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entanglemententropy t1_ixablcw wrote

This ties into a weird idea that I've had for a while, which is that at some point (possibly already), military intelligence might be seriously interested in this question. Meaning that they should have people looking for signs of AGI. Essentially, an AGI could be a very powerful strategic weapon, and indeed we are already seeing some sort of arms race as China, US and the EU is dumping money on AI research. So for security reasons you would want to know if an adversary have developed it, both to try and protect your own interests and also for more offensive purposes like sabotage or technology theft etc. If someone managed to develop AGI without it becoming public knowledge, presumably they would try and use it in non-obvious ways to gain strategic advantage. This sounds like some sci-fi plot, but it might not be too far away.

Along similar lines, I would not be surprised if various militaries eventually will try and have "Manhattan project" style initiatives for developing AI. This would probably be kept under wraps as well, just like the original Manhattan project was; so it could well be that both the US and Chinese military is already spending a lot of money on such things (meaning, a lot more than what we publically know, since clearly DARPA is open about a lot of its AI and robotics research).

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katiecharm t1_ixawd4i wrote

The DoD knew this was coming almost a century ago. Recall that some of humanity’s greatest geniuses in WW2 were already earning governments about a mechanical intelligence race (aka Alan Turing’s Turing Test).

Governments have had a century to prepare for and work in secret on the most powerful military technology that could conceivably exist…. And there are actually some ‘people’ on this board who would have you believe the DoD had no AI research whatsoever and they are operating in the dark.

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