I agree with your analogy to nuclear weapons to some extent. Preventing AGI is going to be hard. The incentives are too massive. The difference between having

I agree with your analogy to nuclear weapons to some extent. Preventing AGI is going to be hard. The incentives are too massive. The difference between having nuclear weapons and building ASI, is that you can chose to not use the nukes as long as nobody else does, while the ASI by it's nature needs to be deployed to some extent to exist at all. Not only that, in the kind of competitive environment you describe, not only will the ASI's be deployed, they will most likely be in competition with each other, which creates the precondition for Darwinian evolution to start happening. My personal belief is that while it may be possible to develop safe ASI as long as it is NOT subject to evolutionary forces, it probably still isn't if they are. As far as I can tell, this is by far the greatest existential threat we're facing at the moment. Finding a way to deal with, while working around the game theoretic challenges you identify, may be orders of magnitude more urgent than for instance stopping global warming. If we do manage to steer AI development into a good (for humanity) outcome, I'm pretty sure ASI's will be able to find technological "solutions" to the problems caused by global warming (an maybe stop the warming itself). On the other hand, if self-replicating ASI's run wild, they would not only be likely to exterminate humanity, but also most other advanced life forms Earth.