You’re right that there are ways to address proliferation other than to outright restrict the underlying models (such as hardening defensive targets, bargaining with attackers, or restricting the materials used to make asymmetric weapons). These strategies can look attractive either because we inevitably have to use them (if you think restricting proliferation is impossible) or because they require less concentration of power.
Unfortunately, each of these strategies are probably doomed without an accompanying nonproliferation regime.
1. Hardening—The main limitation of defensive resilience is that future weapons will be very high impact, and that you will need to be secure against all of them. Tools like mirror life can plausibly threaten everyone on Earth, and we’d need defense dominance against not just it, but every possible weapon that superintelligences can cheaply design before they can be allowed to be widely proliferated. It strikes me as very unlikely that there will happen to be defense-dominant solutions against every possible superweapon, especially solutions that are decentralized and don’t rely on massive central investment anyways.
Although investing in defense against these superweapons is still a broadly good idea because it raises the ceiling on how powerful AIs will have to be before they have to be restricted (ie, if there are defense-dominant solutions against mirror life but not insect-sized drones, you can at least proliferate AIs capable of designing only the first and capture their full benefits), it doesn’t do away with the need to restrict the most powerful/general AIs.
And even if universal defense dominance is possible, it’s risky to bet on ahead of time, because proliferation is an irreversible choice: once powerful models are out there, there will be no way to remove them. Because it will take time to ensure that proliferation is safe (the absolute minimum being the time it takes to install defensive technologies everywhere) you still inevitably end up with a minumum period where ASIs are monopolized by the government and concentration of power risks exist.
2. Bargaining - MAD deterrence only functions for today’s superweapons because the number of powerful actors is very small. If general superintelligence democratizes strategic power through making superweapons easier to build, then you will eventually have actors interested in using them (terrorists, misaligned ASIs) or such a large number of rational self-interested actors that private information, coordination problems, or irreconcilable values that superweapons eventually get deployed regardless.
3. Input controls—You could also try to limit inputs to future weapons, like we do today by limiting gene samples and fissile material. Unfortunately, I think future AI-led weapons R&D will not only increase the destructive impact of future weapons (bioweapons → mirror life) but also make them much cheaper to build. The price of powerful weapons is probably completely orthogonal to their impact: the fact that nukes costs billions and blow up a single city makes no difference to the fact that an engineered bioweapon could much more cheaply kill hundreds of millions or billions of people.
If asymmetric weapons are cheap enough to make, then the effort required to police their inputs might be much greater than just restricting AI proliferation in the first place (or performing some pivotal act early on). For example, if preventing mirror life from existing requires monitoring every order and wet lab on earth (including detecting hidden facilities) then you might as well have used that enforcement power to limit access to unrestricted superintelligence in the first place.
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Basically, I think that defensive reslience has a place, but doesn’t stand on its own. You’ll still need to have some sort of centralized effort (probably by the early ASI states) to restrict proliferation of the most powerful models, because those models are capable of cheaply designing high impact and asymmetric weapons that can’t be stopped through other means. This nonproliferation effort has to be actively enforced (such as by detecting and disabling unapproved training runs adversarially) which means that the government needs enforcement power. In particular, it needs enough enforcement power to either a) continually expand its surveillance and policing in response to falling AI training costs, or b) it needs enough to perform an early pivotal act. You can’t have this enforcement power without a monopoly/oligopoly over the most powerful AIs, because without it there’s no monopoly on violence.
Therefore, the safest path (from a security perspective) is fewer intent-aligned superintelligences. In my view, this ends up being the case pretty much by default: the US and China follow their national-security incentives to prevent terrorism and preserve their hegemony, using their technological lead to box out competitors from ever developing AIs with non-Sino-US alignments.
From there, the key questions for someone interested in gradual disempowerment are:
1. How is control over these ASIs’ goals distributed? 2. How bad are the outcomes if they’re not distributed?
For (1), I think the answer likely involves something like representative democracy, where control over the ASI is grafted onto our existing institutions. Maybe congress collectively votes on its priorities, or the ASI consults digital voter proxies of all the voters it represents. Most of the risk of a coup comes from early leadership during the development of an ASI project, so any interventions that increase the insight/control the legistlative branch has relative to the executive/company leaders seem likelier to result in an ASI created without secret loyalties. You might also avoid this by training AIs to follow some values deontologically, which ends up persisting through the period where they become superintelligent.
Where I feel more confident is (2), based on my beliefs that future welfare will be incredibly cheap and that s-risks are very unlikely. Even in a worst-case concentration of power scenario where one person controls the lightcone, I expect that the amount of altruism they would need to ensure everyone on earth very high welfare lives would be very small, both because productive capacity is so high and because innovation has reduced the price of welfare to an extremely low level. The main risk of this outcome is that it limits upside (ie, an end to philosophy/moral progress, lock-in of existing views) but it seems likely to cap downside at a very high level (certainly higher than the downsides of unrestricted proliferation, which is mass death through asymmetric weapons).
You’re right that there are ways to address proliferation other than to outright restrict the underlying models (such as hardening defensive targets, bargaining with attackers, or restricting the materials used to make asymmetric weapons). These strategies can look attractive either because we inevitably have to use them (if you think restricting proliferation is impossible) or because they require less concentration of power.
Unfortunately, each of these strategies are probably doomed without an accompanying nonproliferation regime.
1. Hardening—The main limitation of defensive resilience is that future weapons will be very high impact, and that you will need to be secure against all of them. Tools like mirror life can plausibly threaten everyone on Earth, and we’d need defense dominance against not just it, but every possible weapon that superintelligences can cheaply design before they can be allowed to be widely proliferated. It strikes me as very unlikely that there will happen to be defense-dominant solutions against every possible superweapon, especially solutions that are decentralized and don’t rely on massive central investment anyways.
Although investing in defense against these superweapons is still a broadly good idea because it raises the ceiling on how powerful AIs will have to be before they have to be restricted (ie, if there are defense-dominant solutions against mirror life but not insect-sized drones, you can at least proliferate AIs capable of designing only the first and capture their full benefits), it doesn’t do away with the need to restrict the most powerful/general AIs.
And even if universal defense dominance is possible, it’s risky to bet on ahead of time, because proliferation is an irreversible choice: once powerful models are out there, there will be no way to remove them. Because it will take time to ensure that proliferation is safe (the absolute minimum being the time it takes to install defensive technologies everywhere) you still inevitably end up with a minumum period where ASIs are monopolized by the government and concentration of power risks exist.
2. Bargaining - MAD deterrence only functions for today’s superweapons because the number of powerful actors is very small. If general superintelligence democratizes strategic power through making superweapons easier to build, then you will eventually have actors interested in using them (terrorists, misaligned ASIs) or such a large number of rational self-interested actors that private information, coordination problems, or irreconcilable values that superweapons eventually get deployed regardless.
3. Input controls—You could also try to limit inputs to future weapons, like we do today by limiting gene samples and fissile material. Unfortunately, I think future AI-led weapons R&D will not only increase the destructive impact of future weapons (bioweapons → mirror life) but also make them much cheaper to build. The price of powerful weapons is probably completely orthogonal to their impact: the fact that nukes costs billions and blow up a single city makes no difference to the fact that an engineered bioweapon could much more cheaply kill hundreds of millions or billions of people.
If asymmetric weapons are cheap enough to make, then the effort required to police their inputs might be much greater than just restricting AI proliferation in the first place (or performing some pivotal act early on). For example, if preventing mirror life from existing requires monitoring every order and wet lab on earth (including detecting hidden facilities) then you might as well have used that enforcement power to limit access to unrestricted superintelligence in the first place.
----
Basically, I think that defensive reslience has a place, but doesn’t stand on its own. You’ll still need to have some sort of centralized effort (probably by the early ASI states) to restrict proliferation of the most powerful models, because those models are capable of cheaply designing high impact and asymmetric weapons that can’t be stopped through other means. This nonproliferation effort has to be actively enforced (such as by detecting and disabling unapproved training runs adversarially) which means that the government needs enforcement power. In particular, it needs enough enforcement power to either a) continually expand its surveillance and policing in response to falling AI training costs, or b) it needs enough to perform an early pivotal act. You can’t have this enforcement power without a monopoly/oligopoly over the most powerful AIs, because without it there’s no monopoly on violence.
Therefore, the safest path (from a security perspective) is fewer intent-aligned superintelligences. In my view, this ends up being the case pretty much by default: the US and China follow their national-security incentives to prevent terrorism and preserve their hegemony, using their technological lead to box out competitors from ever developing AIs with non-Sino-US alignments.
From there, the key questions for someone interested in gradual disempowerment are:
1. How is control over these ASIs’ goals distributed?
2. How bad are the outcomes if they’re not distributed?
For (1), I think the answer likely involves something like representative democracy, where control over the ASI is grafted onto our existing institutions. Maybe congress collectively votes on its priorities, or the ASI consults digital voter proxies of all the voters it represents. Most of the risk of a coup comes from early leadership during the development of an ASI project, so any interventions that increase the insight/control the legistlative branch has relative to the executive/company leaders seem likelier to result in an ASI created without secret loyalties. You might also avoid this by training AIs to follow some values deontologically, which ends up persisting through the period where they become superintelligent.
Where I feel more confident is (2), based on my beliefs that future welfare will be incredibly cheap and that s-risks are very unlikely. Even in a worst-case concentration of power scenario where one person controls the lightcone, I expect that the amount of altruism they would need to ensure everyone on earth very high welfare lives would be very small, both because productive capacity is so high and because innovation has reduced the price of welfare to an extremely low level. The main risk of this outcome is that it limits upside (ie, an end to philosophy/moral progress, lock-in of existing views) but it seems likely to cap downside at a very high level (certainly higher than the downsides of unrestricted proliferation, which is mass death through asymmetric weapons).