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Why Governments Might Race to Build ASI Even If It Could Kill Us All

Entreprise non communiquée

Global
Publié le 5 novembre 2026

Description du poste

I'm not sure if it's game theoretically possible for a nation state to give up a decisive strategic edge and hence I am not confident the development of ASI can realistically ever be stopped as I believe governments will attempt to develop aligned-ASI in secret if they commercially ban it. I have been listening to Nate Soares interviews and he will often point to international cooperation on nuclear weapons. But to me nuclear weapons treaties look like failures of international cooperation. We still have enough nuclear weapons on earth to destroy basically all of modern civilization. We built enough to destroy all of earth, and then we said: "let's not build more than we need to destroy all of earth" and then we patted ourselves on the back "oh boy, good that we stopped building more of those nuclear bombs, imagine if we destroyed all of civilization twice over!". And by the way China is still building nuclear weapons because they rightly assess they can't destroy as much of the earth as Russia and the USA can and they want to reach parity on destroying all of modern civilization. There have been instances of internationally cooperating to forego some strategic edge, such as chemical weapons. However, I do not think chemical weapons ever were a decisive strategic edge in the way that nuclear weapons are, or that aligned ASI would be. The reason for states never being able to give up nukes, aligned-ASI, or any other decisive strategic edge I believe to be simple. Per realist dictate: 1. Nation states live in an anarchic system without a central authority 2. Within this anarchic system they continuously face existential threats from other states 3. To optimally survive in such a world, you have to compete for power. Which is a function of economic wealth (w/ input technology) and population size. The logic of realism argues the USA is existentially threatened by states such as China or Russia. In other words, the USA and China both hold a knife on each oth