There is an extremely straightforward argument that WMDs are precisely what prevented the outbreak of direct warfare between major powers in the latter 20th. (Note that WWI by itself wasn’t sufficient to prevent WWII!)

You can take issue with that argument if you want but it’s unconvincing not to address it.

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horacemorace 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

There’s also an extremely straightforward argument that if the current crop of authoritarian dictatorial players in power now had been then that the outcome of the latter 20th would have been much different.

	▲	lambdaphagy an hour ago \| parent [-]
		The guy who authorized the Manhattan project: - had four [!] terms, a move so anomalous it was subsequently patched by constitutional amendment - threatened court-packing until SCOTUS backed down and stated rubber-stamping his agenda - ruled entire industries by emergency decree in a way that contemporaries on the left and right compared to Mussolini - interned 120k people without due process, on the basis of ethnicity - turned a national party into a personal patronage system - threatened to override the legislature if it didn’t start passing laws he liked Not even saying any of this is even good or bad, clearly in the official history it was retroactively justified by victory in WWII. But it’s a bit rich to say that the bomb wasn’t developed under authoritarian conditions.

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idiotsecant 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

That's a little bit like saying the bullet in the gun prevented someone getting shot while playing Russian Roulette. We pulled back that hammer several times, and it's purely happenstance that it didn't go off. MAD has that acronym for a reason.

	▲	lambdaphagy an hour ago \| parent [-]
		I agree that the risk of an accidental strike was a huge problem with the theory of nuclear deterrence, but the question is: compared to what? In expectation or even in a 1st percentile scenario, was MAD worse than a world where the USSR is a unilateral nuclear power? For that matter, what would it have taken to get a stronger SALT treaty sooner? I think you need to have people thinking through this stuff at a nuts-and-bolts level if you want to avoid getting dominated by a slightly less nice adversary, and so too with AI. Does a unilateral guarantee not to build autonomous killbots actually make anyone safer if China makes no such promise, or does that perversely put us at more risk? I’d love to know that the “no killbots, come what may” strategy is sound, but it’s not clear that that’s a stable equilibrium.

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estearum 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Great, now go ahead and prove that AI also reaches strategic equilibrium. This was pretty much self-evident with nuclear weapons so should probably be self-evident for AI too, if it were true.