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Comment by dgellow | Hacker News Reader

Yep. Such a disgusting industry. They created the arm race, push for the arm race, put themselves in position to benefit from the arm race

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The entire problem with arms races is that any individual entity cannot avoid participating.

sama and his cadre are uniquely evil captains in this race, but they're completely replaceable and the dynamic would remain the same.

They could work to coordinate an end to the arms race.

Uhhh... the mechanism by which they'd do that is via government regulation. Most of the frontier labs have been openly requesting regulation: "the structure of this competition is not suitable for the development of this particular technology"

The reactions vary from:

1. China will do it anyway (need some supranational governance scheme)

2. This is just an attempt at regulatory capture

3. This is just marketing

4. Regulation is bad mmmmkay

The arms race is an intrinsic game theoretical property of a multi-adversarial-actor scenario involving exponential growth of a universally potent technology. It's almost certainly winner-take-all, on a global scale, which behooves everyone to participate.

And no, I don't think it will end well.

The actors here are states or corporations embedded in societies that risk growing popular backlash against the technology.

The other factor is that if it is truly an "alien mind", racing incurs risks to all players. In game-theoretic terms it may be more like a stag hunt than a prisoner's dilemma. In which case cooperation is an equilibrium.

No previous technological arms race has ever concluded with a single winner.

Just like the rest of military stuff.

"A strange game. The only winning move is not to play."

But done by corporations, and selling that service to the general public, including their competitors and adversary countries

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