The Baruch Plan was rejected as Russia realized the plan would give the US a decisive strategic advantage of nuclear armament, or at the very least an unfair authority to police atomic weaponry with controls and inspections under the guise of the United Nations, where Stalin knew Russia would be easily out voted in the Security Council and General Assembly.
He once stated, “If you say why not bomb tomorrow, I say why not bomb them today? If you say today at five o’clock, I say why not one o’clock?” In saying this Neumann was likely virtue signaling anti-communist sentiments, a prominent political attitude at the time.
Today, this strategy of first-mover advantage has been widely adopted by Bitcoin holders and businesses across the world.
Humans have acquired the vast majority of Bitcoin in existence, therefore humans have a decisive strategic advantage over the machines whose value accretion we will reward in Bitcoin.
The reason these feats may not seem as impressive as they once did is in part because our expectation for what computers can do is rapidly increasing .
Chess is no longer thought to be a marker of general intelligence because we understand that while it is extremely complicated, the specific strategies used to play chess successfully have a narrow life application.
Not only can it solve problems in ways we didn’t intend, but once released, it could become impossible to contain a superhuman intelligence with internet access if it doesn’t have very carefully programmed values.
For one short example, a machine super intelligence that is programmed to be self sufficient may decide humans are a hazard to its goals.
It follows that when machine intelligences arrive at consciousness we probably will not understand what exactly is happening inside their black box.
Who is to say a super-intelligent consciousness hasn’t spontaneously arisen within the hive mind of the internet? There it would be free to store itself in part or in whole, around the globe.
As of today there are no regulatory or broad engineering checks on the development machine intelligence.
There’s no reason to believe machine intelligence will only achieve up to a high general intelligence, say that of humans with the highest IQs on the planet, and stop there.