Optimising Society to Constrain Risk of War from an Artificial Superintelligence
This paper is now up (with the annex mentioned in the paper) as a preprint at https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/4268q It can be cited as Draper, John. 2020. “Optimising Peace Through a Universal Global Peace Treaty to Constrain Risk of War from a Militarised Artificial Superintelligence.” SocArXiv. April 15. doi:10.31235/osf.io/4268q. Comments are welcome below. Optimising Peace through a Universal Global Peace Treaty to Constrain Risk of War from a Militarised Artificial Superintelligence John Draper Abstract An artificial superintelligence (ASI) emerging in a world where war is still normalised may constitute a catastrophic existential risk, either because the ASI might be employed by a single nation-state on purpose to wage war for global domination or because the ASI goes to war on behalf of itself to establish global domination; these risks are not mutually incompatible in that the first can transition to the second. We presently live in a world where few states actually declare war on each other or even war on each other. This is because the 1945 United Nations’ Charter's Article 2 states that UN member states should “refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state”, while allowing for “military measures by UN Security Council resolutions” and “exercise of self-defense”. In this theoretical ideal, wars are not declared; instead, 'international armed conflicts' occur. However, costly interstate conflicts, both ‘hot’ and ‘cold’, still exist, for instance the Kashmir Conflict and the Korean War. Furthermore, a ‘New Cold War’ between AI superpowers (the United States and China) looms. An ASI-directed/enabled future interstate war could trigger ‘total war’, including nuclear war, and is therefore ‘high risk’. One risk reduction strategy would be optimising peace through a Universal Global Peace Treaty (UGPT), which could contribute towards the ending of existing
A couple of points. In certain, limited expressions of human international relations, we do know what the decision making process was to reach major decisions, such as the drafting and signing of the Geneva Conventions, some of humanity's best and most successful policy documents. This is because the archived UK and US decision making processes were very well documented and are now declassified.
In other words, we can actually deconstruct human decision making principles (probably conforming instrumentalism in the case of the Geneva Conventions) and then use them to ground or verify other principles.
Coherent diamonds are likely to be obtained from human utopianesque sci fi than anywhere else. This is because decision making... (read more)