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The West's effort to offset the massive strategic advantages of a Russia-India-China axis (demographics, manufacturing capacity, energy) might result in doubling down on the AI+robotics edge they currently enjoy. China not being far off in terms of capabilities might create additional pressures. I'm concerned that recent ideas surrounding global/multilateral AI governance and alignment (e.g. "Consensus-1") might be thwarted by geopolitics.
Good question. My assumption is based on robotic Chinese military hardware which was put on display recently bearing superficial resemblance to Boston Dynamics robots from about a decade ago, but I realize that this may not be sufficient evidence to establish the West's lead in robotics.
So long as Trump as in charge in America, any global governance idea will have to be compatible with his geopolitical style (described today on the Piers Morgan show as "transactional" and "personal", as good a description as any I've heard). I don't know if anyone has ideas in that direction.
On the Russian side, Dugin (an ideologue of multipolarity) has proposed that there could be strategic cooperation between BRICS and Trump, since they all have a common enemy in global liberalism. On the other hand, liberals also believe in global cooperation to solve problems, their world order had an ever-expanding list of new norms and priorities.
China under Xi Jinping has proposed a series of "global initiatives", the most recent of which, a Global Governance Initiative, debuted at the SCO meeting in Tianjin attended by Modi.
I mention this to show that anyone still trying to organize a global pause on frontier AI, has material to work with, though it will require creativity and ingenuity to marshall these disparate ingredients. But the bigger immediate problem is domestic AI policy in America and China. America basically has an e/acc policy towards AI at the moment, and official China is comparably oblivious to superintelligence as a threat (if that's what we're talking about).
Ideologies formed from people interacting with AIs might be the beginning of "AI escaping the datacentres" via memetics.
What are some reasons to believe that Rice's theorem doesn't doom the AI alignment project by virtue of making it impossible to verify alignment, independent of how it is defined/formalized?
This might be a problem if it were possible to build a (pathologically) cautious all-powerful buerocracy that will forbid the deployment of any AGI that's not formally verifiable, but it doesn't seem like that's going to happen, instead the situation is about accepting that AGI will be deployed and working to make it safer, probably, than it otherwise would have been.
It seems to me that Rice's theorem implies that it is impossible for there to be an "isAligned" function to verify an AI's alignment, independent of how you define alignment.
Rice's theorem says that you can't tell if a program is adding together two natural numbers, prints the answer, and terminates. Yet for many programs, you can prove that it's what they do, or can make it so by construction, choosing a program with that property of behavior. It's never relevant to anything in practice.