Over at the Washington Examiner, Sebastien Laye examines the dystopian future with regards to computer technology and whether international AI rivalries promise nothing but general mayhem. Sébastien Laye on Mutually assured malfunction and the new AI cold war:
There is nothing a public policy analyst enjoys more than a good analogy. Artificial intelligence literature is replete with them, provided regularly by think tank experts, industry luminaries — Anthropic’s Dario Amodei’s “Machines of Loving Grace,” referencing poet Richard Brautigan, remains my favorite — and philosophers of diverse perspectives. Recently, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt introduced another intriguing concept in his comprehensive paper “Superintelligence Strategy”: MAIM, or mutually assured AI malfunction.
The acronym is a reference to the Cold War era and the Rand-coined MAD, short for mutually assured destruction. Such evocative acronyms, reminiscent of nuclear tensions, are undeniably effective at capturing the public imagination. Schmidt’s parallel innuendo here is that as we were on the brink of utter devastation 50 years ago during the U.S.-USSR nuclear race, we are in the same predicament today as we are caught in the midst of the U.S.-China AI race. Although I do not fully subscribe to this view, believing firmly that the United States can and should lead, albeit with China closely trailing, many economists seem convinced that the race will have no winner.
In a paper titled “The Manhattan Trap: Why a Race to Artificial Superintelligence is Self-Defeating,” Corin Katzke and Gideon Futerman used game theory to investigate the dynamics of international AI competition. Their conclusion was that such a race would be even more dangerous for international stability than the nuclear race as it would heighten the risks of great power conflict, loss of control of AI systems, and the undermining of liberal democracy.
This is also what Schmidt postulates in his paper, highlighting the differences between the nuclear race with the risk of an AI malfunction and even of preemptive strikes by one of the two rivals. Like the Cold War’s MAD doctrine, which hinged on the devastating cost of nuclear conflict deterring aggression, MAIM could function as a deterrent equilibrium or incentivize international collaboration in AI.
MAIM proposes that large-scale attempts by any single nation to achieve unilateral dominance in artificial intelligence capabilities will inevitably invite retaliatory sabotage from rival states. We can envision several forms of actions, ranging from covert cyberattacks degrading AI training processes to more direct physical assaults on data centers, underscoring the fragility inherent in maintaining unilateral AI projects aimed at strategic monopoly. … Thus, the assurance of general mayhem underpins a precarious yet possibly stable deterrence regime. …
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