The Soviet Union did violate the Biological Weapons Convention, which seems like an example of “an important, binding, ratified arms treaty.” It did not lead to nuclear war.
It’s very misleading to cite that wikipedia article as an example as the actual text of the BWC only bans substances that are classified as ‘biological and toxin weapons’.
But not substances classified as ‘biodefense’, ‘defensive’, etc., capabilities.
And guess which parties the text assigns to be responsible for making that determination?
Which is the loophole that allows countries to operate ‘biodefense programs’.
i.e. I’m fairly certain the Soviet Union never in fact violated the Convention according to the letter of the law, since all it would have taken to comply was a single piece of paper from the politburo reclassifying their programs to ‘biodefense’ programs.
I’m seeing a lot of examples in this thread of the person arguing how past examples which seemingly apply don’t really apply because of some technicality. Of course the situation doesn’t exactly apply, we aren’t talking about bioweapons in the Soviet era here. The parallels in a hypothetical AI treaty are obvious here.
A key question is has the threat of anything prompted a nuclear exchange?
The answer is no.
Has the threat of even a supposed nuclear exchange from faulty sensors prompted a nuclear exchange?
No.
Nuclear weapons are very expensive to make, very hard to develop, only good at killing, and for all practical purposes pretty useless.
We still failed to several rogue countries from developing them. Of course many countries didn’t build them or are downsizing their stockpiles, but is that primarily because of treaties or because they’re very expensive and practically useless.
Try starting a nuclear exchange over China’s “cancer research” gpu clusters. Wonder how that will go.
Another key question is would an overhang exist. We don’t need to even compare this to jet rexords, we have evidence they exist in deep learning from the history deep learning! Many hardware upgrades lead to researchers quickly beating SoTA by just trying algorithms the hardwares let them. There is also a slower algorithmic overhang, just look at chess algos learning rates vs computes.
Maybe I’m reading between the lines too much, but a lot of these arguments would make sense if someone first decided governance is effective then decided on their positions.
The Soviet Union did violate the Biological Weapons Convention, which seems like an example of “an important, binding, ratified arms treaty.” It did not lead to nuclear war.
It’s very misleading to cite that wikipedia article as an example as the actual text of the BWC only bans substances that are classified as ‘biological and toxin weapons’.
But not substances classified as ‘biodefense’, ‘defensive’, etc., capabilities.
And guess which parties the text assigns to be responsible for making that determination?
Which is the loophole that allows countries to operate ‘biodefense programs’.
i.e. I’m fairly certain the Soviet Union never in fact violated the Convention according to the letter of the law, since all it would have taken to comply was a single piece of paper from the politburo reclassifying their programs to ‘biodefense’ programs.
I’m seeing a lot of examples in this thread of the person arguing how past examples which seemingly apply don’t really apply because of some technicality. Of course the situation doesn’t exactly apply, we aren’t talking about bioweapons in the Soviet era here. The parallels in a hypothetical AI treaty are obvious here.
A key question is has the threat of anything prompted a nuclear exchange?
The answer is no.
Has the threat of even a supposed nuclear exchange from faulty sensors prompted a nuclear exchange?
No.
Nuclear weapons are very expensive to make, very hard to develop, only good at killing, and for all practical purposes pretty useless.
We still failed to several rogue countries from developing them. Of course many countries didn’t build them or are downsizing their stockpiles, but is that primarily because of treaties or because they’re very expensive and practically useless.
Try starting a nuclear exchange over China’s “cancer research” gpu clusters. Wonder how that will go.
Another key question is would an overhang exist. We don’t need to even compare this to jet rexords, we have evidence they exist in deep learning from the history deep learning! Many hardware upgrades lead to researchers quickly beating SoTA by just trying algorithms the hardwares let them. There is also a slower algorithmic overhang, just look at chess algos learning rates vs computes.
Maybe I’m reading between the lines too much, but a lot of these arguments would make sense if someone first decided governance is effective then decided on their positions.
How are these points relevant to what was being discussed?
I don’t think the opposing stance for these two question was implied.
The history of (or lack of) nuclear exchanges seems relevant to discussing whether they will be effective at enforcing treaties.
What specifically do these questions relate to in the preceding comment, the one it’s replying to? Or to Jeffrey’s comment before that?