It's because of competition that we are in this situation. When the economic system and relationships between countries are based on competition, it's nearly impossible to avoid these races to the bottom. We need more systems based on cooperation instead of competition.
International systems are more organic than designed, but the problem with cooperation is that it's not a particularly stable arrangement without enforcement - sure, everybody is better off when everybody cooperates, but you can be even better off when you don't cooperate but everybody else does.
Isn't this the opposite? If you want competition then you need something like the WTO as a mechanism to prevent countries from putting up trade barriers etc.
If some countries want to collaborate on some CERN project they just... do that.
> You can't CERN your way to nuclear non-proliferation.
Non-proliferation is, the US has nuclear weapons and doesn't want Iran to have them, so is going to apply some kind of bribe or threat. It's not cooperative.
The better example here is climate change. Everyone has a direct individual benefit from burning carbon but it's to our collective detriment, so how do you get anyone to stop, especially the countries with large oil and coal reserves?
In theory you could punish countries that don't stop burning carbon, but that appears to be hard and in practice what's doing the most good is making solar cheaper than burning coal and making electric cars people actually want, politics of infamous electric car man notwithstanding.
So what does that look like for making AI "safe, secure and trustworthy"? Maybe something like publishing state of the art models for free with full documentation of how they were created, so that people aren't sending their sensitive data to questionable third parties who do who knows what with it or using models with secret biases.
Since 2019, when the Donald Trump administration blocked appointments to the body, the Appellate Body has been unable to enforce WTO rules and punish violators of WTO rules. Subsequently, disregard for trade rules has increased, leading to more trade protectionist measures. The Joe Biden administration has maintained Trump's freeze on new appointments.
I'm not certain of the balance myself. I was thinking as a counterpoint of the band The Beatles where the two song writers (McCartney and Lennon) are seen in competition. There is a balance there between their competitiveness as song writers and their cooperation in the band.
I think it is one-sided to see any situation where we want to retain balance as being significantly affected by one of the sides exclusively. If one believes that there is a balance to be maintained between cooperation and competition, I don't immediately default to believing that any perceived imbalance is due to one and not the other.
Competition is as old as time. There are single celled organisms on your skin right now competing for resources to live. There is nothing more innate to life than this.
The bacteria that are most related to mithocondria are intracelular parasits, so they were probably not eaten while roaming arround pacefully, they are probably nasty parasits that got lazy.
But humans aren't living in the "untamed wilds". We figured out that it's possible to cooperate, even in large numbers, in many-thousands-of-years-BC. Since then we're been scaling up the level of cooperation. The last century provides many examples of successful cooperation between even states -- e.g. various nuclear test ban treaties. Why pretend that now of all times it's somehow impossible for us to cooperate?
