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Notes -
I have to think that very much feels like a Disney fairy tale ending. The good girl (here: the US) did her work (here: solved alignment) and gets rewarded (by the trivial reward of gaining global dominance), while the bad girl (here: the CCP) did not do her work and get's punished.
It seems to be targeting the median six-year-old, but perhaps there is some overlap with US policy wonks.
The way this story is going to turn out is that China, by not caring about alignment is the first to summon ASI. Then the ASI is either aligned-by-default (in which case we will have more red and fewer stars on the flags when we settle the galaxy), or it is unaligned and will decide that it requires the atoms which build our world for something else. There is no moral except "coordination failure is bad", but that is something you need a median ten-year-old to understand.
The ASI's engineer China to adopt democracy, but what does that even mean? The centralized AI's have already shown that they can manipulate the public in whatever way they want, does anyone expect them to stop their manipulations at that point? (Nor are these manipulations necessarily evil, but just come from the fact that if you have a lot of policy power and a lot of foresight, you can't help but notice the electoral consequences of your choices. Any decision branch which ends with "and then The People will vote an anti-AI party into power, and will proceed to settle policy the 19th century way" will not be considered by even the most aligned AI. A fig leaf of voting (for what? A figurehead politician? A utility function?) does not change that such a system would be much closer to China's vision of the state than the vision of the founders.)
But if the best way to get the US to care about alignment is "unaligned AI is a national security risk", then whatever.
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