Is there a way to calculate the P(we are in a 2nd cold war)?
I could see a world that if these assumptions of technology growth are true:
- We have gotten significantly better in our understanding of MLs—
Openai with speech + written capabilities—
Openai now with vision capabilities and a deep understanding of the conditions and environment its in—
GPT 4
- MITs robotics lab has figured out movement and tasks.
- So many I am likely forgetting.
then it doesn’t feel like a very outlandish idea that we could be in another arms race/cold war.
I don’t know where to go with this idea… any advice?
To calculate probabilities you need to define terms very clearly. “(we are in a 2nd cold war)? is a vague claim where the terms are not clearly enough defined for probabilities.
The Cold War analogy is a bit hard to work with, mainly because the original Cold War was a specific state of paradigms that largely can’t repeat; we have computers everywhere, thriving international trade and growth, and more importantly, the original Cold War emerged out of the World War paradigm and was started with intent to use nuclear weapons for carpet bombing (this is where the word “WW3” came from), whereas we now have norms and decades of track record of nuclear brinkmanship and de-escalation (the Cold War was established largely due to everyone everywhere having zero experience with this).
It’s similar to expecting the World War paradigm to return, but not nearly as bad, since most people in power in governments and militaries today came of age during the original Cold War and can easily imagine their world becoming more like that again.