plus, it's hard to compartmentalize science. Once you get the bomb, it's not that hard for other people to figure out. So do you ban all German scientists and get the bomb 20 years later (and maybe let the Russians poach them, because...well it is a market with demand...), or get the Germans, and lose a few to espionage/traitors.
I feel these national borders on comms equipment will eventually be a paper tiger of sorts, because, well, tech is tech, and it's hard to stop the flow. And things work best with open standards anyway.
Authority figures will not matter. This technology, like nuclear weapons, will be pursued to the utmost by all actors capable of marshalling the resources, in secret if necessary. (After all, the 'Hydrogen bomb' was debated pro/con by established authorities, including Oppenheimer and Teller. Did that stop their development?)
US Senate has a bill drawing the line on AI launching nuclear weapons but to think US military, intelligence, and industry will sit out the AI arms race is not realistic.
China's CPC's future existence (imo) depends on AI based surveillance, propaganda, and realtime behavior conditioning. (re RT conditioning: We've already experienced this outselves via interacting with the recent chatbots to some extent. I certainly modulated my interactions to avoid the AI mommy retors.)
I doubt any country could keep it to themselves. Even if we tried and avoided espionage, once it's proven to work economically every major country would ramp up research. (But espionage would happen pretty quickly. We didn't even manage to keep the H-bomb secret for long.)
I think the strife involved would be much less than we're having now from limited fossil supplies...and far less than we'll have a few decades now from climate change.
Ask yourself this -- if all this happened during the cold war, would it have been considered anything special or different compared to other technologies or events? Or would it just have been our computing machine vs that godless commie one, and we'd all keep on keeping on trying to land on the moon or not lose our respective war somewhere?
I submit that it is not anything special, certainly pales in comparison to the atomic bomb. It's merely that we live in that weird end tail of the age of ideology where strong overarching ideologies came to (and are coming to) an end, where we're all scattered to the various geopolitical winds and in the absence of a strong guiding state and vision (communism vs capitalism) become more extreme and perturbed.
If you do want regulation, It should be something proper hashed out diplomatically and economically between Nation States and their respective blocs, no crony capitalist allowed, sorry. The rest of the world shan't be going along with something that economically cripples them.
The other way to look at it is that it's an arms race. Just because you believe something is problematic, that doesn't mean that stopping research into it doesn't lead into problems in its own right, and it can be hard to know what is the greater evil (but generally consensus has been it's better to be in control of that evil than to let someone else be in control of it and use it against you).
I'm sure many of the scientists that worked on nuclear weaponry over the years weren't in a hurry to see their work deployed, but felt their country the more responsibly party to have that capability, even if just to keep level with others.
This kind of thinking only works if all intelligent people end up sharing and following your same ideals. Since that's just not going to happen, is it better to leave your country in the weak position?
How would the cold war have played out if only one side had nuclear capabilities?
I'm also not sure the NSA intelligence is on the same difficulty as the Manhattan Project. As I understand, most if it is general information retrieval techniques. The same tool I wrote to help troubleshoot our VoIP networks is literally the same thing I'd do if I was writing a mass-spying tool. (Collect and index every single packet, store indefinitely, provide fast on-demand access on any selection criteria.)
Edit: Parent comment was equating NSA surveillance in difficulty to the Manhattan Project, and making the case that if no one like Feynman had worked on it, there wouldn't be nukes.
In a lot of these scientific do or don’t debates - people tend to disqualify that there’s a consequence to not building the technology.
In the H-Bomb example, what would happen if Oppenheimer didn’t help develop the bomb? Russia most certainly still would have. And the world would be a different place today.
China, Russia, shit - North Korea are all working on super shady projects that you not I would want any part of. However that doesn’t stop the technology from being developed - and in some dire cases - not making the technology domestically puts us at a disadvantage.
This isn’t me saying that Amazon should continue providing Facial Recognition software to the Government. This is just saying never doing evil isn’t always the best solution - on a global scale.
The "private" vs. "public" divide is less binary than your suggesting.
Individuals, corporations, low level government workers, and the government as a collective all have differing access to different types of information. Also, it's not just pieces of information but also the ability to deal with that that's restricted. For example you might look at a few tweets, but twitter rate limits you without paying them a lot of money.
Edit: (removed redundant crap).
Sure, Russia got copy's of the design for both the first Atomic and Hydrogen bombs. So, every country with nuclear weapons can trace their designs back to those same researchers. Yet, even after 10's of thousands of people have seen them (or a derivative design) and 70 years good luck finding detailed documentation on Google.
I don't agree, for critical actions such as this it needs some level of protection that can be handled by trained professionals. e.g. You do not want to make it easy to send a nuclear bomb, but you also need to make sure that if there's ever a need for it, it can be done quickly by trained professionals.
The test ban treaty was a slick example of pulling up the ladder after arriving somewhere first. Want weapons research? Now you need weapons researchers and supercomputers...
- Leverage in persuading scientists to become sources for foreign intelligence agencies, or to participate in sabotage.
- Delays development.
- Disincentivizes nuclear weapons research as career path.
The US and Russia experienced something on the order of 15 known nuclear weapons accidents despite attempts a command & control designed to prevent such occurrences. This doesn't include the unknown amount of weapons grade materials lost/stolen; or the possibility a few finished weapons may have been sold. How many rolls of the dice, by how many additional actors, before the world's luck runs out? From a risk management perspective, if there must be nuclear weapons (realistically) then not every country is capable of stewardship and possession of such weapons.
One need not take sides between, say, Iran and the US/Israel to make an ethical case for extreme efforts to prevent developing nations from obtaining nuclear weapons. The same ethical argument, however, strongly argues for open-sourcing nuclear stewardship technologies so that gaps in proliferation prevention are bridged.
1. It's not obvious to me you can't reverse-engineer the necessary timing information, especially when you have a bunch of nuclear weapons experts and a huge stockpile allowing you to take apart a few and use that knowledge on the rest. To my knowledge, the PAL system was intended to prevent weapons from being detonated by rouge officers or thieves; it wasn't designed to thwart states.
2. Even if all the conventional explosions are worthless, you still have all the nuclear material and other extremely sophisticated equipment involved with boosting, etc. It's not like creating new nukes from scratch.
I think for this conversation to continue productively, we need experts to weigh in on these issues.
Well, just like nuclear weapons, eventually the cat is out of the bag, and you can't really stop people from making them anymore. Except that, obviously, it's much easier to train an LLM than to enrich uranium. It's not a secret you can keep for long - after all it only took, what, 3 years for the Soviets to catch up to fission weapons, and then only 8 months to catch up to fusion weapons (arguably beating the US to the bunch of the first weaponizable fusion design)
Anyway, the point is, obfuscation doesn't work to keep scary technology away.
I feel these national borders on comms equipment will eventually be a paper tiger of sorts, because, well, tech is tech, and it's hard to stop the flow. And things work best with open standards anyway.
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