As various people have said, the original context was not making everybody more intelligent and thereby changing their inclinations, but rather creating an arbitrarily powerful superintelligence that makes their inclinations irrelevant. (The presumption here is typically that we know which current human inclinations such a superintelligence would endorse and which ones it would reject.)
But I’m interested in the context you imply (of humans becoming more intelligent).
My $0.02: I think almost all people who value war do so instrumentally. That is, I expect that most warmongers (whether ideologues or not) want to achieve some goal (spread their ideology, or amass personal power, or whatever) and they believe starting a war is the most effective way for them to do that. If they thought something else was more effective, they would do something else.
I also expect that intelligence is useful for identifying effective strategies to achieve a goal. (This comes pretty close to being true-by-definition.)
So I would only expect smarter ideologues (or anyone else) to remain warmongers if if starting a war really was the most effective way to achieve their goals. And if that’s true, everyone else gets to decide whether we’d rather have wars, or modify the system so that the ideologues have more effective options than starting wars (either by making other options more effective, or by making warmongering less effective, whichever approach is more efficient).
So, yes, if we choose to incentivize wars, then we’ll keep getting wars. It follows from this scenario that war is the least important problem we face, so we should be OK with that.
Conversely, if it turns out that war really is an important problem to solve, then I’d expect fewer wars.
As various people have said, the original context was not making everybody more intelligent and thereby changing their inclinations, but rather creating an arbitrarily powerful superintelligence that makes their inclinations irrelevant. (The presumption here is typically that we know which current human inclinations such a superintelligence would endorse and which ones it would reject.)
But I’m interested in the context you imply (of humans becoming more intelligent).
My $0.02: I think almost all people who value war do so instrumentally. That is, I expect that most warmongers (whether ideologues or not) want to achieve some goal (spread their ideology, or amass personal power, or whatever) and they believe starting a war is the most effective way for them to do that. If they thought something else was more effective, they would do something else.
I also expect that intelligence is useful for identifying effective strategies to achieve a goal. (This comes pretty close to being true-by-definition.)
So I would only expect smarter ideologues (or anyone else) to remain warmongers if if starting a war really was the most effective way to achieve their goals. And if that’s true, everyone else gets to decide whether we’d rather have wars, or modify the system so that the ideologues have more effective options than starting wars (either by making other options more effective, or by making warmongering less effective, whichever approach is more efficient).
So, yes, if we choose to incentivize wars, then we’ll keep getting wars. It follows from this scenario that war is the least important problem we face, so we should be OK with that.
Conversely, if it turns out that war really is an important problem to solve, then I’d expect fewer wars.