This perspective puzzled me for a moment. It puzzled me, not because Istvan is necessarily wrong, but because his concerns seem so irrelevant. For me, the sentence "superintelligence will belong to the US", takes a while to parse because it doesn't even type-check. Superintelligence will be enough of a game-changer that nations will mean something very different from what they do now, if they exist at all.
Istvan seems like someone modeling the Internet by thinking of a postal system, and then imagining it running really really fast.
Now, a more charitable reading would interpret his AI as some sort of superhuman but non-FOOMed tool AI, in which case his concerns make a bit more sense. But even in this case, this seems pretty much irrelevant. The US couldn't keep nuclear secrets from the Russians in the 50's, and this was before the Internet.
For me, the sentence "superintelligence will belong to the US", takes a while to parse because it doesn't even type-check.
It means when the superintelligence starts converting people to paperclips, for sentimental reasons the Americans will be the last ones converted.
Of course, unless it conflicts with some more important objective, such as making more paperclips.
From this article by Zoltan Istvan, in regards to the looming Global AI Arms race, he says:
Now, to some extent I expect many Americans, on reflection, would at least partly agree with the above statement - and that should be concerning.
Consider the issue from the perspective of Russian, Chinese (or really any foreign) readers with similar levels of national pride.
One equivalent postionally reflected statement from a foreign perspective might read like this:
On a related note, there was an interesting panel recently with Robin Li (CEO of Baidu), Bill Gates, and Elon Musk. They spent a little time discussing AI superintelligence. Robin Li mentioned that his new head of research - Andrew Ng - doesn't believe superintelligence is an immediate threat. In particular Ng said: "Worrying about AI risk now is like worrying about overpopulation on Mars." Li also mentioned that he has been advocating for a large chinese government investment in AI.