Ross Douthat

The risk of human misuse, misuse primarily by authoritarian regimes and governments, and scenarios where AI goes rogue.

What do you call autonomy risks?

I think the Internet, including your own AIs, are already generating that.

The Internet does that for us.

Just fine.

So let's talk about the kind of political military dimension, right?

So you say, I'm going to quote, a swarm of billions of fully automated armed drones, locally controlled by powerful AI, strategically coordinated across the world by even more powerful AI, could be an unbeatable army.

And you've already talked a little bit about how you think that in the best possible timeline, there's a world where essentially democracies stay ahead of dictatorships.

And this kind of technology, therefore, to the extent that it affects world politics, is affecting it on the side of the good guys.

Right.

I'm curious about why you don't spend more time thinking about the model of what we did in the Cold War, where it was not swarms of robot drones, but we had a technology that threatened to destroy all of humanity.

There was a window where people talked about, oh, the U.S.

could maintain a nuclear monopoly.

That window closed.

And from then on, we basically spent the Cold War in sort of

rolling ongoing negotiations with the Soviet Union.

Right now, there's really only two countries in the world that are doing intense AI work, the US and the People's Republic of China.

I feel like you are strongly weighted towards a future where we're staying ahead of the Chinese and effectively sort of building a kind of shield around democracy that could even be a sword.

But isn't it just more likely that

If humanity survives all this in one piece, it will be because the U.S.