Comment by mrob
14 hours ago
It's a simple prisoner's dilemma scenario. If you focus on safety, you're still exposed to all the risk of extinction when your competitor achieves ASI first, but you lose the upside of potentially becoming king of the world. There is no possibility of future rounds, so the rational strategy is to always defect.
It can certainly be seen as a simple prisoner's dilemma, but it's not in some very important dimensions. (E.g. given the core tech the most likely outcomes are not AGI but developed carelessly nonetheless capable of causing all sorts of societal damage.) Unfortunately our bitwit overlords love short term self serving frameworks like this one so it's easy to imagine them embracing a "what has the future ever done for me" strategy...
>the most likely outcomes are not AGI
So long as it's non-neglible, it doesn't change the rational strategy. Uncertainty about whether ASI is achievable only reduces the magnitudes of the expected values of the payoffs, not their relative order. Adding a "global misery" scenario does not change the fact that "extinction OR king of the world OR global misery" is strictly superior to "extinction OR global misery".
Can you say more about what kind of model you see this as?