Christopher Kirchhoff: prediction

Transcript context

…How would you describe what you think is around this corner? Well, on the national security front, there’s been a heck of a lot of conversations about [laughs] is AI as dangerous as the next nuclear bomb? Everybody at frontier labs went out last summer and watched Oppenheimer. It’s interesting just culturally, coming from the National Security Council, where it was my day job to look at really awful stuff, to get up every morning and, before the chairman came into the office, read the morning intelligence brief about all the awful things going on in the world every day. So, I look at AI as a technology that is not at all like nuclear. I never think it’s going to achieve this zero-to-one-point technology, as we would call it, that nuclear is today, where you either have a bomb or you don’t. It’s going to be much more diffused. It’s going to be much more a part of the commercial economy. It’s going to be much more a question of, do you have an iPhone 15 versus an iPhone 12? Do you have the most advanced AI versus AI that’s a little bit older or maybe from an open-source model? Because of that, as an international relations theorist and as the literature would suggest, it’s not going to be like nuclear weapons. It’s not going to create sudden disequilibria in the international system. It’s going to be much more shades of gray, I think, and gradations. That’s good because it means that we will have time among nations to find new equilibria without hopefully finding ourselves in sudden disequilibria that could create an incentive for one nation to start a war against another. Again, the new book is Unit X: How the Pentagon and Silicon Valley Are Transforming the Future of War by Raj M. Shah and Christopher Kirchhoff. Chris, thank you very much.…

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