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Comment by itsalwaysgood

11 hours ago

The problem with public policy is that it allows other countries to get ahead of you. 'AI' isn't just a tool, it's also a race.

What do you win at the end of the race? I've never heard it concisely put. 'Dominance' is the word that comes to my mind, but I don't want to put words in your mouth and don't really know why that would inherently be a valuable trophy, so that's probably not what you were thinking of, right?

The bigger race is education, which some countries are really falling behind on.

  • That is always going to be a personal race. You can get in the currents of education, but your success will always depend on your own paddling.

    • I don’t personally set education standards for today’s youth or budgets to invest in the country’s youth.

      The United States is falling behind in both.

Why should we care about that? Even if you wanted to argue our individual fates are tied to our country's, we don't all live in the same country, so how, actually, could we all care? Are you really convinced its so zero sum like this?

We collectively spend decades and decades creating a sophisticated global capitalism, huge networks and infrastructures of trade and travel, just to find ourselves in some dark forest-esque race with everyone else anyway? Is this really consistent to you? What was the point of anything in the last, like 40 years to you if we just need to act like we are still in a cold war, except this time its a war with everyone?

  • We're you around for the space race?

    It's a world prestige thing, and also a competitive edge, for better or worse.

  • "Other countries" means China here, I think. China got a little on board with the global capitalism (and lifted 800 million people out of extreme poverty along the way, if we're looking for the point), but never really embraced Liberalism and so ideally isn't the one aligning superintelligence. It would be lousy if Russia or North Korea or Somalia was in that position and it would be fine if the UK or Denmark or Brazil or Ghana was, but none of that matters because none of them will be in that position. Only the US and China are playing the game.

    • If this speculated intelligence is so "super" why would it matter what its host country's commitments are? I would hope it would at least be intelligent enough to sort things out there? How can something be so potentially threatening, so "super," but also be like a baby, where we need to worry how its raised? Its super intelligent about everything except ideology? That doesn't really sound like (super)intelligence to me..

      But ok, even granting that framing, if the issue is China's placement on the spectrum of "liberal", what would it take for them to be the good enough guys here?

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