Harder medium-term choices: diplomacy to govern superintelligence

If we manage to meet the challenge of the climate crisis with any degree of success, humanity will still have to survive the singularity, the emergence of superintelligence. We will have to establish a new relationship with superintelligent machines much more powerful than our own minds with the capacity to make their own choices about their objectives and the means to their ends (Kurzweil 2000; Bostrom 2014; Tegmark 2017). Superintelligent machines will be able to make these choices and implement strategies for achieving their objectives independently of and much faster than humans. In order to prevent superintelligent machines from making choices that are at best disadvantageous and at worst lethal to human civilization, we must engage in the types of existing diplomacy between governments, firms, and civil society that are required to govern the development of superintelligence before superintelligence emerges. We must prepare now for the diplomacy that will be needed to prevent the ‘breakout’ of superintelligence unconstrained by human-imposed curbs on its potential capacity to harm us.

In anticipation of the emergence of even benign superintelligence, we must prepare for superintelligent machines, in whatever form they take, to emerge as diplomatic actors in their own right. Establishing a working relationship with superintelligent machines may demand of us to create a wholly new form of diplomacy. The process of initiating a diplomatic collaborative relationship between humans and superintelligence might resemble the earliest human diplomatic encounters hypothesized by Sharp (2009, pp. 94– 95). Superintelligent machines as diplomatic actors could be as radically different from us humans as the very first other tribes that early human tribes discovered living across the nearest hill from their own village. Superintelligent machines will be thinking beings with their own ends and means that are intrinsically ‘other’ to us, in the way that different existing diplomatic actors are other to us today. We will need diplomacy to mediate and live with those differences into the future.

Webb (2019) recognizes that the challenges facing global society concerning how to govern the development of artificial general intelligence and superintelligence must be addressed through diplomacy.