I agree that the current nuclear weapon situation makes AI catastrophe more likely on the margin, and said as much here (The paragraph “You might reply: The thing that went wrong in this scenario is not the out-of-control AGI, it’s the fact that humanity is too vulnerable! And my response is: Why can’t it be both? …”)
That said, I do think the nuclear situation is a rather small effect (on AI risk specifically), in that there are many different paths for an intelligent motivated agent to cause chaos and destruction. Even if triggering nuclear war is the lowest-hanging fruit for a hypothetical future AGI aspiring to destroy humanity (it might or might not be, I dunno), I think other fruits are hanging only slightly higher, like causing extended blackouts, arranging for the release of bio-engineered plagues, triggering non-nuclear great power war (if someday nuclear weapons are eliminated), mass spearphishing / hacking, mass targeted disinformation, etc., even leaving aside more exotic things like nanobots. Solving all these problems would be that much harder (still worth trying!), and anyway we need to solve AI alignment one way or the other, IMO. :)
I agree that the current nuclear weapon situation makes AI catastrophe more likely on the margin, and said as much here (The paragraph “You might reply: The thing that went wrong in this scenario is not the out-of-control AGI, it’s the fact that humanity is too vulnerable! And my response is: Why can’t it be both? …”)
That said, I do think the nuclear situation is a rather small effect (on AI risk specifically), in that there are many different paths for an intelligent motivated agent to cause chaos and destruction. Even if triggering nuclear war is the lowest-hanging fruit for a hypothetical future AGI aspiring to destroy humanity (it might or might not be, I dunno), I think other fruits are hanging only slightly higher, like causing extended blackouts, arranging for the release of bio-engineered plagues, triggering non-nuclear great power war (if someday nuclear weapons are eliminated), mass spearphishing / hacking, mass targeted disinformation, etc., even leaving aside more exotic things like nanobots. Solving all these problems would be that much harder (still worth trying!), and anyway we need to solve AI alignment one way or the other, IMO. :)