Reports tell us that during their recent farewell meeting, Xi Jinping and Joe Biden agreed that the People’s Republic of China and the United States would “maintain human control—as opposed to AI control—over their nuclear arsenals” (China-Taiwan Weekly Update, November 21, 2024).
“US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan emphasized that the conversation aligned with Biden’s and Xi’s agreement to ‘work on AI safety and risk together’ following last year’s Woodside Summit. Sullivan stated that he did not foresee an ‘imminent risk’ that either power would ‘hand over the control of nuclear weapons to artificial intelligence’ but that the discussion took place as a long-term stabilization measure.”
Why would any government consider delegating “decision”-making about the unleashing of nuclear weapons to any set of code independently of any actual decision? And if any head of state were so far gone as to think it practical to program nuclear attack on this or that country if such-and-such data patterns were to emerge, would this head of state hesitate to lie about it during summits with other heads of state?
Let’s set aside the minor matter of whether artificial “intelligence” should be in charge of annihilating mankind and instead consider the persistent assumption of many reports on supposed agreements between the United States and China: that, absent any means of monitoring and enforcement, such agreements mean something.
One vintage meaningless agreement between China and the United States is touched on in a PBS Frontline article: “Chinese Hacking Steals Billions; U.S. Businesses Turn a Blind Eye,” companion to a Frontline documentary.
Blind eyes
The title is incomplete, because it’s not just businessmen who have turned a blind eye.
The article reports that in the wake of a massive Chinese cyberattack on Google and many other major U.S. companies in 2010, federal officials were incommunicado.
“They did not even publicly concur with the attributions that Google had made at the time,” says Dmitri Alperovitch, a co-founder of CrowdStrike, a cybersecurity firm. The attack occurred during the Obama administration, which demonstrated high mastery of the art of achieving nothing or much worse than nothing via fictitious agreements.
Obama administration officials say they did not turn a blind eye to the Google hack or cybertheft from China.
The administration was struggling with other important priorities, such as North Korea, Iran, the economy and climate change, says Evan Medeiros, Obama’s top China specialist and then a staffer at the National Security Council.
“Direct confrontation with China does not usually result in lasting solutions,” Medeiros says, noting that President Obama secured an agreement with Chinese President Xi Jinping to halt the attacks and put together a regional trade agreement—the Trans-Pacific Partnership—to add pressure.
But neither measure lasted.
“Hindsight is always 20/20,” he says. “I wish that we had spent more time…finding creative ways to punish them for creating a nonlevel playing field.”
Iran. The weather.
“Had we but known!” “Hindsight is 20/20.” It is. And foresight can be pretty clear too, if you use some hindsight at the time you are deciding what the Chinese Communist Party is likely to do. Examine the track record to date. If the “top China specialist” doesn’t know, consult somebody who does.
Also see:
StopTheChinazis.org: How to Thwart China’s Cyberattacks
