[tintor]

Humanity agreed, for example, that growing ozone hole is dangerous for everyone, and worked together to ban production of gases that damage ozone layer. See Montreal Protocol International Treaty. It was highly effective. Training powerful AIs isn’t different.

[hax0ron3]

I think that trying to stop AI development is more like trying to stop nuclear weapon proliferation than it is like fixing the ozone hole. I think the difference is that if one country works to fix the ozone hole, that doesn't make the other countries scared that they are falling behind in ozone hole fixing technology and might get conquered or reduced to subservience as a result.

Nuclear weapon proliferation seems to have plateaued recently, but I think that this appearance is partly deceptive. The main reasons it has plateaued is that: 1) building and maintaining nuclear weapons is expensive, 2) there are powerful countries that are willing to use military force to stop some other countries from developing nukes, and 3) many countries have reached nuclear latency (the ability to build nuclear weapons very quickly once the political order is given to do it) and are only avoiding actually giving the order to build nukes because they don't see a current important-enough reason to do it.

[zbentley]

We've also made progress as a species towards banning and reducing other things that in-group upsides and really bad externalities: off-the-shelf sale of broad system antibiotics; chattel slavery; human organ trafficking; some damaging recreational drugs.

The prohibitions aren't perfect, of course (and not without their own negative externalities in some cases). But all of those things are much more accessible to people than nuclear weapons, and we've still had successes in banning/reducing them. So maybe there's hope yet.