Freedom of Action: America's ASI Strategy, w/ RAND's Joel Predd, Ben Boudreaux & Matt Chessen

Hello, and welcome back to the Cognitive Revolution! Today my guests are Joel Predd – Senior Engineer & Director; Ben Boudreaux – Policy Researcher & Professor of Public Policy, and Matt Chessen – Resident Technical Expert, at the Center for the Geopolitics of AGI at the RAND Corporation. Together with co-authors, they've recently written a new RAND Perspective paper called "A U.S. Strategy to Secure Geopolitical Advantage on an Uncertain Path to Superintelligence: Maintaining Freedom of Action". This is one of the clearest pieces of AI strategy writing I've encountered – it's both a great introduction and orientation tool for people who are just now entering the AI strategy discourse, and a useful organizing framework for anyone who's been frustrated by how many AI strategy conversations consist of smart people talking past one another due to differing, often unstated assumptions about critical questions. Their first contribution is a taxonomy of 7 Archetypal Strategies that aim to achieve distinct, coherent win conditions, and the 5 Pivotal Uncertainties that will need to be resolved before the best strategy can be identified. The 7 Strategies, which will be familiar to Cognitive Revolution listeners, include: - Acceleration, aka the a16z Plan of letting technology take its natural course - Dominance – aka the Dario plan where the US builds such an advantage that it can dictate terms to other countries. - Co-Development – which you might think of as the Demis Plan for international cooperation - Preparedness for Coexistence, which seems to be OpenAI's plan, as far as I can tell - a Moratorium – aka the Pause AI Plan - Deterrence – which is something like Dan Hendrycks, Alex Wang, and Eric Schmidt's Mutual Assured AI Malfunction Plan, - and finally, investments in what they call "Continuity of Society", which might be best described as Prepping for an inevitable AI Doomsday. The 5 Uncertainties are: 1. How close are we to extremely powerful and dangerous AI systems? 2. Is it feasible for humans to coexist with such systems? 3. Is it possible for one actor, which could be a country or perhaps even a private company, to use such systems to achieve a decisive strategic advantage over its competitors? 4. Can humanity come together to cooperatively restrain itself from developing such dangerous systems? 5. And finally… can the United States or a coalition of governments prevent the development of such systems, including by force if necessary? The core argument, as you'll hear, is that because there's no consensus on these critical questions, even as AI capabilities continue to advance at a blistering pace, the United States should invest now in all of the foundational technologies, institutions, and other capabilities that the various strategies would require, such that we can keep our options open long enough to get the answers needed to make a wise high-level strategic choice and commitment. Ultimately, while I'd personally argue for Co-Development by default, with a Moratorium as the fallback, in case it becomes clear that we simply can't continue to develop AIs safely, I feel that this recommendation is a very good one for a national government that is just now beginning to understand the nature of the technology, and remains – for a mix of good and bad reasons – very doubtful that it can trust its rivals to cooperate on such a high-stakes issue. Along the way, we discuss: - how the politics of AGI have shifted in DC over the last couple of years, - how AGI-pilled the government is today, - how realistic a decisive strategic advantage really is, - the similarities and differences between the strategic dynamics of the current AI situation and the Cold War nuclear arms race, - the magnitude of the investment they are recommending, which they are working to quantify in upcoming work on the cost and lead times for 106 distinct capabilities they've listed in a Security Architecture Catalog, - and what we can do, both in our organizations and even just as individuals, to maintain as much agency and control as possible even as we seek maximum leverage from AI in our work. This conversation, and the Perspective Paper itself, stand out for abstracting away the many messy and often confusing details of week-to-week AI developments and focusing attention on the most critical decisions the United States will need to make, as well as the core reasons that it remains premature to commit to a single strategy. So, without further ado, I hope you enjoy this clarifying synthesis of AI discourse and simple, high-level argument that the US government should do everything it can now to maintain its freedom of action on the path to superintelligence, with Joel Predd, Ben Boudreaux, and Matt Chessen of RAND's Center for the Geopolitics of AGI.

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Thank you for being part of The Cognitive Revolution,
Nathan Labenz