But as leading AI scholars have been making clear all week, nothing about AI, which has advanced by leaps and bounds just in a few months, is stable. A more apt metaphor may be the one used by Thomas Schelling, a titan of nuclear strategy and winner of the Nobel Prize for his work in game theory.
As the Cold War advanced, Schelling imagined a situation in which two adversaries find themselves “in a room full of gasoline,” each holding matches. Neither can credibly threaten to strike his match, since the conflagration would kill them both.
But each can, through provocation or miscalculation, raise the risk of incineration by inadvertent escalation or accident.
Schelling was describing a situation of brinkmanship that is captured in game theory with Chicken, a scenario in which two drivers race toward each other. If one swerves, the other wins. If both swerve, neither wins, but both are safe. If neither swerves, they crash. Translated to today’s AI situation, crash could mean extinction.
Whereas the Prisoner’s Dilemma allows for rationality (even for scorpions, in this mixed metaphor), Chicken describes something more frightening: the loss of control and, in Schelling’s phrase, a “threat that leaves something to chance.”
That seems to describe the AI race, as companies in the US, and presumably China, are creating large-language models and other agents that autonomously manipulate or attack other systems and have already done so.