AI is not a genie that can be kept in a bottle. Making a nuclear bomb is a huge engineering effort. You need to build huge facilities, acquire rare resources, a

AI is not a genie that can be kept in a bottle. Making a nuclear bomb is a huge engineering effort. You need to build huge facilities, acquire rare resources, and potentially test it somehow. It takes a lot of energy to get there. Software on the other hand, my computer is running tens of millions of lines of code right now, and for stuff with heavy utility there's not much the government can do to get in the way. Cryptography is a great example of this. Cryptography used to be regulated, but because it's easy to pass around code + binaries + keys there was really nothing the government could do to stop people from using it. So it was deregulated, as an admission that if you banned cryptography, you get a population without it pitted against criminals who do have it. I'm guessing that AI will end up much the same way. You do need a lot of data, certainly a lot more than you need to get strong encryption, but data is ultimately easy to move around compared to nuclear manufacturing facilities. And it's even more open when you consider how much data is available that might be useful to an AGI. If you give a human 500,000,000 hours to read + process + innovate using just Wikipedia, you are going to get something impressive. An AGI has access to any page that's reachable from a URL bar, and that data is not something that needs to be passed around with the AGI codebase. Granted, I personally believe that AGIs are 30+ years away, and I don't think that Wikipedia is enough data for something like a competitive NLP machine using modern technology, but I think that's the direction we will be moving in. We should accept today that AI will be a part of the future, and prepare for the inevitability rather than try to run from it.