Artificial Intelligence as exit strategy from the age of acute existential risk

post by Arturo Macias (arturo-macias) · 2023-04-12T14:48:35.771Z · LW · GW · 15 comments

Contents

  The Age of Existential Risk
  Organic exit: nuclear war risk in my lifetime
  Deus ex machina: the technological exit
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15 comments

This article argues that given the baseline level of existential risk implied by nuclear weapons the development of Artificial Intelligence (AI) probably implies a net reduction in existential risk. The so called Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) can replace the human political system and solve the worst alignment problem: the one that human groups have with respect to each other. 

The Age of Existential Risk

If we had to describe in a few words our historical moment, not from the perspective of years or decades, but from that of our existence as a species, this moment should be called the age of acute existential risk.

In the last two hundred years, Humanity has experienced an immense expansion of its material capabilities that has intensified its ecological domination and has taken us out of the Malthusian demographic regime in which all other living species are trapped.

In August 6th, 1945, with the first use of a nuclear weapon on a real target, Humanity became aware that its material capabilities now encompassed the possibility of self-extinction. The following decades saw a steady increase in the destructive capacity of nuclear arsenals and several incidents where an escalation of political tension or a technical failure threatened to bring down the sword of Damocles.

An important feature of nuclear war is that it is a funnel for many other sub- existential risks. Financial, ecological, and geopolitical crises, while threatening neither human civilization nor its survival, substantially increase the risk of war, and wars can escalate into a nuclear exchange. Barring the possibility of nuclear war, the risks of a more populous, hotter world with growing problems of political legitimacy are partly mitigated by technology and economic interconnection. But the risk of nuclear war amplifies the other purely historical and environmental risks and turns them into existential risks.

If the nuclear war risk does not reduce over time, an accident, whether technical or political will happen sooner or later. Each of these 77 years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki is a miracle and a tribute to human reason and self-restraint. But without an exit strategy, sustained levels of nuclear war risk doom our technological and post-Malthusian civilization to be an ephemeral phenomenon.

In my opinion we can classify nuclear war risk exit strategies into two types: i) organic stabilization and ii) technological deux ex machina.

Organic stabilization refers to a set of social processes, linked to human development, that naturally reduce the risk of nuclear war. In the first place, in industrial societies the activities with the highest added value are linked to human capital. Consequently, the incentives to conquest and war are drastically reduced in a world where wealth is made by work, education and technology, compared to a world were land is the main source of wealth. Additionally, economic development implies a lower propensity for violence, either at the individual or at the group level.  Economic interdependence and inter-elite permeability (that have increased for the last two centuries) are also a necessary condition for definitive pacification.

The other way out of acute existential risk is some technological deux ex machina. In my view, AI can be that game changer. 

In the next section I am going to outline my subjective position on how the risk of nuclear conflict has evolved during my lifetime, and in the next I argue that these advances have proven to be limited and fragile, and that it is necessary to promote all the forms of technological progress and especially AI, to get out of this stage of acute existential risk as soon as possible.

Organic exit: nuclear war risk in my lifetime

I was born in 1977, and therefore I was six years old in the year of the highest risk of nuclear war in history: in 1983, the KGB launched the most extensive operation in Soviet intelligence history to assess the probability that NATO was preparing a preventive nuclear war; in September of that year the Petrov incident took place, and in November, Moscow seriously considered that the NATO winter maneuvers (Able Archer 83') were a covert operation for an all-out war with the USSR. Nuclear tension lasted for several more years amid an intensification of the Cold War that included: i) the Strategic Defense Initiative, ii) the dismantling of Soviet technological intelligence (Vetrov's leak), and the subsequent sabotage of the Trans-Siberian gas pipeline, iv) and the shooting down of the KAL007 plane in Korea.

During the 1990s, after the end of the Socialist Bloc, nuclear war disappeared from the collective consciousness, although political instability and ultra-nationalist and neo-communist currents in Russia suggest that in the final decade of the XX century nuclear war risk remained high. With the election of Vladimir Putin, an apparently authoritarian modernizer with an agenda of internal consolidation, the Russian origin nuclear war risk seemed to fade.

In parallel, since the mid-eighties in China a system of collective leadership was established, then a transition to a market economy was successfully performed, and finally the Communist Party appeared to open up to the homegrown moneyed class: in a few decades China seemed to have traveled the road from an absolute communist monarchy to a census-based bourgeois republic. Beyond the Middle East issues (which never implied nuclear risk), between 1991 and the mid-2010s, global trends were: i) universal economic convergence and interdependence, ii) consociational (not necessarily democratic) governance in the great powers, and iii) increasing permeability among the national elites of the different countries. For twenty-five years (those that go from my adolescence to my middle age) I saw the consolidation of a post-Malthusian, technocratic, and post-national world, where wealth depended above all on capital and technology. Of course, I was vaguely aware of what is obvious today: organic stabilization of existential risk is a soft solution to a hard problem, but everything looked so well behaved that Hegelian complacency (the opium of elites) looked a sensible position. 

The general trends thus described were real, and they are more structural than the post-Ukrainian shock leads us to believe. However, after the mid-2010s, Xi Jinping has succeeded in replacing collective governance with his absolute power, and in Russia the “authoritarian modernizer” has become a “totalitarian warmonger”. Additionally, the waterways of the nuclear non-proliferation regime have widened with the development of the nuclear arsenal of North Korea and probably, in a few years, that of Iran.

The lesson of these decades of success is bleak: human institutions have an error margin clearly above what is tolerable for the risks of the Nuclear Age: nuclear war can mean billions of deaths, and the fall “into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister and perhaps more prolonged by the lights of a perverted science” (the famous Churchill’s description of the consequences of a nazi victory perfectly fits a post nuclear world).

Even if we overcome the Russian-Ukrainian war, these years have shown that the probability of democratic regression is high even in developed countries. Only open societies have been able to generate the kind of international ties that can definitely lower international tensions. Autocracies may temporarily ally, but their elites are nationalized, and do not have the systems of reciprocal social influence and commitment on which the “Pax Democratica” is based. Apart from their intrinsic flaws (which technology is going to sharpen) autocracies have not a natural pathway for nuclear war risk reduction, and their resilience means that the trust that can be placed in the organic social progress to overcome the era of acute existential risk is limited.

Of course, economic stabilization, institutional innovation, and democratizing and internationalist activism are not useless: they are the only way in which the vast majority of Humanity can participate in the task of surviving the nuclear age. The organic path is not totally impracticable even as a definitive solution (social science is developing and can offer new forecasting and governance mechanisms safe enough for a nuclear world). Furthermore, each day that we survive by opportunistic means is one more day of life, and one more day to find a definitive solution.

But looking back at these four and a half decades, and given the regression towards autocracy and international chaos in less than ten years, my opinion is that Nuclear War is among the most likely causes of death for a person my age in the Northern Hemisphere.

Deus ex machina: the technological exit

That is why it makes no sense to fear the great technological transformations ahead. Humanity is on the verge of a universal catastrophe, so in reality, accelerationism is the only prudent strategy.

I have serious doubts that Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) is close: cars have not been able to drive autonomously in big cities and the spectacular results in robotics from Boston Dynamics are not yet being seen in civilian life nor in the battlefield. It's very easy to point to major successes (like chat GTP), but the failures are prominent as well.

An additional argument to consider AI risk as remote, is the Fermi Paradox. Unlike nuclear war, AI-risk is not a Fermi Paradox explanation. If an alien civilization is destroyed by the development of AI, the genocidal AI would still be in place to expand (even faster than the original alien species) across the Universe. So, while nuclear war is a very likely alien killer, AI is only an alien replacer. The vast galactic silence we observe suggest a substantially higher nuclear than AI risk. Probably, the period between the first nuclear detonation and the development of AGI is simply too risky for the majority of intelligent species, and we have been extremely lucky so far (or we live in a low probability Everett’s multiverse branch where 77 years of nuclear war risk have not materialized).   

In any case, a super-human intelligence is the definitive governance tool: it would be capable of proposing social and political solutions superior to those that the human mind can develop, it would have a wide predictive superiority, and since it is not human it would not have particularistic incentives. All of this would give an AGI immense political legitimacy: a government oriented AGI would give countries that follow its lead a decisive advantage. During the Cold War, Asimov already saw AI (see the short story “ The Avoidable Conflict ”) as a possible way to achieve a “convergence of systems” that would overcome the ideological confrontation through an ideal technocracy.

Despite fears about the alignment of interests between AI and Humanity, in reality what we know for sure is that the most intractable problem is the alignment among humans, and that problem with nuclear weapons is also existential. Technological progress has already given us the tools of our own destruction. The safest way out for Mankind is forward, upward and ever faster, because from this height, the fall is already deadly.

Apart from AGI, there are several technologies for nuclear war risk mitigation. Decentralized manufacturing and mini-nuclear power plants could lead to a world without large concentrations of population and with moderate economic interdependence, that is, without the large bottlenecks that would be the main military targets in the event of a strategic nuclear war. Cheap rockets (like those developed by Space X) could allow the development of anti-missile shields, leading to a viable Strategic Defense Initiative. Should the worst happen, artificial food synthesis could allow survival in a nuclear winter. The portfolio of nuclear resilience technologies shall be developed in parallel to the paths of organic mitigation of existential risk. AI can accelerate them even if we do not succeed in producing the AGI that can solve the human alignment problem. 

The risks that AGI implies for Humanity are serious, but they should not be assessed without considering that it is the most promising path out of the age of acute existential risk. Those who support a ban of this technology shall at least propose their own alternative exit strategy.

In my view, we are already in the brink of destruction, so we shall recklessly gamble for resurrection.

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