In the last few years, as I read stuff about AI US vs. China in the blogosphere, I’ve always felt confused by this kind of question (exports to China or not? China this or that?). I really don’t have an intuition of what’s the right answer here. I’ve never thought about this deeply, so I’ll take the occasion to write down some thoughts.
Conditional on the scenario where dangerous AI/point of no return comes in 2035, if AI development continues to be free, so not because say it would come earlier but was regulated away:
Considering the question Q = “Is China at the edge with chips in 2035?”:
Then I consider three policies and write down P(Q|do(Policy)):
P(Q|free chips trade with China) = 30% P(Q|restrictions on exports to China of most powerful chips) = 50% P(Q|block all chips exports to China) = 80%
I totally made up these percentages; I guess my brain simply generated three ~evenly-spaced numbers in (0, 100).
Then the next question would be: what difference does Q make? Does it make a difference if China is at the same level of the US?
The US is totally able to create the problem in the first place from scratch in a unipolar world. Would an actually multipolar world be even worse? Or would it not make any difference, because the US is self-racing? Or would it have the opposite effect, where the US is forced to actually sit at a table?
In the last few years, as I read stuff about AI US vs. China in the blogosphere, I’ve always felt confused by this kind of question (exports to China or not? China this or that?). I really don’t have an intuition of what’s the right answer here. I’ve never thought about this deeply, so I’ll take the occasion to write down some thoughts.
Conditional on the scenario where dangerous AI/point of no return comes in 2035, if AI development continues to be free, so not because say it would come earlier but was regulated away:
Considering the question Q = “Is China at the edge with chips in 2035?”:
Then I consider three policies and write down P(Q|do(Policy)):
P(Q|free chips trade with China) = 30%
P(Q|restrictions on exports to China of most powerful chips) = 50%
P(Q|block all chips exports to China) = 80%
I totally made up these percentages; I guess my brain simply generated three ~evenly-spaced numbers in (0, 100).
Then the next question would be: what difference does Q make? Does it make a difference if China is at the same level of the US?
The US is totally able to create the problem in the first place from scratch in a unipolar world. Would an actually multipolar world be even worse? Or would it not make any difference, because the US is self-racing? Or would it have the opposite effect, where the US is forced to actually sit at a table?