On the Schmidt–Matheny report on US strategy toward China
In January 2021, the China Strategy Group — co-chaired by former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and AI/biosecurity policy expert Jason Matheny (then-director of Georgetown’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology, CSET) — released a memo to the incoming Biden administration calling for a more coordinated US response to Chinese technological competition. On the Long Term World Improvement (LTWI) mailing list, another correspondent had argued that the report overstated the threat from China and that Western activists should focus instead on causes like global mosquito eradication and autonomous-weapons treaties. These are Alyssa’s replies, lightly stitched.
The criticism brings up a lot of important points (AI and bio risk are bad!!, although I know at least Matheny is very aware of this and has spoken at length about it elsewhere), but at the same time, I think it undersells the costs either of a dominant China or of the US simply not being able or willing to do foreign policy. Sure, no one is going to launch a military invasion of the US, but a China that had economic and technological dominance could impose a lot of pain in the same way that the US and EU sanctioned Russia in 2014 and crippled the Russian economy, even though Russia is a global power and major nuclear weapons state. More to the point, most of the “other 20 or so democratic developed countries” mentioned rely on the US for security in one form or another. In the case of Taiwan, they would just get steamrolled by China with little in the way of alternatives; in other cases, they might have the choice between getting steamrolled outright, becoming the subordinate in an alliance relationship, or doing a big military buildup independently. This would make a lot of people very unhappy and would likely increase risk a lot by multiplying the number of conflicts that might be escalated; see eg.
this general overview of international relations by Bret Devereaux .
Some more notes: Redirecting a significant fraction of the US defense budget to worldwide eradication of mosquitoes doesn’t seem like a plausible option; there are organizations like Matheny’s CSET that work on influencing security/technology policy and military spending, and organizations that work on lobbying for more foreign aid and redirecting that aid to different causes, and organizations that try to get rich donors to spend on things like mosquito eradication, but the NDAA being replaced with a giant mosquito bill is really into Not Happening territory. The US largely withdrawing from its current foreign policy (either through deliberate choice or simply being overtaken) might happen, but that scenario doesn’t include anything about massive mosquito spending, it just means the US leaves.
It doesn’t seem like “taking away all their propaganda” is that effective of a tool right now; unfortunately, given current media technology, it seems like political leaders can convince large fractions of a population of things that are obviously, facially preposterous. I personally made thousands of dollars betting that Trump would lose the US election weeks after the election was already over; from talking to people in Russia, China, India, Japan, etc., it’s clear that many of them believe political shibboleths that are very different but equally absurd. Anyone can go to r/Sino and find thousands of people, many of them intelligent, educated and living in the West, who believe completely sincerely that (eg.) the CCP has a much better human rights record than the US and the Xinjiang genocide is a CIA hoax.
I’m really not sure how a general international treaty against all autonomous weapons would work, either in terms of incentives for major military powers to agree to it or in terms of enforcing it once it was in effect. Drones are easy and dirt cheap to make, and software can be written anywhere and then hidden anywhere; it isn’t like chemical or biological weapons where you need huge factories or rare, controlled precursor ingredients with no other applications.
Bret Devereaux on chemical weapons is an essay that goes over how major militaries will happily ban weapons that they don’t currently see a use for, but will refuse to ban (or will only pretend to ban) ones that form a significant part of their strategy.
Some further notes: It seems like efforts at changing defense/security/technology policy and efforts aimed at mosquito reduction don’t funge against each other very much? They use generally different groups of people, quite different pools of money and different skills.
It doesn’t seem reasonable to give China moral credit for things that they have no power to do anyway? China’s military buildup only began very recently in historical terms; in 2003, when the Iraq War started, China had essentially no force projection ability at all. They couldn’t really invade anyone except immediate neighbors, and any attempt to do so would have immediately been crushed by a dominant, hegemonic US alliance with overwhelmingly superior technology and military spending. Based on the historical track record of the behavior of both liberal democracies and autocratic states, a China with the kind of unchallengeable hegemonic power the US had in 2003 would be way, way worse; the Soviet Union, as a roughly co-equal superpower, outright conquered and subjugated half of Europe and did quite a lot of intervention and bullying elsewhere.
I’m sure China’s leadership tells everyone, and I know a lot of people really believe, that the US is really evil and bad and dangerous. But I’m not sure how much power the US has to affect this? Propagandists can and do just make stuff up, both now and historically. The Nazis had a whole propaganda department about how the British were the bad guys, the Soviets had a whole propaganda department about how capitalism was evil, etc. To quote Eliezer Yudkowsky on writing HPMOR: “Maybe someone could mistake that for Gray vs. Grey morality, if they’re accustomed to Tolkien heroes fighting orcs and Sauron, or if they don’t realize how little it means for a character to think they’re justified — how little that tells you about their position on the good-evil axis. Adolf Hitler was an outspoken opponent of animal vivisection, who at some dinners would give graphic accounts of animal cruelty in an attempt to convince those present to not eat meat. Apparently Hitler also didn’t get his Villain Letter. He probably even wore clothes that weren’t black. That’s the difference between the children’s-book Voldemort, and Adolf Hitler in real life.
Of course it’s not just villains who try to justify themselves. Self-justification is cheap, and any character who is even slightly clever will be able to purchase it by the truckload. A large part of the art of rationality is learning to make self-justifications more expensive and difficult to purchase. Any character who is not being depicted as a master-level rationalist should have no trouble at all coming up with a story that makes them the good guy, irrespective of what they’re currently doing.”
Re the Taiwan issue, I don’t think that analogy works at all, just as a matter of history; the current CCP government is the result of a violent, non-democratic, Soviet-sponsored revolt against the original Chinese government which overran most of China but not Taiwan, it’s not like the CCP held all of China and then Taiwan declared independence spontaneously. A better analogy would be if Trump successfully staged a coup and declared himself president-for-life, Hawaii didn’t recognize him and continued to respect Biden and the original American system of government, and then China gave Hawaii protection so it wouldn’t be overrun by a mainland-American military invasion.
In the case of Russia launching an outright military invasion of Ukraine in 2014, which was a lot more egregiously norm-violating, there were a lot of US/EU sanctions that caused some pain, but it was far from universal and it wasn’t enough to convince Russia to back off or to resolve the situation. I don’t think there’s a lot of hope for establishing a robust sanctions punishment regime around drones if there’s trouble enforcing one for much more obvious cases like “don’t invade neighbors” and “don’t assassinate people on foreign soil with military nerve gas”.
Another quick note here: the “eyes of the world” frame seems to subtly imply that there is some other entity, “the world”, apart from the major states, that could supervise them or check them somehow. But this doesn’t really meaningfully exist; the major states are effectively the biggest decision-makers and the highest authorities, there’s no other supervisor or judge that can override them. Eg., here’s a breakdown of the world economy by GDP , which will at least roughly correspond to both military and economic influence.
24% is the US. 16% is China. 36% is NATO and other current US military allies (this is likely a slight underestimate, since my arithmetic didn’t include various small Latin American and European countries), who would presumably be upset that the US unilaterally terminated a decades-old relationship, especially after a lot of planning had gone into the assumption of a joint defense. And then… there’s not that much left, that’s a total of 76%. The largest non-aligned country, who might presumably be “won over” to one side or the other, is India at 3% of global GDP (and who is currently engaged in a border conflict with China anyway). It’s not like the US is a single senator who has to sweet-talk a majority of 50 others into joining their position; the US and direct military allies are already a majority of the global economy, and by far the largest player outside of that group (by a factor of five) is China itself, who is never going to join regardless.
As a quick aside, here’s an interesting essay arguing that trying to “move the Overton Window” is in general a destructive strategy .