Christopher Kirchhoff: recommendation

Transcript context

…The current potential for an AI arms race — at a philosophical level, do you think we have any choice other than just to try to win it? Is there some other path we could think about taking? Or it’s just another arms race, we tried to win the ones before, we’ve got to win this one too. Maybe it’s more important than usual. Or is there something else that can be done? Well, the human rights community has, at a number of junctions, tried to propose alternate pathways, and I’m very attuned to the arguments they’re making, as I think they’re arguments that should be listened to. By the way, when I was a Pentagon employee, through the — I think it’s called the Combined Federal Campaign — we could donate a portion of our salary to a number of nonprofit charities. One of the charities I donated to was Human Rights Watch, which is wonderfully subversive for a Pentagon employee because they actually produce incredibly great research about what’s happening on the ground in conflict areas around the world that every national security official, I think, should be reading. Out of Human Rights Watch and another community of computer scientists led in part by Stuart Russell, there is this movement called Stop Killer Robots that emerged about 10 years ago, foreseeing the shift in AI, foreseeing the shift in the rise of smart micro drones, and asking us not to go down that path. I actually got to sit in a couple meetings with Stuart at the White House, and it was interesting to watch him make his argument. Although I respect him incredibly as a technologist, what was interesting to me about the way he made the argument — it was without any sense of the literature on strategic stability. Out of the Cold War, we have this fascinating part of political science that has studied, what is the consequence of the spread of nuclear weapons among states? To the best that you can study this question in the world, the consensus in the literature is, nuclear weapons have actually lessened great power conflict in the modern world. There’s nobody who actually wants — But it’s a frequency-versus-intensity issue, right?…

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