D̶o̶n̶’̶t̵⠀Can’t Look Up

Why AI development won’t stop and what can realistically be done about it. If war is so terrible, why do we still actively wage it? If nuclear weapons are so powerful and dangerous that we even came up with the concept of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) as a consequence of using them, why do we still keep stockpiles of them? If climate change is a scientifically proven fact whose consequences are not only awful, but global-reaching, why haven’t we successfully addressed it yet? If hunger could have already been eradicated, why haven’t we done so? If many of the most renowned AI scientists have warned against AI’s reckless development , why don’t we pause its development until at least we feel more certain about how to do it safely? These questions are complex and difficult to address in the world we live in. Or in other words: if these problems were easy to manage, they would already have been solved. In this post, I am making the claim that two fundamental challenges stand in the way of global coordination: 1) the visibility problem , concerning our ability to understand and agree on the nature and consequences of a threat; and 2) the structural problem , concerning the incenti