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Comment by JoshTriplett | Hacker News Reader

They will if it would be against international treaties to do otherwise, mutually enforced by every other world power.

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They made a movie about that.

Between:

   "Iron Sky"
   "Whoops Apocalypse" 
   "Wag The Dog"

and

   "Idiocracy"

You'd think we were amply warned.

We don’t even need something that powerful, you can control the hardware manufacturers and distributors. If you control GPUs, HBM, and the hardware needed to cool all that down and provide the power, that’s enough to make it very hard to scale up the risk.

You cannot really hide an AI datacenter consuming GW of power for too long.

Except no one country controls all that. And if you put limits on it, other countries will speed up doing it themselves.

If you stop going "nobody will do anything actually effective", and start going "how do we do something actually successful", any number of successful ideas start readily arising. It is possible to stop. Not easy, but possible.

Like a war or something? I can't think of a successful non-bad way for everyone to stop besides a treaty.

Outside of the current nonsense in Iran, we've never had to go to war to prevent nuclear arms. We've never had to go to war to ban weapons in space. These things are possible. Hard but possible

> we've never had to go to war to prevent nuclear arms. We've never had to go to war to ban weapons in space

We've mostly been blindsided by covert nuclear programmes. As for weapons in space, they don't have any purpose. The moment they make sense we'll see weapons in space.

That's why treaties sound reasonable to me. Though I'd imagine they would be more like Climate Change ones. Before Iran there were bombings to stop nuclear arms. Imagine a country getting bombed because it's detected their building a data center.

US + South Korea + Taiwan gives a control over pretty much all the hardware used for AI training and inference. Of course having a psychopath president like Trump doesn’t really help at anything that requires international collaboration

> international treaties to do otherwise, mutually enforced by every other world power

This does not exist.

Look at how we regulate nuclear weaponry. Consider how much more widespread it would be if we hadn't.

Nuclear weaponry is effectively regulated because the nuclear powers have agreed that nobody else should be allowed to have the capability.

So this is basically suggesting that USA and China should work together to ensure that they are the only ones allowed to develop and maintain capable AI. And between the two of them they can carve up and techno-colonize the rest of the world.

> Nuclear weaponry is effectively regulated because the nuclear powers have agreed that nobody else should be allowed to have the capability

Nuclear powers also gave security guarantees that e.g. convinced Ukraine to give up its Soviet stockpile. We're almost certainly entering a new regime of proliferation due to the breakdown of that system.

We've also agreed, for instance, not to do certain types of testing anymore. Just as we could agree to stop training even larger frontier models.

Except...

(From WP)

India

In 1998, India said it would only sign the treaty if the United States presented a schedule for eliminating its nuclear stockpile, a condition the United States rejected.[18]

Israel

In 2016, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that its ratification was dependent upon "the regional context and the appropriate timing".[19]

United States

The United States has signed the CTBT, but not ratified it; there is ongoing debate whether to ratify the CTBT.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_parties_to_the_Compreh...

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