This is a special post for quick takes by momom2. Only they can create top-level comments. Comments here also appear on the Quick Takes page and All Posts page.
Comment Permalink
The US are the Big Scary
I don't really know how to say it otherwise, and I don't have the mental health to turn this into a full post.
The US are the biggest actor in AI. Their companies are firmly nationalist, using arguments such as "we need to have the best AI to defeat our autocratic opponents". The US have whimsical politics which can decide to ruin a foreign country; Trump, POTUS now and for the critical coming years of AI takeoff, does not have the interests of even nominal allies at heart.
I often see arguments on LW about China, but they always land flat for me because China is looking very responsible on AI safety compared to the US!
Even if the US don't destroy the world out of misalignment, they'll probably vassalize it out of power concentration.
I just don't see how my non-US, democratic, liberal, non-AI-pilled country can avoid becoming a third world state dependent on the US for AI goods and services, even if it doesn't end up outright conquered.
Please don't assume that we want the US to win.
9
1Showing 3 of 6 replies (Click to show all)
1
50
This isn't limited to non-Americans. Plenty of rightie-ish Americans are rooting for China on the basis that China at least makes overtures towards ideological and cultural pluralism, and backs them up by open-sourcing their models. It isn't trivially obvious to me that the median Trump supporter would be better off if Anthropic dominated, versus if Moonshot decisively ended the moat once and for all and open-sourced the result.
I think U.S. AI companies, and, to a degree, much of the AI Safety sphere, are making a strategic mistake by taking sides in a cu...
118
I am happy that America is winning because over the past 100 or 150 years, it has been by far the best governed of any large country (say, the top 10% or 20% of countries by population[1]). America leads the world's large countries in freedom of speech and other liberties by far. It also has clearly the most stable regime among large countries over this period, beating the UK because of the Troubles and other Irish conflicts.
I wish Dario in particular and the American public in general were not so ideologically aggressive (this topic is treated well in Kissinger's Diplomacy). But I don't think that America will "vassalize" the world.
1. ^
Over the past 150 years this top-10% list has always included China, India, America, Russia, Japan, Germany, Indonesia, Brazil, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nigeria. It has sometimes included Vietnam, Mexico, the UK, France, Italy, the Philippines, Ukraine, Turkey, Egypt, Iran, Spain, Ethiopia, Poland, Thailand, and DRC. (This includes some judgment calls on border placements for historical countries.)
7
i agree that eg. dario's argument of "we must beat china" is a bad argument; the interests of the US should not be privileged in a post-ASI world. but the bigger issue is that no country or company can "win the AI race"; it's a race towards murder-suicide.