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Chapter 1: What historical context is provided on nuclear disarmament?
Hello, everyone. Welcome to Your Undivided Attention. This is Tristan Harris. In 1965, 20 years after the first test of a nuclear weapon, the Trinity test, a reporter asked Robert Oppenheimer whether it was too late to stop the spread of nuclear weapons. And at the time, five countries had developed their own atomic bombs. His answer was short and chilling. It's 20 years too late.
It should have been done... the day after Trinidad. But Oppenheimer was wrong.
Chapter 2: How does technology play a role in building trust between adversaries?
It wasn't too late. Nuclear deproliferation and disarmament did happen. And over 60 years later, only nine countries have nuclear weapons. Even the person who created this technology, who was convinced of its inevitability, couldn't imagine how the future might unfold. So how did this nuclear nonproliferation happen?
Chapter 3: Why is coordination on AI important for global security?
Well, it happened largely because of technology. The biggest obstacle to agreeing on nuclear red lines was that adversaries couldn't trust any promise the other made. They needed to be able to verify the number of warheads, and they needed to know if a nuclear device was for a weapon or a power plant. Now, none of that was possible until we built the technology needed to verify those things.
And today we're in a similar situation with AI.
Chapter 4: What verification technologies are needed for AI governance?
In order for adversaries like the United States and China to agree on reasonable red lines or on things like bioweapons, cyber hacking, or the risk of recursive self-improvement, they first need to be able to trust each other. And so we urgently need to build the verification technology that would make that trust possible.
So today, I'm so excited to have on the show two experts in this area to talk about the kinds of verification technology we need to think about how we would do this for AI.
Tim Fist is the Director of Emerging Technology Policy at the Institute for Progress, and Janet Egan is a Senior Fellow and Deputy Director for the Technology and National Security Program at the Center for New American Security, or CNAS. Tim and Janet, welcome to Your Unabided Attention. Thanks for having me.
Thanks for having me.
So just to level set for listeners who really don't know that much, just for a regular person out there, why does coordination on AI matter? Like what would happen if we didn't have coordination?
The fundamental premise is that AI and its impacts will be global, regardless of who develops it.
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Chapter 5: What challenges do experts face in establishing AI verification?
So it does matter which jurisdiction gets the transformative capabilities first, but it doesn't matter in terms of them having global impacts. Risk that eventuates in one country doesn't respect national borders and can easily move across and impact global equities. And we're no longer in the Kumbaya globalist zeitgeist of the 1990s, where everyone was building up global institutions.
We've kind of moved into a different realm where there's like diminishing engagement in international rules and lower trust between different international counterparts. So I think this means we really need to be preparing for a world where any agreements that protect collective global interests aren't just based on trust, but are based on the ability to verify that folks are following the rules.
Do you want to add to that, Tim, in terms of how the consequences of AI are global and not contained to one country?
Yeah, so I think it's interesting to put this in the context of current events. I think over the last few months, we've had all three of the leading US AI labs say that having the option for a global slowdown or pause in AI development is something that they would support. So this is coming from DeepMind, Anthropic, and OpenAI, which is kind of like a big deal.
if we take them at their word for why they said they want this kind of thing, they think they're not that far off from building AI systems that can exhibit what's called recursive self-improvement or RSI.
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Chapter 6: How can historical examples inform AI treaty negotiations?
And what that means is like an AI system that's capable of autonomously designing and then building its own successor. And I think the risks that these people point to is if this happens, it could have two big consequences. So one is on like the misuse of AI.
So if we see this rate of capability growth happening far exceeding what we've seen over the past few years, it could lead to sort of much greater risks in the near term future of people like using AI to do dangerous stuff. And the other risks that these people point to is the risk of like loss of control.
So humans losing understanding of the AI systems that they're building, leading to the creation of a model that we can't control and we also don't understand how it works. And so it could be misaligned with human interests. And so, yeah, what...
These labs are calling for what we might want in such a situation is time for the world to take coordinated action so that like societal institutions and alignment research can keep up. And what you really need for that is some way to verify that everyone's following those same rules and actually engaging in that kind of like coordinated slowdown.
Chapter 7: What are the current efforts and policies regarding AI verification?
Right. So just to back up for listeners, because Anthropic recently did publish this letter about a need for a global slowdown. But they noted that if one lab chooses to slow down, and that doesn't stop China from slowing down, then they're just basically sacrificing the current lead that they have.
And you're back to the basic fundamental arms race that, you know, everyone is racing to build more and more powerful models. for the fear that if you have a more powerful one and you can use it over me, aka China gets mythos and can hack the US before US gets mythos and can hack China, just that paranoia alone creates the kind of pressures for continuing to advance on the capability curve.
But we get back to how could these labs and countries and companies actually verify that they're doing the right thing and they're going to uphold their agreement? Because we all know they're going to say, oh, I'm going to do the right thing, but then secretly I'm going to build it in a black project in an underground bunker facility.
you know, military base or, you know, data center that's buried underneath the earth. And so that brings us to the conversation we're having today. How would you make this relatable to someone who doesn't understand or think about, you know, verifying AI treaties?
Chapter 8: What hopeful scenarios could emerge from improved AI governance?
What's the story of mystery we might point to?
So there's a couple of examples from the nuclear space about this fundamental idea of a technology enabled an agreement to happen.
One is the seismic monitoring system that allows treaties like the Comprehensive Test Brand Treaty, the CDBT, to happen, where because we have the technology to detect underground tests, 300 monitoring stations distributed globally across, you know, up to 100 countries,
those monitoring stations allow us to detect underground tests, which then allow you to have an agreement that bans underground tests. Because without that technology, you would not be able to verify whether the agreement was being complied with. And we did see that every single signatory to this treaty has not engaged in nuclear testing, which is sort of, in my view, a very big success story.
Another really interesting one is from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty. So this was a treaty that was signed to try and prevent like a whole category of nuclear weapons from existing, which were those with flight times of less than 10 minutes. Because that is extremely dangerous, you don't have much warning, you could sort of like attack immediately.
And so this was primarily targeted at launches that were located in Europe, between sort of like Europe and the USSR. And this treaty was actually enabled by an X-ray scanning technology. This was called CargoScan, which they placed this technology, the US and the Soviet Union developed this together and deployed it at Soviet missile factories.
And what this technology did is for every single rail car that was coming out of this missile factory, that was scanned by this X-ray machine to measure the diameter of the missile to ensure that it was not one of these intermediate range missiles that have a flight time of less than 10 minutes.
This is cited as the key thing that actually made this treaty around this kind of nuclear weapon possible. So the existence of that X-ray technology made it such that we could put in place this agreement that we wanted to have.
So someone had just said they meant the technology and realized that the diameter alone of the size of the missile would essentially be enough to get a sort of a signal of what was going on in that missile and whether it matched the treaty, the terms of the agreement.
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