Leopold Aschenbrenner: evaluation

Transcript context

…What does privatization in this world even mean? What happens after? We’re talking about whether the government project is good or not. I have very mixed feelings about this as well. My primary argument is that if you’re at the point where this thing has vastly superhuman capabilities — it can develop crazy bioweapons targeted to kill everyone but the Han Chinese, it can wipe out entire countries, it can build robo armies and drone swarms with mosquito-sized drones — the US national security state will be intimately involved. The government project will look like a joint venture between cloud providers, labs, and the government. There is no world in which the government isn’t involved in this crazy period. At the very least, intelligence agencies need to run security for these labs. They’re already controlling access to everything. If we’re in a volatile international situation, initial applications will focus on stabilizing it. It’ll suck. It’s not what I want to use ASI for. Somehow we need to prevent proliferation of new WMDs, and maintain mutually assured destruction with North Korea, Russia, and China. There’s a broader spectrum than you’re acknowledging. In a world with private labs, there will be heavy government involvement. What we’re debating is the form of government involvement, but it will look more like the national security state than a startup, which is what it is right now. Something like that makes sense. I’d be very worried if it’s like the Manhattan Project, where it’s directly part of the US military. If it’s more like needing to talk to Jake Sullivan before running the next training line...…

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