When Mr. Biden dropped by a meeting in the White House on [May 4] of technology executives who are struggling with limiting the risks of the technology, his first comment was “what you are doing has enormous potential and enormous danger.”
It was a reflection, his national security aides say, of recent classified briefings about the potential for the new technology to upend war, cyber conflict and — in the most extreme case — decision-making on employing nuclear weapons.
No one really knows what these new technologies are capable of when it comes to developing and controlling weapons, and they have no idea what kind of arms control regime, if any, might work.
The foreboding is vague, but deeply worrisome. Could ChatGPT empower bad actors who previously wouldn’t have easy access to destructive technology? Could it speed up confrontations between superpowers, leaving little time for diplomacy and negotiation?
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So far there are no treaties or international agreements that deal with such autonomous weapons. In an era when arms control agreements are being abandoned faster than they are being negotiated, there is little prospect of such an accord. But the kind of challenges raised by ChatGPT and its ilk are different, and in some ways more complicated.
