The Race for AGI Poses New Risks to an Unstable World

In the headlong rush for technological supremacy, strange new risks are being created. Just as nuclear scientists were unsure whether the first atomic blast would ignite the earth’s atmosphere, today’s AI researchers can’t say whether smarter-than-human computers would be friends or foes. There’s a chance, some believe, that superhuman intelligence might escape human control entirely. If a runaway AGI wanted to harvest our oxygen, electricity, and carbon for its own purposes, there might be nothing we could do to stop it. In this way, some scientists fear, the winner of the race to AGI might be neither the U.S. nor China, but rogue AI itself, spelling the end of human civilization.

The Trump Administration is skeptical of these risks. The bigger danger, current and former White House insiders say, is of the U.S. losing its technological lead to China. It is this belief, more than any other, that is defining the U.S. government’s approach to AI. “It should be unacceptable to any American to live in a world in which China could outcompete us in AI, and reap the economic and military benefits,” David Sacks, President Trump’s AI czar, said in January. “If we hobble ourselves with unnecessary regulations,” he added a month later, “[China] is going to take advantage of that fact, and they’re going to win.”