“Data centers can be bombed with conventional munitions,” Stokes writes. (He’s not the first thinker to suggest bombings to stop powerful AI; in 2023, AI critic Eliezer Yudkowsky suggested that countries needed to be ready to “destroy a rogue data center by airstrike.”)
Of course, the China hawk isn’t numb to what such an attack would mean for the world.
“Bombing would cross a major threshold that heretofore has not been crossed in US-China relations,” Stokes continues. “Trying to think through the particulars of that will be especially important, in part because it will help policymakers… start to work backwards based on the unique nature of the technology, in the same way that in a past era, policymakers would learn about nuclear weapons.”
Futurism links to the SCMP (which acts under the Chinese Communist Party’s censorship regime) which in turn is referencing a CNAS’ ‘online event’ and a ‘CNAS report published last week’, though there are no links to the online event nor the report.
I couldn’t find the online event, but here is the report for those who want to read it: Superpowers and AGI - How U.S.-China Competition Could Be Shaped by the Emergence of Artificial General Intelligence
The linked article is quoting Stokes, for example, saying,
and,
I can’t find these and other quotations from the linked article in the original report (not even the SCMP is quoting these).
In the original report, there is no mention of a “US military strike against China” as the SCMP headline tries to make people believe.
In the original report, words like ‘bombing’ and ‘espionage’ - quoted by Futurism - don’t even exist.
Though the report discusses the U.S./China rivalry regarding AGI, it does so in a much larger and more diverse frame, including the common U.S./China competition with the Global South and other regions, what supposedly happened if and when any other country develops AGI first, and more things related to this topic. It is by no means a report “U.S. versus China” as the linked article (and the SCMP) makes people believe.
AI critic Eliezer Yudkowsky - which is also not mentioned in the SCMP - indeed suggested in 2023 that countries needed to be ready to “destroy a rogue da center by airstrike," but this was not directed specifically to China or any other country. He meant that as a possible (and, for now, theoretical) future measure in case a data center becomes dangerous for humans and humanity at some point in the future.
But you can perfectly combine all these fake quotations and half-truths to create a hopelessly distorted reality. This is pure propaganda aiming to sow division.