and write it up sometime, either you’ll change your mind about timelines till superintelligence or you’ll have found an interesting novel argument that may change other people’s minds (such as mine).
I think I’m also learning that people are way more interested in this detail than I expected!
I debated changing it to “203X” when posting to avoid this becoming the focus of the discussion but figured, “eh, keep it as I actually wrote it in the workshop” for good epistemic hygiene.