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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   13133 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 13, 2026

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I recommend reading Scott's piece that came out today on this very topic.

I did, and after reading it and reading the ~75% of comments pushing back against it I have been convinced even more that this is a horrible, no-good idea.

"what if enforcing the law on child pornography requires you to arrest a politician but that causes the politician to start world war 3 in order to overturn the state and prevent himself from being brought to justice"

The comparison I'm trying to make to nuclear proliferation is that you can have these multi-lateral treaties with some teeth and they don't seem like they lead unavoidably to some kind of dystopian state or world war three.

Replace "child pornography" with "corruption" and arguably this is already happening in Israel...

Jokes aside, I think you're missing my point; I'm trying to say that nuclear non-proliferation didn't work at all in the way that this proposal would need to (every great power still maintains "end the world" nuclear stockpiles, and many smaller powers still maintain nuclear turn-key programs to create the bomb on short timescales if necessary), all while the incentives to own unrestricted compute are much greater than the incentives to own nuclear weapons.

We don't have "no nuclear weapons" multi-lateral treaties, which would be meaningless words at best and lead to nuclear annihilation at worst, we have "countries who don't have nukes yet are incentivized to not get them" multi-lateral policy which is not the same thing at all.

"The chips in the data centers eventually have cryptographic software that lets either China or the US halt their work at any time"

"Any data center that trains AIs need to be transparent (writing basic information about their operations, like the size of their training runs, to a public database) and verifiable (someone needs to be able to prove they’re running the code they claim to be running)"

These proposals map much more to "let's have everyone get along and disarm their nuclear stockpiles", which is plainly impossible, than to "we will stop states who aren't part of the club from getting in", which is what we actually have. Obviously we could stop Botswana from getting the bomb or doing frontier AI runs, but it would also be completely pointless.

If powerful AI comes about that this is a possible plan then all futures have that character. Your sit back and watch plan included. You're not in any way avoiding it.

Again, say you thought the chance of human eradication in the next 20 years was 20%, like many safety people do, would you still council surrender to that fate?

If the alternative is this, then yes.

Obviously I would press the "fix everything button with no downsides", and probably press the "maybe fix everything button without severe downsides", depending on the precise proposal, but I think pressing the "fix very little button with severe downsides" is a horrible idea.

Even if if we acknowledge the quite uncertain premise that the chance of human eradication in 20 years is 20%, then I think even trying to eventuate the global compute control dystopia, it's still going to be at least 20% chance in 20 years (as the dystopia is unlikely to work and such continued rapid AI progress would require massive advances in algorithmic and training efficiency), and likely make life much worse for everyone else in the interim.

As you say, if it's happening then it's going to come about either way; best to make merry while life is still good.

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