Unipolar / Multipolar: “Will transformative AI systems be privately controlled by one organization or many?” Questions to consider when making this more precise are: What if all the relevant organizations are within one political bloc, like the USA, or many, like the USA + China + Russia + India? What if the humans are unified into a single faction, but the AIs are divided into multiple camps? What if it’s the other way around? Also, for each of these kinds of unipolarity or multipolarity, perhaps the world will transition from one type to another at some point, so the question becomes whether the world is unipolar or multipolar “in the crucial period.”
There are implications of the unipolar/multipolar variable for AI governance, but also for technical AI safety (e.g. it’s more important to build AI that can do bargaining and game theory well, to the extent that the world will be multipolar).
Huh, I’m surprised this one got downvoted—I had always thought of it as uncontroversially important. I’d be interested to hear why. Maybe the idea is that we should be reducing the alignment tax rather than organizing to pay it, and reducing the tax works the same way in unipolar and multipolar scenarios? EDIT: OK, now it’s been strong-upvoted, lol. I guess my takeaway is that this is a controversial one.
Unipolar / Multipolar: “Will transformative AI systems be privately controlled by one organization or many?” Questions to consider when making this more precise are: What if all the relevant organizations are within one political bloc, like the USA, or many, like the USA + China + Russia + India? What if the humans are unified into a single faction, but the AIs are divided into multiple camps? What if it’s the other way around? Also, for each of these kinds of unipolarity or multipolarity, perhaps the world will transition from one type to another at some point, so the question becomes whether the world is unipolar or multipolar “in the crucial period.”
There are implications of the unipolar/multipolar variable for AI governance, but also for technical AI safety (e.g. it’s more important to build AI that can do bargaining and game theory well, to the extent that the world will be multipolar).
Huh, I’m surprised this one got downvoted—I had always thought of it as uncontroversially important. I’d be interested to hear why. Maybe the idea is that we should be reducing the alignment tax rather than organizing to pay it, and reducing the tax works the same way in unipolar and multipolar scenarios? EDIT: OK, now it’s been strong-upvoted, lol. I guess my takeaway is that this is a controversial one.