What Safeguarding Nukes Can Teach Us About Safeguarding A.I.

The Daily

The episode explores whether the historical framework of nuclear nonproliferation can serve as a blueprint for regulating the existential ri

Key takeaways

• The Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (N/A) successfully limited weapon spread through inspections and commitments from major powers.
• Unlike nuclear weapons which require rare materials like uranium, AI development relies on 'compute,' which is much harder to regulate or intercept.

Main topics

• Nuclear Nonproliferation
• AI Regulation

Notable quotes

Treat AI the way superpowers treated nuclear weaponry.

Conclusion

While the nuclear era provides a conceptual model for cooperation, the

Transcript preview

Speaker 7 (0:00) My name is Diana Dunn. I would like to be able to share my New York Times account with my granddaughters. We live in a very rural area. I would like to share my account just to increase their knowledge of our whole world. Thank you so much. Speaker 5 (0:17) Diana, we heard you. It's why we created the New York Times Family Subscription. One subscription, up to four separate logins for anyone in your life. Find out more at nytimes.com slash family. Speaker 3 (0:34) From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Last night, in a lavish ceremony, President Trump welcomed Chinese leader Xi Jinping as he arrived in the United States for two days of closely watched negotiations. On their crowded agenda, what if any role they should play in regulating artificial intelligence amid a global freakout over its risks? Speaker 3 (1:08) Today, as my colleague David Sanger explains, when it comes to protecting humanity from technological catastrophe, there's really only one proven model for the two leaders to look to. It's Thursday, September 24th. David? up from Washington, D.C., sitting here in our New York studios, and I didn't even have to come to you this time. You know, I just had to Speaker 8 (1:44) come see the Daily's Empire in Speaker 3 (1:46) New York. In person? In person. Yeah. It's pretty remarkable. It's a humble empire. It's a late stage. So, David, when President Trump and the leader of China, Xi Jinping, meet in Washington today, They're going to broach this subject on many people's minds, which is the risk of artificial intelligence, that risk including, of course, these swarming rogue AI agents that have been hacking into companies and basically breaking the rules of their creators. And what she and Trump uniquely can maybe do about it is going to be the subject of at least some of this meeting. And I think we've all come to understand that The leaders of the U.S. and China are uniquely positioned to talk about the safety of AI because they're the countries with the most advanced frontier AI laboratories. And the only way that AI gets contained is if both of those countries somehow act together and at the same time. And as this meeting approached, and this is why we love you so much, you reached out to us to say, you know, I have seen this movie before. Big fears. big thoughts about coordination and solutions to big problems. You told us there's a historical parallel to all of this and maybe a historical solution. Speaker 8 (3:11) Well, Michael, there is an obvious parallel. We had an era starting in the late 1940s and through the Cold War where two states, the Soviet Union and the United States, had created... a potentially terrifying technology that had all kinds of commercial uses but could also bring about civilizational extinction. Speaker 3 (3:35) Nuclear weapons. Speaker 8 (3:36) Nuclear weapons. And everybody had to go figure out how we were going to get the benefits without getting the terror. And you know what? It took decades to happen. These two countries, they locked arms and they came up with agreements that ultimately have... brought us to the remarkable moment that there has been no use of a nuclear weapon in anger since 1945. Right. Nuclear nonproliferation worked. Nuclear nonproliferation combined with a balance of terror worked. So now, quite naturally, everybody's looking to that model as we begin to think about how you might contain artificial intelligence. particularly after this summer of surprises that we've had where we have rogue agents breaking out of their sandboxes. Right. Treat AI the way superpowers Speaker 3 (4:35) treated nuclear weaponry. Speaker 8 (4:38) Well, look, if you think that the heads of some of these frontier companies are coming out and saying there is a 10 % chance of civilizational extinction, Speaker 3 (4:45) that's Speaker 8 (4:46) probably a higher proportion chance than there was in the early days of the nuclear era. that we would wipe each other off the map. At least it's equivalent. And so now the question is, can two very different countries in very different times, China and the United States, come to some kind of framework agreement that could begin to get us there? Speaker 3 (5:12) Okay. Well, given all of that, In your capacity, David, as a historian of all the world's great technological dangers, I think it would be instructive to have you tell us the story of nuclear nonproliferation, how that old framework that kept nuclear weapons from going off around the world could, in theory, apply right now to AI. So just give us a quick history lesson here. Speaker 8 (5:42) Let's just start with when the U.S. developed its first atomic weapon through the Manhattan Project. Familiar to anybody who's been off to see the Oppenheimer movie or read some of this history. It was in the 1940s. Speaker 8 (5:55) And at the time, there was a deep fear that another country would beat us to it. But it wasn't the Soviets at that time. It was Germany. Speaker 7 (6:04) In a last desperate attempt to escape defeat, German science threw everything it had into the perfection of V2. Speaker 8 (6:10) Where the fear of American intelligence was the Germans would get a nuclear weapon. before the United States. And there was this just abiding fear we had to get there first. In Speaker 7 (6:21) the spreading, teeming laboratories of the Manhattan Project, the pace intensified. Groves had ordered that the first bomb must be ready for testing in mid-July. Speaker 8 (6:30) And in the summer of 1945, scientists from Los Alamos went out to do the Trinity test, which was the first explosion of a nuclear bomb to see if the technology could work. Speaker 7 (6:43) It occurred to someone that if the bomb succeeded, half New Mexico would be littered with fragments of radioactive steel. Any man who looked at it at the moment of detonation would never see again. Speaker 8 (6:54) There were people within the Los Alamos program who were doing mathematical calculations and coming to the conclusion that we could light the entire atmosphere afire and destroy the Earth in doing the test. But despite those fears... Speaker 8 (7:16) They went ahead with the test. Just weeks later... Speaker 7 (7:23) A short time ago, an American airplane dropped one bomb on Hiroshima. Speaker 8 (7:29) Came Hiroshima. Speaker 7 (7:31) 8.15 in the morning, found a 400-pound bomb with a destructive force of 20,000 tons of TNT mushrooming up over the stunned enemy city. To the frightened inhabitants, the end of the world had come. Speaker 8 (7:42) And days after that, Nagasaki. Speaker 7 (7:45) Four square miles of the city were blasted into dust. And a black rain of destruction hovered over the ruins for many hours. Speaker 8 (7:52) And in total, those two bombs killed around 200,000 people. Of course, the world had never seen anything like this before. Tens of thousands of homes and buildings were wiped out. The devastation was everywhere. Speaker 7 (8:07) Japan was driven to quick surrender. For the future, the choice is peace or total destruction. The atomic age is here. Speaker 8 (8:25) But somewhat astonishingly, it didn't stop the arms race. Of course, it turned out to be just the beginning. And now, of course, the U.S. thought it had an insurmountable lead over countries that didn't yet have nuclear weapons. That lead didn't last very long. The Soviets were working away on this. They had a bunch of atomic spies along the way who helped them to it. And by 1949, they had conducted a test and we were off into the races. And the 1950s were a period of great terror where each side was not only building up its arsenal, but building up the powers of these weapons as if the weapons used at Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not powerful enough. And by this stage, Proliferation was starting. Speaker 7 (9:18) Off northwest Australia, this was the place chosen to explode Britain's first atomic weapon. The Speaker 8 (9:23) Sahara Desert, the site Speaker 7 (9:24) chosen for France's first A-bomb