The difference between having nuclear weapons and building ASI, is that you can chose to not use the nukes as long as nobody else does, while the ASI by it's nature needs to be deployed to some extent to exist at all.
Not only that, in the kind of competitive environment you describe, not only will the ASI's be deployed, they will most likely be in competition with each other, which creates the precondition for Darwinian evolution to start happening.
My personal belief is that while it may be possible to develop safe ASI as long as it is NOT subject to evolutionary forces, it probably still isn't if they are.
As far as I can tell, this is by far the greatest existential threat we're facing at the moment. Finding a way to deal with, while working around the game theoretic challenges you identify, may be orders of magnitude more urgent than for instance stopping global warming.
If we do manage to steer AI development into a good (for humanity) outcome, I'm pretty sure ASI's will be able to find technological "solutions" to the problems caused by global warming (an maybe stop the warming itself). On the other hand, if self-replicating ASI's run wild, they would not only be likely to exterminate humanity, but also most other advanced life forms Earth.
Whether that's the ability to create and appreciate art, beauty or the ability to experience emotions such as love and purpose, or maybe some abstraction, generalization or expansion of these that we may not comprehend.
In general, nukes aren't a good analogy to AGI/ASI. The x-risks of AI are such that you can't use them in MAD fashion; AI is more like increasingly potent engineered pathogen - you can't do MAD with bioweapons, and you're one lab accident away from ruining the day for everyone on the planet.
Also, if a single entity gets too far ahead, it may be constrained politically or even militarily.
Let's say for instance that OpenAI created an AI able to suddenly design GPU's that outperform Nvidia'. That would be a sign of a quite hard takeoff, as it would quickly lead to MS/OpenAI gaining full control of both software and hardware markets.
This would be huge incentive for the US government to either nationalize this AI, make it's IP open source or use some kind of anti-trust measures to slow them down.
The problem is, the time between when you notice and when it's too late to act, might be days, or hours, or seconds, or even negative.
> Let's say for instance that OpenAI created an AI able to suddenly design GPU's that outperform Nvidia'. That would be a sign of a quite hard takeoff, as it would quickly lead to MS/OpenAI gaining full control of both software and hardware markets.
That's solving the wrong problem. If OpenAI creates an AI able to design GPUs better than Nvidia and is general enough, the risk is that it'll arrange for more compute for itself and train an even more capable version of itself. And you might not notice until couple iterations of this happen.
> This would be huge incentive for the US government to either nationalize this AI, make it's IP open source or use some kind of anti-trust measures to slow them down.
When that happens, the US government better be sending men with guns to forcefully shut the businesses involved down, and getting ready to lob some cruise missiles at some data centers for good measure.
I agree. Especially if there is a hard take-off where AGI goes to 100x ASI in hours , days or weeks. Or the AGI could be really hard to detect, even if it took longer to develop. There is certainly a significant existential risk associated with AGI/ASI.
However, if we imagine a scenario where AGI was ONLY constrained by algorithms and code, and NOT at all from compute, then this kind of scenario would be much more likely. Lately, though, increases in AI strength have come more from increases in compute than improvements in algorithms.
If (which we may hope is the case), an AI explosion requires hardware improvements to take off (even if the AI can design the hardware itself), then we can HOPE that an explosion would be easier to detect.
> When that happens, the US government better be sending men with guns to forcefully shut the businesses involved down,
All the actions I described are ultimately backed by the government's guns.
> and getting ready to lob some cruise missiles at some data centers for good measure.
This could be an option if the data center was outside the US. Inside the US, the government can shut off the power, if needed.
AI safety is a bit like nuclear arms safety. You don't get any safer by not having any nuclear weapons; you just put yourself at the mercy of others with nuclear weapons. The reason nuclear war fare so far hasn't happened is mutually assured destruction. That's why lots of countries seek to have them. Non proliferation treaties have slowed that down but there are probably at least ten or so countries with nuclear weapons at this point.
With AI, it's a lot less clear cut. It's basically going to be about dominance and outsmarting the other side. The downsides are basically more hypothetical / ethical / moral. And when it comes to ethics and morals, there definitely is no such thing as royal we. Countries like China and Russia are likely to choose their own path. Plenty of other countries that will want to get ahead here.