* CFC elimination (saved the ozone layer)
* Leaded gas ban (well, except private aircraft, but they are working on that)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.
CFC elimination is a great example but even a hugely complex issue, and one we aren't doing well on, like climate change has had progress according to the latest IPCC report because of global collaboration.
- simple to explain / rally around
- low economic impact (a single country wouldn't get tremendous advantage by keeping using cfc for instance)
- once the technology is developped there's little upside in going back
We'd need to recreate those to have stable progress on the other issues.
Industry said we would forever hobble not only progress but set back the standard of life we had all come accustomed to. Engines would ping, then pop, and turn into mush; refrigerators would no longer function. Back to iceboxes.
There were plenty of economic losers when we resolved these problems. It took 100 years to force industry to come to terms with the fact that ‘crazy gas’ causes actual human suffering and limits our lifespan.
If we could overcome those economically entrenched interests to protect the entire planet we can set up some guidelines to protect us from the next threat, whatever it may be.
I mean, tax software giant pushing back against simpler tax filling is a thing, so the presence of pushback feels like a given whatever we do. The difference would be on wether whole giant industries are bond to almost disappear, as is it with the coal industry for instance.