Nicolás Promanzio analyzed the race for AI and its dilemmas: “If you regulate it, the other will get ahead”

The international analyst Nicolás Promanzio participated in Otra Vuelta Más, on TN, where he analyzed the catastrophic scenarios that have begun to occupy a large part of the public discussion about the advance of artificial intelligence and focused on a central problem: the technological competition between the United States and China makes it difficult to establish limits without ceding ground to the rival.

The conversation began with a deliberately extreme question: “Will we all die?”. Promanzio responded by placing the debate within a broader transformation of international conflicts.

“Nowadays, when countries enter into conflict, they do not enter into the binary logic of war or peace. That logic is over,” he explained. He elaborated that much of the current disputes occur below the threshold of conventional war and encompass technological, financial, commercial, and energy dimensions.

In that context, he placed the race for artificial intelligence. “The United States and China are competing for a technological tool”, he noted, and explained that its impact will ultimately depend on how states and other actors use it.

There, he raised one of the main dilemmas of the debate. “It’s very difficult because if you regulate it completely, the other will surpass you; but if you leave it free, you run the risk of it taking on a life of its own”, he stated.

The discussion also incorporated the recent warnings from the CEO of Anthropic, Dario Amodei, who raised the possibility that the United States and China might agree in the future on joint limits to the pace of technological development. His stance contrasts with positions that reject greater state intervention, such as that of entrepreneur Peter Thiel.

Promanzio emphasized that much of the Western conversation currently focuses on the American model, while there is much less information about what is happening within China. However, he considered it unlikely that Beijing remains oblivious to the same dilemma. “I have no doubt that China, internally, is having these same discussions,” he asserted.

Finally, the analyst sought to separate technological development from its possible applications. “It is important to understand that AI is a tool and depends on how you use it. It is not an end in itself”, he explained.

As a comparison, he referred to nuclear energy: the problem does not necessarily lie in the technology, but in the fact that it can be used to manufacture an atomic weapon and direct it against a population. For Promanzio, artificial intelligence still does not have total autonomy, and the challenge is precisely to define how far to allow its development without giving up a strategic advantage.

During the discussion, the leftist leader Cristian "Chipi" Castillo also intervened, attributing the risks mainly to business logic. “The problem is that they operate with the business logic of corporate profit,” the communist asserted, before proposing that artificial intelligence have “full public control”, be state-owned, and be controlled by the population.