>Musk: I think the best defense against the misuse of AI is to empower as many people as possible to have AI. If everyone has AI powers, then there’s not any on

>Musk: I think the best defense against the misuse of AI is to empower as many people as possible to have AI. If everyone has AI powers, then there’s not any one person or a small set of individuals who can have AI superpower. This is essentially Ray Kurzweil's argument. Surprising to see both Musk and Altman buy into it. If the underlying algorithms used to construct AGI turn out to be easily scalable, then the realization of a dominant superintelligent agent is simply a matter of who arrives first with sufficient resources. In Bostrom's Superintelligence, a multipolar scenario was discussed, but treated as unkikely due to the way first-arrival and scaling dynamics work. In other words, augmenting everyone's capability or intelligence doesn't necessarily preclude the creation of a dominant superintelligent agent. On the contrary, if there's any bad or insufficiently careful actors attempting to construct a superintelligence, it's safe to assume they'll be taking advantage of the same AI augments everyone else has, thus rendering the dynamic not much different from today (i.e. a somewhat equal—if not more equal—playing field). I would argue that in the context of AGI, an equal playing field is actually undesirable. For example, if we were discussing nuclear weapons, I don't think anyone would be arguing that open-source schematics is a great idea. Musk himself has previously stated that [AGI] is "potentially more dangerous than nukes"—and I tend to agree—it's just that we do not know the resource or material requirements yet. Fortunately with nuclear weapons, they at least require highly enriched materials, which render them mostly out of reach to anyone but nation states. To be clear, I think the concept of opening up normal AI research is fantastic, it's just that it falls apart when viewed in context of AGI safety.