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You start from incorrect premises by presupposing agreed-upon rules would never work anyway.

"Competition" only makes sense within a pre-mediated set of constrains. Rules all competitors agree to.

Workable rules are a difficult problem, that doesn't mean it wasn't worthwhile to come up with them.

> You start from incorrect premises by presupposing agreed-upon rules would never work anyway.

The rules would never work on a global economy.

If you think the entire world is going to shake hands and agree not to let their companies use a competitive advantage, that’s not a conversation I’m interested in having. It’s a fantasy.

If you think it’s that easy to get all competitors in a global economy to agree to a set of rules, maybe start with nuclear disarmament?

Your idea about the world being inhabited by mindless seekers of short-sighted "competitive advantages" is the fantasy.

Getting people to agree isn't easy, that doesn't mean it wasn't worthwhile. There often even isn't any viable alternative to reaching an agreement in social settings.

When your hyper-competitive mode of thinking leads to undesirable consequences, you have to change your mindset. Reality doesn't conform to wishful thinking.

Yes I think this level of pessimism doesn’t actually hold up to the history of the last 100 years as it relates to nuclear weapons, cloning, wars etc. In fact I think the history actually points to the fact that believing such deals were impossible was a source of much of the strife. In many cases as soon as people started to actually speak to each other about what they had been fighting about they quickly realized that they wanted the same thing. No one wanted nuclear proliferation to increase but until someone said it it only got worse: https://www.history.com/articles/reykjavik-summit-nuclear-de.... When Robert McNamara met with a Viet Cong general after the war ended he realized that they both had totally misunderstood the objectives of the other: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=0X1YY49rPtg&ra=m. Agreeing to end nuclear testing saved us from the Cuban Missile Crisis. Richard Ngo, an AI safety researcher, often says that none of us are on the pareto frontier and I tend to agree with him.

Almost nobody (I have to say almost) in the world including Xi, the ceo of deep seek, Dario, and even Sam Altman want AI to kill everyone. I really think we just have to

A. Get stakeholders to believe this is a bad idea.

B. show that we’re willing to do it first to prevent this stupid race from continuing.

This is off topic now but yeah the world would have been a different place if someone had listened to the demands of Ho Chi Minh earlier.. and Hammarskjöld had not been crashed

> Agreeing to end nuclear testing saved us from the Cuban Missile Crisis.

The treaty came after the crisis, not before. And it only banned atmospheric, underwater, and space tests. The US and USSR kept testing underground on a large scale, while France and China never signed it and continued atmospheric tests for years.

Fair, I was going off memory and was wrong. I guess I was mostly just trying to get across that communication seems to be more powerful than we give it credit for, but should’ve double checked.

Nuclear disarmament is governed by treaty, which is largely adhered to.

An AI treaty could quite easily be offered by the US because it has multiple frontier labs. Most countries would quite happily limit the activity of their larger companies in exchange for their companies not being eaten alive by AI generally. It is pretty great fodder for international cooperation, and governments can move fast when it is timely to do so.

The greater the competitive advantage, the greater the incentive to "cheat" the rules.

I am highly skeptical everyone will play by the rules, even if you could get people to agree on paper.

The difference between something like "unlicensed AI training" and, e.g, Nuclear weapon non-proliferation is that nukes are realistically only a deterrence against invasion. There are no economic benefits to having them in a stockpile. They're hard to make, and the manufacturing and testing steps are pretty obvious to an observer.

This is opposed to AI training in a data center that might host remote-stream video games, hospital infrastructure, protein folding, etc. How will we be able to police that in any realistic fashion? Will China or the US allow unfettered visibility into all data centers data streams to outsiders?

And again, the incentives: Imagine having Astra v3 or Opus 8 while everyone else is stuck with a lobotomized version of GPT 4o.

What about the military applications? The weapon of the future is autonomous drone swarms. If I'm a superpower, I'm pouring hundreds of billions into that.

About the only realistic way this is going to work is if we are able to solve alignment in a way that doesn't significantly hinder AI development. If it imposes even, say, a 20% handicap, people will ignore it.

People don't "play by the rules" for uniform reasons: some have rational insight, others can be enticed and still others need to be shown averse consequences for breaking them. Rules aren't beneficial only when you hit 100% conformity, the mere possibility of them getting broken is no rational reason to abandon rules altogether.

"Alignment" likely is unsolvable programmatically: Conscious intelligence is more powerful than unconscious. How "aligned" are you? Would you want to be? What difference of any relevance is there between you and "artificial" conscious intelligence that allows you to turn them into slaves?

> ...the mere possibility of them getting broken is no rational reason to abandon rules altogether.

Of course I agree with that. The problem is the enforceability / detectability of this on a global scale hovers around zero, when we're talking literally trillions of dollars on the line.

You would literally have to have every data center account for every cycle of compute it generates.

Again, the nearest comparison feels like bioweapon and nuclear bans. But the difference is the incentives for building those feel significantly weaker, so treaties that reduce and ban their creation are pretty easy to get consensus on, broadly speaking. By comparison, this is something that might provide a 10x competitive advantage to your country's economic, intellectual, and military might.

I think the only way we would get broad global consensus on this is for something Really Bad to happen, so that it moves it out of the fuzzy "sci-fi theoretical" into concrete existance.

On competition between countries: you’re imagining the world economy as working in the same way pre and post AGI, I doubt it will work the same way at all.

There is not a single country nor trading block on Earth who is going to allow some AI dominant superpower to ravage them. The idea that America or China wins an economic game here is absurd, what happens instead is that trade barriers go up hard and the world fragments into blocks that tolerate AI to differing levels. Unevenly distributed AGI kills globalism the next day.

For the rest of your reply you ignore the “at least” part in that sentence, and also seem to expect a detailed policy proposal. The details can be worked out; there is some reasonable compromise between what activities AI can and cannot be used for, and what level of capability can be deployed where.

More broadly, you seem to believe in a just world fallacy of unregulated capitalism being an inherent good. It isn’t, and regulations exist even in the United States, so this unregulated state doesn’t exist now.

Moreover, regulations and redistribution are stronger elsewhere in the developed world, and there is a strong argument to be made that the lack of these in the US, and the gap between rich and poor that it causes, is responsible for more suffering than having more of these things outside of it.

I don't think this adds up. The AGI blocks will have AGI kill bots and those that don't won't have a choice about what they will or will not allow.

Well if your baseline scenario is that swarms of marauding kill bots murder everyone then yeah, this is all moot.

> I don't think this adds up. The AGI blocks will have AGI kill bots and those that don't

will have nukes.

Doesn't matter how much "intelligence" you have stockpiled when nukes start raining down on you.

Unless the AGI is able to develop effective defences to intercept an incoming nuclear attack.

MAD is a belief system. It doesn't matter whether AI can effectively stop the retaliation, it is enough that people making the decisions believed that it can (are we there already?).

But MAD means you can't use them. It might save you from an all out killbot invasion but it doesn't stop asymmetric warfare or being cutoff from the rest of the world.

> world join hands and agree not to compete with each other

We kinda do for other areas.

Largely the world agrees not to pirate software, tv, other IP.

THe issue of joblessness is well understood in china, they know that jobless people means a drop in living standards, a drop in living standards means the "contract" has failed.

So it makes sense that countries like america and the constituents of the EU understand that loosing 10% of all jobs in a few years is going to be a massive dick punch.

I also I think that finally the historians and economic types havae got through to the dipshit billionaire that they only have money because the plebs are spending money. If the plebs are unemployed and unemployable, they (the billionaires) are going to be lynched.

> If the plebs are unemployed and unemployable, they (the billionaires) are going to be lynched.

Hence the robot dogs

> Limit what AI corporations can use? Other countries would love that more than anything. Basically a free gift to any competitors or any startup that quietly avoids the rules.

Sure - look at what is being done today with H1B visas and tariffs.

What is more important to you - having a job and a functioning economy/society, or upholding some "free market" doctrine you've bought into?

Just as with H1B visas, you restrict usage. For example, don't allow AI to replace any job that pays under $250K.

If foreign countries make things cheaper, just as China is making EVs that cost a fraction of a Tesla, then slap tariffs on them.

A government should be primarily concerned about the people it represents, not about the profitability of the companies who are lobbying/bribing it.

> Sure - look at what is being done today with H1B visas and tariffs.

I have some bad news for you if you bought into the idea that the tariffs were good for domestic jobs and the economy.

> What is more important to you - having a job and a functioning economy/society, or upholding some "free market" doctrine you've bought into?

This is the definition of a false dichotomy, and you also ignored (or missed) the point completely.

I did not make an argument out of “free market doctrine”. I explained the second order effects that would provide a net reduction in jobs in this country.

My wife’s company is going through this right now. H1Bs are expensive and unpredictable, so the solution is to relocate more of the operations outside of the country and build up those offices.

Failure to understand second order effects and international economies is pervasive in these arguments for heavy regulations. You can do a lot to hold back your country’s companies to force them to pay for employees they don’t need and those few employees benefit for a while, but it collapses when those companies stop hiring in the regulated countries and resume hiring where they can actually operate a business. If you try to regulate them from doing it anywhere, you’ve given their competitors a wonderful gift to come destroy the company completely. Then they’re not making any jobs for anyone.

Do you think outsourcing and offshoring of jobs, whether manufacturing or software development, has been a positive for the US economy?

Does it make sense to you for US companies to be sending wages overseas, supporting a foreign family and economy, when there is someone here in the US, unemployed and equally capable of doing the job?

Trump has certainly been ham-fisted about tariffs, but in a world without tariffs then the country with lowest cost of production, closely related to lowest cost of living, and lowest wages, wins, and this is not going to be the US in most cases. If you follow that path then a high cost country like the US will end up utterly reliant on other countries as it imports almost everything, and loses all domestic manufacturing capability. Sounds familiar?

free market doctrine is an axiom to your second order effects. its so embedded into all your assumptions that you havent even considered it

Whatever you are calling "free market doctrine" is a physical law. Why would a business owner subject themselves to shitty conditions if they could find workers in better places? Some would of course, but not most or all.

They won't - they'll act purely in their self or shareholder's interest.

If the government wants companies to act in a way that benefits the country and its people, then they need to pass laws to make that happen, for example by things like H1B quotas, or by tax penalties that make the desired behavior the most profitable.

Why do you think protectionism works in benefit of the country's people? Ask Brazilians what they think of tariffs and protectionism. Ask for instance how many of them fly to the USA to buy electronics.

I think you need to take tariffs case by case and ask if this an industry worth protecting - do you need to have it domestically, or are you ok to rely on imports? Maybe you want to protect high margin industries supporting good jobs, and are willing to rely on imports for things like clothing, food, electronic assembly. OTOH some things should have strategic importance - so then maybe you want to make sure you (the country) are if possible self-sufficient for things like defense, semiconductor manufacture, etc.

People, just like companies, are most likely to act in their own self-interest rather than in the interest of society as a whole. Sure, you'd like to be able to buy everything as cheap as possible, which in a high cost of living (which translates into high cost of manufacture) country like the US would mean relying mostly on tariff-free imports, and the death of the entire industrial base. Is that really what's best for the country?

That doesn't work. What happens is that industry sells for a bit less than the price of the imported good and everyone suffers. It has no longer any incentive to compete and just sits and withers off while countries and companies participating in the market overtake it. It does the opposite of protecting the industry. While its still anti capitalist, I would consider state subsidies of certain industries more palatable than tariffing of competition.

Jobs are going to evolve because of AI. Some jobs will be automated. New jobs will be created. It's like saying we should have never created car factories and automated much of it because we should think of the horse handlers and maintainers.

There will still be a market for "trust". And its customers will never trust the machines. And within that market a lot of new startups will emerge for those who actually get to work and seize opportunities rather than lament a bygone era.

> New jobs will be created.

In the short term yes, but in the long term no.

What makes AI different to previous technological shifts is that it is (or will be) a general purpose technology, equally capable of itself doing the new jobs that it creates (so yeah, they'll be created, but also immediately taken away).

The saving grace is that this won't happen immediately, or as soon as we get something the AI companies slap an "AGI" label on in a couple of years, and it will likely take decades until we have an "artificial human" tech that genuinely could do any job (if we choose to allow that future).

Tariffs need to be credibly perceived as more or less permanent in whatever sector you're targeting for businesses to invest the large amounts of capital needed to reshore manufacturing.

Which is one of the main reasons Trump's arbitrary tariffs are ineffective policy, businesses see his capricious approach to tinkering with tariffs on a daily basis and instead make a rational decision to eat the costs under the assumption they are temporary.

Because he may change his mind in a week, SCOTUS may strike them down, Democrats win budgetary leverage in Congress, the right bribe gets paid for an exemption, etc. He could have enshrined them into legislation with the GOP's majority but politically they don't have enough support even within their own party, making the whole tariff saga pretty much pointless and self-defeating for any kind of long term restructuring of the US economy.