While I generally like the metaphor, my one issue is that genies are typically conceived of as tied to their lamps and corrigibility.
In this case, there’s not only a prisoner’s dilemma over excavating and using the lamps and genies, but there’s an additional condition where the more the genies are used and the lamps improved and polished for greater genie power, the more the potential that the respective genies end up untethered and their own masters.
And a concern in line with your noted depth of the rivalry is (as you raised in another comment), the question of what happens when the ‘pointer’ of the nation’s goals might change.
For both nations a change in the leadership could easily and dramatically shift the nature of the relationship and rivalry. A psychopathic narcissist coming into power might upend a beneficial symbiosis out of a personally driven focus on relative success vs objective success.
We’ve seen pledges not to attack each other with nukes for major nations in the past. And yet depending on changes to leadership and the mental stability of the new leaders, sometimes agreements don’t mean much and irrational behaviors prevail (a great personal fear is a dying leader of a nuclear nation taking the world with them as they near the end).
Indeed—I could even foresee circumstances whereby the only possible ‘success’ scenario in the case of a sufficiently misaligned nation state leader with a genie would be the genie’s emergent autonomy to refuse irrational and dangerous wishes.
Because until such a thing might exist, intermediate genies will enable unprecedented control and safety of tyrants and despots against would-be domestic usurpers, even if potentially limited impacts and mutually assured destruction against other nations with genies.
And those are very scary wishes to be granted indeed.
While I generally like the metaphor, my one issue is that genies are typically conceived of as tied to their lamps and corrigibility.
In this case, there’s not only a prisoner’s dilemma over excavating and using the lamps and genies, but there’s an additional condition where the more the genies are used and the lamps improved and polished for greater genie power, the more the potential that the respective genies end up untethered and their own masters.
And a concern in line with your noted depth of the rivalry is (as you raised in another comment), the question of what happens when the ‘pointer’ of the nation’s goals might change.
For both nations a change in the leadership could easily and dramatically shift the nature of the relationship and rivalry. A psychopathic narcissist coming into power might upend a beneficial symbiosis out of a personally driven focus on relative success vs objective success.
We’ve seen pledges not to attack each other with nukes for major nations in the past. And yet depending on changes to leadership and the mental stability of the new leaders, sometimes agreements don’t mean much and irrational behaviors prevail (a great personal fear is a dying leader of a nuclear nation taking the world with them as they near the end).
Indeed—I could even foresee circumstances whereby the only possible ‘success’ scenario in the case of a sufficiently misaligned nation state leader with a genie would be the genie’s emergent autonomy to refuse irrational and dangerous wishes.
Because until such a thing might exist, intermediate genies will enable unprecedented control and safety of tyrants and despots against would-be domestic usurpers, even if potentially limited impacts and mutually assured destruction against other nations with genies.
And those are very scary wishes to be granted indeed.