Instead of USA vs Russia, it is now USA vs PRC. SO if either slows down, the other will win by default. So no one is going to slow down.
This comment was written 100% without any AI.
This might be my own fault, but I never read/watched/consumed too much sci-fi, and the kinds of sci-fi I did consume were mostly dystopian works or cautionary tales. I just have a hard time in general grasping how can we hope to influence and control beings that are orders of magnitude more intelligent than ourselves. Recent events don’t give me a lot of hope that frontier labs have a good grasp on this either (and by their own admission too).
But I do think we are not anywhere close to AI competency for fine motor skills, e.g. microinjection to make transgenic animals (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8361322/figure/fig2...)at scale is still really difficult.
It is also unlikely that AI will start a skynet-like scenario as those nuclear launch systems are air gapped and require multiple authorizations.