Episode
🤖 Superintelligence and national security: My chat (+transcript) with AI expert Dan Hendrycks
- Published
- May 8, 2025
- Duration seconds
- 2365
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Summary
My fellow pro-growth/progress/abundance Up Wingers, As we seemingly grow closer to achieving artificial general intelligence — machines that are smarter than humans at basically everything — we might be incurring some serious geopolitical risks. In the paper Superintelligence Strategy , his joint project with former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and Alexandr Wang , Dan Hendrycks introduces the idea of Mutual Assured AI Malfunction: a system of deterrence where any state’s attempt at total AI dominance is sabotaged by its peers. From the abstract: Just as nations once developed nuclear strategies to secure their survival, we now need a coherent superintelligence strategy to navigate a new period of transformative change. We introduce the concept of Mutual Assured AI Malfunction (MAIM): a deterrence regime resembling nuclear mutual assured destruction (MAD) where any state’s aggressive bid for unilateral AI dominance is met with preventive sabotage by rivals. Given the relative ease of sabotaging a destabilizing AI project—through interventions ranging from covert cyberattacks to potential kinetic strikes on datacenters—MAIM already describes the strategic picture AI superpowers find themselves in. Alongside this, states can increase their competitiveness by bolstering their economies and militaries through AI, and they can engage in nonproliferation to rogue actors to keep weaponizable AI capabilities out of their hands. Taken together, the three-part framework of deterrence, nonproliferation, and competitiveness outlines a robust strategy to superintelligence in the years ahead. Today on Faster, Please! — The Podcast , I talk with Hendrycks about the potential threats posed by superintelligent AI in the hands of state and rogue adversaries, and what a strong deterrence strat…