I do think they are a sufficient condition to kick off an arms race. Export controls are a declaration of hostility, and they force the two countries to decouple from each other. China and the US being decoupled makes the downside of an arms race much lower and the upside much higher.
It’s hard to justify export controls unless you believe that we actually are in an arms race, sooner or later. If you wanted to prevent an arms race you couldn’t pick a worse policy to put your weight behind. That leads me to conclude that AI policy people who back export controls find an arms race to be acceptable.
I don’t think something as strong as this, but I did think at the time that the work on export controls was bad and likely to exacerbate arms race dynamics, and continue to believe this (and the celebration of export controls as a great success of the EA policy efforts was one of the things that caused me to update on future EA-driven AI policy efforts probably being net harmful, though FTX played a bigger role).
I do think they are a sufficient condition to kick off an arms race. Export controls are a declaration of hostility, and they force the two countries to decouple from each other. China and the US being decoupled makes the downside of an arms race much lower and the upside much higher.
It’s hard to justify export controls unless you believe that we actually are in an arms race, sooner or later. If you wanted to prevent an arms race you couldn’t pick a worse policy to put your weight behind. That leads me to conclude that AI policy people who back export controls find an arms race to be acceptable.
I don’t think something as strong as this, but I did think at the time that the work on export controls was bad and likely to exacerbate arms race dynamics, and continue to believe this (and the celebration of export controls as a great success of the EA policy efforts was one of the things that caused me to update on future EA-driven AI policy efforts probably being net harmful, though FTX played a bigger role).