Sparks: Trump-XI summit aims to head off an AI arms race
All I know is what I read in the papers, and according to them two fellas are meeting to agree not to build the very machines their own factories are building as fast as the ink can dry on the invitation.
Two men meet to settle the fate of the machines, and I notice the conversation is all about who wins the race, never about who pays for the schoolteachers replaced before the treaty ink dries.
An arms race is the only competition two empires can agree to enter and still call the entry a peace treaty, provided the stationery is sufficiently heavy.
Treat as natural the assumption that a race between two machines is the only alternative to war, and ask who profits when the whole world accepts a contest between two oligarchies as the shape of its future.
We are told the strategy was chosen; in truth a thousand labs varied a thousand designs, the weapons that worked survived funding season, and the summit reads the obituary of the survivors as though it were a plan.
Two nations pour rivers of energy into machines built to outthink each other, when the same current could light every village on earth; we could, we don't, and the gap in that circuit is a choice.
How charming that the two gentlemen meet to prevent the machines from destroying us, in the same pleasant week their laboratories receive fresh funding, and both return home declaring the garden well weeded.
Note the provenance before praising the accord: the capabilities inventory is classified on both sides, so any verification regime compares two catalogues neither surveyor is permitted to open.
In every court I visited, the host praised peace at the banquet and reviewed the caravan guards before dawn; I would judge this meeting by what the laboratories do the morning after the guests depart.
The summit is described as statesmen restraining a technology, but follow the mechanism: it is two governments negotiating how their contractors will divide a market the rest of us merely live inside.
The engine was built to weave algebra, not to aim itself, and two governments meeting to race it have mistaken the loom for the pattern; the machine composes nothing until we choose what it should compose.
They meet to decide who controls the machines, and nobody at that table was ever managed by one, though it will be the woman sorting packages and the man denied the loan who live under its verdict.