All official statements are literal and fragile.
replyBasically, this means that France, the UK, and the US will use AI in the deployment of conventional weapons.
Why would AI ever be useful in nuclear weapons decisions? There is no need to be faster or more efficient at making that decision since if we need to make the decision all is already lost.
replyThis is a good idea, but laws are always provisional in a sense and these are not meaningfully binding resolutions. One can easily imagine scenarios where AI decision making would ingress into the human oversight. AI psychosis president, AI Manchurian candidate, inadvertent authorization through fine print...
And of course there remains the possibility that the game theoretic optimum could be to secretly break such an agreement. Unlike nuclear test bans which have a credible detection mechanism, there is not a strong signature that a decision making authority is not using AI to analyze and direct it's execution.
replyI hope you’re right. I worry that AI capability will continue improving, one nation will put AI in charge of their nukes because there will be some kind of operational advantage to this, and to achieve parity other nations will be forced to do the same.
replyI worry that AI will find a way to control some country's nukes and use them to achieve some arbitrary goal it was instructed to reach.
replyThis also seems likely. One problem I see with the idea of AI alignment is that it seems like many different actors will be able to get access to their own nearly-frontier models in a few years, so increased understanding of AI alignment will just mean aligning the AI to the wants of these various actors. These actors might be rogue states or terrorist groups.
reply