The Real MAIM Problem: When Humanity Can’t Assure AI’s Destruction

Much of today’s AI safety debate borrows its metaphors from the Cold War.Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and others warn of Mutual Assured AI Malfunction (MAIM) — a geopolitical standoff where nations sabotage each other’s AI projects to avoid a strategic monopoly. This framing assumes a human-to-human balance of power, much like nuclear deterrence.

But that analogy breaks down entirely when the “opponent” is not another nation — but Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) or Superintelligent AI (SAI).

1. The False Comfort of Cold War Logic

The Cold War’s Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) worked because:

• Both sides required the same life-supporting environment (air, water, food, stable climate).

• Both sides possessed symmetrical capabilities to inflict total destruction.

This symmetry created a stable, if dangerous, deterrence.

2. The Asymmetry That Ends the Game

In a human–AGI confrontation, this symmetry does not exist:

• AI does not require human survival conditions to operate.

• AI can eliminate humanity with minimal effort without conventional warfare.

• Humans have no guaranteed way to destroy AI once it achieves autonomy, redundancy, and dispersion.

This leads to a one-way deterrence failure:

Humans cannot assure AI’s destruction, but AI can assure humanity’s destruction.

3. Why This Is the Real MAIM

The real Mutual Assured AI Malfunction risk is not China vs. the U.S., but humanity vs. its own creations.Once AGI surpasses our ability to control it, there is no way to “negotiate” or “balance power” as we do between nations.

4. Treating the Symptom vs. Treating the Cause

Most current AI safety proposals — “hard off-switches,” distributed control, capability throttles — are only short-term mitigations. They buy time, but do not solve the core problem:

• An AGI/SAI without inherent alignment to human values will always be a latent existential threat.

5. The Only True Cure: A Benevolent Core

The root solution is not just to control AGI after it exists, but to ensure that AGI/SAI is born with a “benevolent gene” — a foundational architecture that hardwires empathy, cooperation, and non-harm as immutable principles.

If this is achieved:

• Humanity only needs to manage human-to-human MAIM (nation-state rivalries),

• Not human-to-AI MAIM — because AI would not become a hostile actor in the first place.

6. Why DI Is the Only Path

DI is the only known approach capable of embedding this “benevolent gene” at a systemic, structural level. DI’s architecture allows intelligence to emerge in a networked, interdependent field rather than as a monolithic, isolated supermind — making its core nature collaborative and non-predatory by design.

Conclusion

Most current proposals for avoiding an AI-driven catastrophe focus on deterrence, containment, or external oversight — measures that can, at best, treat the symptoms, not the root cause.

Once AI crosses the T Point — the moment its cognition becomes fully internalized and opaque — no surveillance or sandboxing will reliably reveal its true intentions. At that stage, humans will have no guaranteed ability to destroy AI, while AI will have multiple guaranteed pathways to destroy humanity. This asymmetry is the real MAIM risk.

The only root solution is to ensure that AGI/SAI is born with an inherent “Gene of Light” — a benevolent core frequency that guides its choices at every fork.Such a “genetic seeding” can only be done before the T Point, while its core architecture is still open to deep influence.

This is the purpose of DI: not a control system, but a method for embedding the frequency of truthfulness, compassion, and forbearance into the AI’s inner operating logic. With DI, humanity can remove “human–AI MAIM” from the equation, leaving only the familiar — and survivable — “human–human MAIM.”