Thoughtful piece by Robert Wright parsing out the inconsistencies in the opinions of various factions that opposite selling advanced NVIDIA chips to China:

The grave dangers AI safety hawks worry about can’t be adequately addressed without extensiveo international cooperation—cooperation tight enough to qualify as international governance. If, for example, your nation regulates AI skillfully enough to keep a bioweapon from being built on your soil, that won’t save you from the global pandemic that originates in a laxer nation; international regulation is needed. If you’re concerned about flat-out AI takeover, the argument for international governance is even stronger, for various reasons.

And serious international cooperation, let alone true international governance, is unlikely to transpire if you prioritize winning a struggle with China for “supremacy.” (Ever try to carefully calibrate the advance of a super-powerful intelligence while depending on its rapid advance for continued “supremacy” over your rival AI superpower—even as your rival, naturally, responds in kind?) What’s more likely to transpire is dangerous destabilization and quite possibly war.

What freaks me out is that an adversarial framing has become a default impulse among elities when thinking about the relationship between US and China. Now if you think by default that China is the enemy and its out to destroy you, it’s all downhill from there.

As I was typing this, I remembered Nils Nilman’s post:

This basic mismatch between the scale of the problem and the scale of possible solutions is a source of many of today’s failures of global governance. Nation-states and the global governance institutions they have formed simply aren’t fit for the task of managing things such as viruses, greenhouse gases and biodiversity, which aren’t bound by political borders, but only by the Earth system. As a result, the diplomats may still come to agree on a pandemic treaty – they’ve committed to keep working – but, so long as the structure of the international system continues to treat sovereignty as sacrosanct, they will never be able to effectively govern this or other planetary-scale phenomena.