In the early days of the cold war, the US had won the race to acquire nuclear weapons, the most powerful and deadly on Earth. America then did something unprecedented and noble: in 1946, less than one year after the tragedies of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the US government proposed that the UN should control nuclear resources and ensure they were used only for peaceful purposes. 

We are now witnessing the advent of truly powerful artificial intelligence, and are not yet capable of understanding fully both the promise and perils of this new technology. 

All the more reason then for our governments to be as wise and judicious as in the immediate aftermath of the first nuclear strikes: we must try to control the most harmful military aspects of AI — and ensure that the gains accrue to all. 

Naive, critics say. Quixotic. The Chinese and Russians will never go for it. That’s likely to be true — in the short run.

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