Keith Duggar: belief

Transcript context

…re things that are enormously expensive and incredibly risky to the nations that pursue them. And to recognize you're in an arms race is almost to insist you try to get out of that spiral in some way. And I think the other thing more broadly outside of war is, you know, people will often say this about AI, like, it's coming. You have to accept it. We regulate and change technologies all the time. In the 19 seventies, you know, at Silomar, we have a big conference where the question of recombinant DNA was on the agenda. We could do it. Many scientists were deeply fearful of how that would work. The scientific community agreed to basically stop it in its tracks. Germline editing, the same thing. Imagine what advantage would come to the military if you could, you know, change the germline and create some kind of, you know, super soldiers out there. We've known how to do that for 50 years. So time scientists chose not to do that. Cloning. Yeah. We've been we know how to do cloning for decades now. Right? But the scientific community, with 1 rogue Chinese exception, right, has agreed not to do that. And so I do think there is a world where we should not just accept the future as being determined. We shape it actively. And maybe you want this thing to go forward. Maybe you don't. But we have many examples of genius being stuffed back into the bottle. And, you know, I think it's entirely possible. It may not be the thing we want to do, but it is something that's doable. And we shouldn't just resign ourselves to say, hey, our fate is out of our hands. We control it. And in fact, that might be the most dangerous view I hear in AI, where people say, it's just coming like a freight train. Nothing you can do about it. You just have to like figure out how you're going to adjust. I don't accept that. We can shape it. We can form it. We can allow it to do certain things, not other things. We don't have to accept that robots are fighting with no oversight in wars, or that robots are taking our jobs. These are things we may permit or may not permit. But it is our choice. And we should just like debate them on the merits rather than having being fatalistic about it. I think there is 1 aspect to sort of the x risk argument though, which is that all it takes is 1 rogue nation, you know, who says, yeah, we don't care. You know, we're not gonna sign on to this treaty or that treaty. I mean, like you mentioned, you know, nuclear proliferation, you know. If if my history serves me correctly, even after the signing of that of that treaty, there were there were countries that still continued, like, and and a couple at least, that maybe or probably developed, you know, nuclear weapons. And I think that the problem with hypothetical, like the hypothetical AI is that it's so powerful. It's such an advantage that that if if you allow that to happen, and by virtue of not doing it yourself, can't defend yourself against it, you know, what happens then? I find that a dangerous view in 2 ways. And like in the world of war, you know, you can say, like, you know, this came actually up during the Iraq War and the Afghanistan conflict. You know, we're having to abide by rules that the enemy wasn't doing. We know that to be the case. You know, we just didn't kill civilians. We had to be in uniform. We tried to take you a prisoner and give you all the rights of a POW or if and then we tried to break away from that. Right? That's what Guantanamo was about. Like, we're not gonna recognize those kind of things. And it didn't work well for us, you know, as a country. And we went back to that in a different stage later. So abiding by rules, even when there are defectors, is generally the smart play. I think in AI, of course, the only country that can do this is China. That's the only country that can do this. And so there are 2 places there. 1 is, yes, we should seriously talk to them about international agreements. I believe that. And 1 of the things I most despair about is so many people in Washington DC think it's even silly to mention that.…

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