[vouaobrasil]

> The United States is in a race to achieve global dominance in artificial intelligence. Whoever has the largest AI ecosystem will set the global standards and reap broad economic and security benefits

Correction. Whoever has the largest AI will be the first to play the "defect" strategy in the Prisoner's Dilemma, and will thus be the first to usher in a new era of an arms race where everyone loses except those who are at the very top and can take advantage of the losers.

[ben_w]

> and will thus be the first to usher in a new era of an arms race where everyone loses except those who are at the very top and can take advantage of the losers.

Unless the AI is stupid, in which case the leader pushes the button and finds that either the AI hallucinates a solution that plain doesn't work, and/or turns out to be acting according to a completely different set of moral values than they wanted, values which can be the straw-est of straw men versions of either your own or you opponent's policies that nobody would ever actually expect to meet in a real political takeover scenario.

[vouaobrasil]

True, but the arms race does not have to be solely about the leader's use of AI. It is mainly the forced acceleration of economic development that will mainly lead to superficial changes in the long run that won't really be beneficial to anyone, and use a lot of energy in the mean time.

[generalizations]

Does that change the urgency? Or just the perceived morality? TBH just because it's a question of strategy and survival doesn't change its importance.

[vouaobrasil]

Realizing it changes the urgency with which we should find a workaround that avoids the prisoner's dilemma altogether. We must go beyond thinking about strategy and "survival", because we have restricted our thinking of "survival" to a narrow economic domain. And that domain is the continued enrichment of the rich and calling it "strenthening the economy". However, we must find new ways of thinking that go beyond this narrow view that is, although seemingly good in the short-term, is leading to long-term disaster.

That will involve finding a new sort of courage to stop playing the arms race and re-defining the terms of the game so that economic supremacy is not the prime goal, as it is leading to global instability, climate change, inequality, and eventual technological dystopia.

I mean, do we really want to live in a world where everyone is an AI button-pusher, staying on the level of the superficial, which is rather meaningless in the grand scheme of things?

[generalizations]

That sounds like a complicated way of wishing that if everyone would just take on selfless values, the world could be a better place. But those are a product of very specific cultures and you can't even extrapolate them to the majority of the world's population.

Reminds me of the plot twist in the Firefly movie.