Over the course of two harrowing weeks in October 1962, the world came within an eyelash of nuclear Armageddon. The United States and the Soviet Union were jockeying desperately for advantage during the Cold War arms race. After the United States stationed intermediate-range nuclear missiles in Italy and Turkey, the Soviets, fearing a first strike, sought to station their own nuclear weapons in Cuba. The tense two-week standoff that ensued, the Cuban Missile Crisis, nearly escalated into nuclear war. But it didn't. Not only did the parties step back from the brink, the crisis proved to be a turning point in the Cold War itself. That brush with calamity changed the thinking of leaders on both sides, said William Wohlforth, a political scientist at Dartmouth who studies national security and international relations. "Right away we got the hotline agreement, so we could talk to each other. We began to work toward the testing agreement. And slowly, in the subsequent years we got a big, complex bilateral arms-control process."
The United States and the Soviet Union remained bitter enemies. But on one point of shared interest — not obliterating humanity — they could work together. Today experts in the artificial intelligence industry are sounding alarms that A.I. companies, and the countries where they are based, are locked in their own kind of arms race. The consequences, many believe, could be as disastrous as the nuclear war that President John F. Kennedy and the Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev, narrowly avoided.
A new working paper by Drew Fudenberg, an economics professor at M.I.T. who is a leading game theorist, and Andrew Koh, an economics professor at Columbia University and a research scientist at Google Deep Mind, suggests a possible way to slow the A.I. arms race to a safer pace. It would require the players in the competition, both companies and governments, to share good information about their advances, and to agree on where danger actually begins.
Professors Koh and Fudenberg start from a simple premise: Everyone has an interest in averting catastrophe, no matter how self-interested they may be. At the same time, they argue, the major players in the A.I. industry are under strong incentives to compete for dominance. The companies want the market share and billions of investment dollars that the most advanced models will bring. Governments want the economic benefits of A.I. and also access to advanced models for their own purposes. Those competitive pressures spur the players to race dangerously toward the brink of disaster, where many worry that rogue A.I. agents could, for instance, bring down government or financial systems, sabotage vital infrastructure or launch a biological attack.
Source: New York Times Top Stories · Summarized by HeadlinesBriefing