I don’t think any of the proposals by AI x-risk people are actionable or even desirable.
Comparing AI to nukes is a bad analogy for a few reasons. Nukes are pretty useless unless you’re a nation state wanting to deter other nations from invading you. AI on the other hand has theoretically infinite potential benefits for whatever your goals are (as a corporation, an individual, a nation, etc.) which incentives basically any individual or organization to develop it. Nukes also require difficult to obtain raw materials, advanced material processing, and all the other industrial and technological requirements, whereas AI requires compute, which exists in abundance and which seems to improve near exponentially year over year, which means individuals can develop AI systems without involving hundreds of people or leaving massive evidence of what they’re doing (maybe not currently due to computing requirements but this will likely change with increasing compute power and improved architectures and training methods). Testing AI systems also doesn’t result in globally measurable signals like nukes.
Realistically making AI illegal and actually being able to enforce that would require upending personal computing and the internet, halting semiconductor development, and large scale military intervention to try to prevent non-compliant countries from attempting to develop their own AI infrastructure and systems. I don’t think it’s realistic to try to control the information on how to build AI, that is far more ephemeral than what it takes to make advanced computing devices. This is all for a hypothetical risk of AI doom, when it’s possible this technology could also end scarcity or have potentially infinite upside (as well as infinite down side, not discounting that, but you have to weigh the hypothetical risks/benefit in addition to the obvious consequences of all the measures required to prevent AI development for said hypothetical risk).
I’ve watched several interviews with Yudkowsky and read some of his writing, and while I think he makes good points on why we should be concerned about unaligned AI systems, he doesn’t give any realistic solutions to the problem and it comes off more as fear mongering than anything. His suggestion of military enforced global prevention of AI development is as likely to work as solving the alignment problem on the first try (which he seems to have little hope for).
EDIT:
Also, I’m not even sure that solving the alignment problem would solve the issue of AI doom, it would only ensure that the kind of doom we receive is directed by a human. I can’t imagine that giving (potentially) god-like powers to any individual or organization would not eventually result in abuse and horrible consequences even if we were able to make use of its benefits momentarily.