This is an edited version of a LW shortform.
Superintelligence will likely be developed by US companies; run on US data centres; and be under the jurisdiction of the US government. This will massively boost US military power and make the US economically dominant (e.g. US producing 99% of world GDP). By default, middle powers will be left in the dust.
How can middle powers avoid this fate? It’s tough, but here’s the best plan I could think of. (I’m particularly thinking about liberal democracies with influence over AI like UK, Europe, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan.)
On a very high level: middle powers should leverage the fact that the US needs them to beat China. It’s genuinely unclear which country will develop superintelligence first, and which would win in a subsequent industrial explosion. Middle powers should help the US,* and make sure they are rewarded with continued access to frontier AI and new technologies (including military tech).*
That final bolded part is hard. What can the UK realistically do if the US denies it access to frontier AI? The middle powers need a credible alternative to being supplicants of the US. The only alternative that makes sense to me is *siding with China. *If the US won’t grant middle powers access to their frontier AI, but China will, why should middle powers continue to send AI chips to the US? Why should they continue to support the US diplomatically and militarily? They shouldn’t. They should be willing to pivot to China if the US doesn’t offer AI access sufficient for their national security needs.
My plan for the middle powers has two stages:
Stage 1 could well be enough by itself. Maybe middle powers can maintain significant economic and military power indefinitely. But if not, stage 2 is a back-up: it binds the US so that it can’t use its dominance to crush the middle powers.
I’ll walk through each stage in turn.
The biggest lever here is securing access to frontier AI. Anton Leicht has a great post about how this is under threat, as evidenced by developments with Mythos. Middle powers should insist on equal commercial terms to US companies, and comparable access for their militaries. This is in AI companies’ interests! A bigger market means more customers and higher prices.
Aside: why access to frontier AI might be sufficient for middle powers to stay economically relevant indefinitely
The hope here is that:
Most of the economic surplus from AI isnotcaptured by AI companies.To create economic value, AI must be combined with complementary inputs: factories, human physical labour, know-how of human experts, relationships with suppliers, trusted brands, etc. How much of the surplus will be captured by AI companies vs the owners of these complementary inputs? Optimistically: producers of general-purpose technologies often capture only a small fraction of surplus; and multiple frontier AI companies might sell similar products and bid each other down on cost.Most of the economic surplus from AI occurs outside the US. The majority of these complementary inputs are situatedoutsidethe US. So most AI-driven economic value-add should occur outside US borders.
If (1) and (2) both hold, a significant fraction of AI’s economic surplus will accrue to non-US actors. But how can middle powers guarantee frontier AI access? It’s tough, but a few strategies:
Beyond securing access to frontier AI, how else can middle powers maintain economic and military leverage?
The catch-all meta-point here is waking middle powers up to superintelligence.
I’m not recommending middle powers do their own frontier AI development. Seems very hard for them to catch up with the US.
If stage 1 goes well, middle powers remain somewhat powerful economically and militarily deep into the singularity. But it might fail. What can middle powers do if they see the US on track to total global dominance? First, they should demand a /slowdown of AI development. But the US may refuse – pausing is very costly if alignment risk is low. And pausing is a stopgap: eventually, superintelligence will be developed.
An additional demand: when superintelligence is developed, it’s designed to refuse to crush middle powers. By doing this, the US would credibly bind itself to maintaining the sovereignty of other nations.
What would the US be binding itself to? At a minimum, to never attack middle powers militarily or otherwise interfere with their sovereignty. This would likely be enough to ensure middle power citizens could be very rich absolutely and live in freedom, even if their *relative *status falls far behind the US. But it could go further: the US could bind itself to continue sharing frontier AI access and other technologies with middle powers.
Would this work? The optimistic case is that this isn’t a big sacrifice for the US. They can still become as rich as they like and achieve their security interests. Sure, they can’t seize control of other nations, but that is not an important goal of theirs anyway. Losing that option is well worth the benefits: other nations cooperate economically, don’t attack US data centres, and don’t threaten nuclear war.
The pessimistic case is that this involves an insane degree of irrevocable hand-off to AI. The US must literally be unable to attack middle powers no matter how hard it tries: retraining the AI, turning it off, training a new more powerful AI, passing new laws, using the military to destroy the data centres the AI is running on. For it to be truly binding, the US must permanently hand over military and political power to AI. That might be deeply unpopular, and indeed seem insane to the US. It’s also extremely hard to verify: you can’t just verify the training run, you need to verify that humans+other AIs have no way to disempower the trained AI. It’s more like verifying “who would win this civil war” than “technical property XYZ holds”.
The realistic path here probably involves gradually handing off more and more control to AI that refuses to crush middle powers, with no clear point at which humans could no longer wrest back control.
To make the hand-off less irrevocable, the commitment could be time-bound: superintelligence won't help the US crush the middle power within the next 2 years. That could be enough to get us through a software-only intelligence explosion, after which middle power's compute supply chain leverage is more binding.
The longer middle powers wait to push for stage 2, the less leverage they will have because the US will have pulled further ahead economically and militarily. So they should be pushing in this direction constantly, e.g. demanding transparency into the model specs of powerful AIs deployed in the US government, and arguing that powerful military AI should be designed to obey international law.
(I described the plan as involving two stages because that’s how I expect it to play out over time. But succeeding at either stage is sufficient! If middle powers stay economically/militarily competitive, they never need to bind US superintelligence. And if they do bind superintelligence, they won’t be crushed no matter how far behind they fall.)
Another strategy: train superintelligence to ensure middle countries continue to get equal access to frontier AI. This combines stages 1 and 2, and could prevent even the relative disempowerment of middle powers.
I live in the UK, so I am biased here. I do not want the UK to become a supplicant to the US!
But here’s a brainstorm of pros and cons from a more impartial perspective.
Pros to empowering middle powers:
Cons of empowering middle powers. Multipolarity has its own downsides: