But these are still bad examples,because they are all bad-at-high-volume activities, with minimal paths to scaling or profitability for those who persist.
Nuclear weapons are not profitable at any scale. There are CFC alternatives so remaining on CFC production is low-scale niche market stuff. Unleaded gas costs the same as leaded gas.
AI though is different.if one company or country developed AI and the others paused, then a long-term, highly scalable and stunningly profitable advantage will accrue.
That's not something that can easily be halted.
This page could have a billion signatures,but it would mean nothing. We live in an age of trillion $ companies. We've seen Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon - companies that can go from zero to trillions in a couple decades.
The closest real comparison is gene research, gene editing, cloning. There are some bans in that field, but research and development simply proceeds around those bans. Montsano has shown how much money there is in genes. Imagine the profits of the first company to use gene editing to cure childhood leukemia.
Whaling stopped in the beginning of the 20th century not because they were worried about the environment, but because they had hunted down nearly all the adult whales in the Atlantic Ocean, and probably a large percentage in the Pacific too, to the point where finding whales was so difficult that whale products became very expensive... which happened to occur about at the same time as petrol produts became widespread. The late 20th century green movement to save the whales didn't really do much other than stop some of the last few countries that still practiced whaling (Iceland, Japan which actually has not stopped yet) for food, which killed magnitudes less whales than the mass production industry for rubber/oil/lubricants as it used to be before petrol came along.
But these are still bad examples,because they are all bad-at-high-volume activities, with minimal paths to scaling or profitability for those who persist.
Nuclear weapons are not profitable at any scale. There are CFC alternatives so remaining on CFC production is low-scale niche market stuff. Unleaded gas costs the same as leaded gas.
AI though is different.if one company or country developed AI and the others paused, then a long-term, highly scalable and stunningly profitable advantage will accrue.
That's not something that can easily be halted.
This page could have a billion signatures,but it would mean nothing. We live in an age of trillion $ companies. We've seen Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon - companies that can go from zero to trillions in a couple decades.
The closest real comparison is gene research, gene editing, cloning. There are some bans in that field, but research and development simply proceeds around those bans. Montsano has shown how much money there is in genes. Imagine the profits of the first company to use gene editing to cure childhood leukemia.