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Superintelligent takeover A powerful artificial intelligence system could march where human superpowers feared to tread, discovers Ben Walker
Time was when the United States was the only nuclear power. In the four years immediately following the end of World War II, Washington, having developed and used the atom bomb in 1945, was the sole superpower. It wasn’t until 1949 that the Soviet Union developed its own bomb and, thus, the nuclear arms race and Cold War began. Theoretically, the Americans could have exploited their edge in 1945-1949 to effect a decisive military advantage. The US had the opportunity to use its nuclear monopoly to create a singleton (an all-dominant power), and become the all-powerful, unchallengeable global government. There was serious discussion at the time around the Americans’ options. The first was to build up their arsenal then threaten and, if necessary, carry out a nuclear first strike against the USSR. Such a move would have destroyed the nuclear development capacity of the Soviets, consigning the Cold War to the realms of counterfactual fiction. An alternative strategy, which also stood a fair chance of success, was for the US to exploit its nuclear monopoly to bring about a global government with itself at the centre, a quasi United States of Earth with a nuclear monopoly and a powerful hand to prevent any rogue nations developing their own atomic weaponry. The first – malign – approach was promoted by a surprising array of voices from all sides of the political spectrum. The socialist philosopher and future antinuclear campaigner Bertrand Russell was at times a supporter of so-called preventative nuclear war. The rightwing game theory pioneer John von Neumann was another prominent advocate. A variety of the second – more benign – approach was tried in 1946 in the shape of the Baruch plan, which would have seen the US temporarily cede its nuclear capacity to an international agency under the control of United Nations. Under the proposal, all permanent members of the UN Security Council would give up their veto over nuclear weapons matters, such that no nation found to be in breach of UN Dialogue Q3 2018
nuclear policy could veto any penalties proposed against it. The plan collapsed when Stalin recognized that the USSR and its Warsaw Pact allies could easily be outvoted by the US-aligned West on the Security Council, an imbalance that would have secured American dominance for a generation. The world was left with the Cold War and, as it transpired, four decades of fragile peace. Consider what would have happened were the US not a human governmental power but a superintelligent artificial system. Leading philosopher and ethicist Professor Nick Bostrom, director of the Oxford Future of Humanity Institute and Oxford Martin Programme on the Impacts of Future Technology at the University of Oxford, contends that many of the factors that prevent humans from exploiting a decisive strategic advantage in the hope of creating a singleton fail to apply to artificial systems. Humans are wary of wagering all their capital
Humans are wary of wagering all their capital on a 50-50 chance of doubling it. The same need not hold true for AI