I’m a bit skeptical about the utility of wargaming AI because of how speculative it is. Military wargames seem like they would be much more grounded. Perhaps it’s possible to mitigate this by running a large number of scenarios under different assumptions, but it just seems incredibly hard to design these scenarios in such a way so as to produce useful output.
I basically agree with you that the AI version is much more speculative than military versions. As a consequence I think the benefits will be different than the military wargames, but they will still be present. I think the difference looks like this:
Military wargames are mostly about raising the player’s awareness of the dimensions of an established military model. In cases where we have a pretty good model, the game has some predictive power in the scenario described.
We don’t have good models for the AGI version; instead we would be generating plausible-but-concrete situations through the game against which we can compare our models, such as they are. This wouldn’t have any predictive power, at this stage; I really just think it would make deeper conversations faster and more transparent, which seems worth it.
I think a factor which might pay big dividends is that the game lets us concretely explore the interplay of multiple dimensions at once—almost all the discussion I have read constrains the subject to one dimension at a time, in the name of clarity.
I’m a bit skeptical about the utility of wargaming AI because of how speculative it is. Military wargames seem like they would be much more grounded. Perhaps it’s possible to mitigate this by running a large number of scenarios under different assumptions, but it just seems incredibly hard to design these scenarios in such a way so as to produce useful output.
I basically agree with you that the AI version is much more speculative than military versions. As a consequence I think the benefits will be different than the military wargames, but they will still be present. I think the difference looks like this:
Military wargames are mostly about raising the player’s awareness of the dimensions of an established military model. In cases where we have a pretty good model, the game has some predictive power in the scenario described.
We don’t have good models for the AGI version; instead we would be generating plausible-but-concrete situations through the game against which we can compare our models, such as they are. This wouldn’t have any predictive power, at this stage; I really just think it would make deeper conversations faster and more transparent, which seems worth it.
I think a factor which might pay big dividends is that the game lets us concretely explore the interplay of multiple dimensions at once—almost all the discussion I have read constrains the subject to one dimension at a time, in the name of clarity.