Comment by goatlover
9 hours ago
I'd prefer companies not help the military develop the most powerful weapons possible given we're in the age of WMDs, have already had two devastating world wars and a nuclear arms race that puts humanity under permanent risk.
There is an extremely straightforward argument that WMDs are precisely what prevented the outbreak of direct warfare between major powers in the latter 20th. (Note that WWI by itself wasn’t sufficient to prevent WWII!)
You can take issue with that argument if you want but it’s unconvincing not to address it.
There’s also an extremely straightforward argument that if the current crop of authoritarian dictatorial players in power now had been then that the outcome of the latter 20th would have been much different.
The guy who authorized the Manhattan project:
- had four [!] terms, a move so anomalous it was subsequently patched by constitutional amendment
- threatened court-packing until SCOTUS backed down and stated rubber-stamping his agenda
- ruled entire industries by emergency decree in a way that contemporaries on the left and right compared to Mussolini
- interned 120k people without due process, on the basis of ethnicity
- turned a national party into a personal patronage system
- threatened to override the legislature if it didn’t start passing laws he liked
Not even saying any of this is even good or bad, clearly in the official history it was retroactively justified by victory in WWII. But it’s a bit rich to say that the bomb wasn’t developed under authoritarian conditions.
Great, now go ahead and prove that AI also reaches strategic equilibrium. This was pretty much self-evident with nuclear weapons so should probably be self-evident for AI too, if it were true.
That's a little bit like saying the bullet in the gun prevented someone getting shot while playing Russian Roulette. We pulled back that hammer several times, and it's purely happenstance that it didn't go off. MAD has that acronym for a reason.
I agree that the risk of an accidental strike was a huge problem with the theory of nuclear deterrence, but the question is: compared to what? In expectation or even in a 1st percentile scenario, was MAD worse than a world where the USSR is a unilateral nuclear power? For that matter, what would it have taken to get a stronger SALT treaty sooner?
I think you need to have people thinking through this stuff at a nuts-and-bolts level if you want to avoid getting dominated by a slightly less nice adversary, and so too with AI. Does a unilateral guarantee not to build autonomous killbots actually make anyone safer if China makes no such promise, or does that perversely put us at more risk?
I’d love to know that the “no killbots, come what may” strategy is sound, but it’s not clear that that’s a stable equilibrium.
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So would you have preferred the Nazis to develop the most powerful weapons and they win the world war? (which they were trying to do?)
With the benefit of hindsight we know the Nazis in fact were not racing to develop The Bomb. Reasonable assumption to have oriented around at the time though.
Its not just the atomic bomb im talking the usa had the best production of fighter jets, bombers, all kinds of communication technology, deciphering technology all the ammunition, all of those together beat the Nazis and they were trying their best to develop better and more advanced technologies than usa!
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If Anthropic does give the DoD what they want, does that magically stop China, Iran, Russia, etc from advancing in AI arms development?
If Anthropic doesn't give the DoD what they want, does that mean that China, Iran, Russia, etc magically leapfrog not only Anthropic, but the entire US defense industry, and take over the planet?
> If Anthropic does give the DoD what they want, does that magically stop China, Iran, Russia, etc from advancing in AI arms development?
No
> If Anthropic doesn't give the DoD what they want, does that mean that China, Iran, Russia, etc magically leapfrog not only Anthropic, but the entire US defense industry, and take over the planet?
The risks are high, so if you're the US, you want a portfolio of possible winners. The risks are too high to not leverage all the cutting edge AI labs.
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Did WMDs have a meaningful effect on stopping the Nazis? I thought the bomb wasn't dropped until after they surrendered.
The only two atomic weapons ever deployed weren't even targeting Nazi Germany, but Japan. Dark but true: they were both deliberately and knowingly targeted at civilian populations.
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