Seriously. It’s stupid talk to encourage regularity capture. If they were really afraid they were building a world ending device, they’d stop.
Write a thought. You’re not clever enough for a drive by gotcha
Is it? The push for the bomb was an international arms race — America against Russia. The race for AGI is an international arms race — America against China. The Manhattan Project members knew that what they were doing would have terrible consequences for the world but decided to forge ahead. It’s hard to say concretely what the leaders in AGI believe right now.
Ideology (and fear, and greed) can cause well meaning people to do terrible things. It does all the time. If Anthropic, OpenAI, etc. believed they had access to world ending technology they wouldn’t stop, they’d keep going so that the U.S. could have a monopoly on it. And then we’d need a chastened figure ala Oppenheimer to right the balance again.
We have many cases of creating things that harm us. We tore a hole in the ozone layer, filled things with lead and plastics and are facing upheaval due to climate change.
> they will be aligned with us because they designed such that their motivation will be to serve us.
They won't hurt us, all we asked for is paperclips.
The obvious problem here is how well you get to constrain the output of an intelligence. This is not a simple problem.
Then they went off and did the math and quickly found that this wouldn't happen because the amount of energy in play here was order of magnitudes lower than what would be needed for such a thing to occur and went on about their day.
The only reason it's something we talk about is because of the nature of the outcome, not how seriously the physicists were in their fear.
Was it? US (and initially UK) didn't really face any real competition at all until the war was already over and they had the bomb. The Soviets then just stole American designs and iterated on top of them.
Thought to be honest in my original post I was more thinking of Asimov's nonfiction essays on the subject. I recommend finding a copy of "Robot Visons" if you can. Its a mixed work of fictional short stories and nonfiction essays including several on the subject of the three laws and on the Frankenstein Complex.