Trump-Xi summit: Cold War AI analogies pointless, six-month US lead

Henry Kissinger first made his name as an academic writing about nuclear arms control during the Cold War and later forged his reputation as the architect of US-China detente. In his final years, he became fixated on what he believed was an even greater danger: self-learning machines that could target anything, anywhere, with any kind of destruction, making the world "100% vulnerable." He pleaded for the US and China to open talks to avoid "catastrophic consequences," using the template of nuclear arms control agreements with the Soviet Union that he himself negotiated.

But Kissinger's prescriptions on how to avert AI disaster haven't aged well. Beijing refuses to consider nuclear arms-limitation talks for the same reasons it balks at slowing AI progress. Moscow and Washington had elaborate protocols to avoid inadvertent escalation during the Cold War, but Beijing thinks such guardrails would simply encourage US recklessness — the two sides can't even agree on rules-of-the-road to prevent ship and plane accidents in flashpoints like the South China Sea from spiraling into armed conflict. Some analysts point to the Obama administration coaxing China into the Paris Climate Agreement in 2016 as a hopeful precedent, but China had its own powerful reasons to sign up, including a public revolt against killer smog and a security imperative to swap imported oil for home-grown green technologies.

On the present trajectory, the US and China appear to be hurtling toward the very calamity Kissinger warned about. Both sides have a clear interest in slowing the development of the most advanced AI models — the Hugging Face attack was a wake-up call in the US, and China has been confronted with the prospect of rogue agents taking over WeChat — but they don't trust each other enough to do so. The outcome may hinge on whether either government can find a way to trust the other's commitments, and for now, neither side is watching the dials.