The problem with AI is that it should be regulated, not stopped. And I don't mean the type of regulation that stops startups from competing against incumbents. Regulate the algorithms like Senator Elizabeth Warren suggested. But since the US is, at the moment, a majority
gerontocracy, so really old people either want their pensions/stocks/retirement to keep going great, or they are ignorant of it. Likely the former for US leaders, since many of them have credible staffers who do know about reinforcement learning, AI, LLMs, automation, and AI workflows.
The second problem is the Putin problem of AI. The nation/person I am most afraid of getting AI isn't Iran, or can't get AI due to its lack of electricity(the last time I heard of Iran, they had an energy shortage), competent leadership, and general economic misery. O,r North Korea, which doesn't even have a functioning dense power grid based on satellite photos, despite lots of natural resources. It's not Xi who, if given AGI or nuclear-armed AGI, which is, despite what all leaders tell you, the eventual goal, would likely not nuke the US, given the fact that no one would trust them again, they have economic assets in Mexico, would face nuclear winter and possible large-scale starvation without US food, and fertilizers. And China can't just use AGI to disarm the US in terms of WMDs either, because our allies would give us a heads up, and they have their own AI.
- It's Vladimir Putin. Putin can feed his people despite nuclear winter. Putin was the one who freaked everyone else out when he stated whoever controls AI will control the world, aka if I win the AGI race, I will actively use it against the West, whom he hates more than Xi or the CPC hates the US. I think the US and NATO have a strategic competition with China, not a Cold War(Yes, I was wrong), while the US has a Cold-Semi-hot War with Russia. If you let Putin be in control of AGI, he will use it to pinpoint the exact point every nuclear asset in NATO would be at its most vulnerable, and run historical models that show correlation with a black swan event and possible massive NATO nuclear vulnerability at its most critical point, and then he would strike.
- It's not China because China has not shown its willingness to go beyond the culmination point in war; they could have annexed more Indian land, they could have won the Sino-Vietnam War and taken land, but they have been very risk-averse. That's not to say they haven't thought the same way I am thinking, but their portability is lower, they are more in touch with the US-led order, as we speak, there is a clique of pro-west, pro-businessmen, pro-globalism clique in Shanghai, and likely in Guangzhou, Shenzhen, and other various coastal tier one cities minus Fujian.