states pursuing power in zero-sum power races ultimately created positive sum economic spillovers from peace and innovation.
Which seems a lot like one might characterized basic research in many ways—it seems a bit wasteful and doesn’t really accomplish a lot that is directly useful to anyone on most practical levels initially. However ultimately it tends to plant a lot of seeds or open a lot of new development branches that do.
So are arms races, particularly those that don’t end in an armed conflict, something we can view as just another form of basic research? Or is the arms race side of this just one of the branches that stemmed from the basic research and maybe we shouldn’t give the arms race or the zero-sum power game much credit for the spin offs?
I’m also not quite sure what to make of “if the ‘good guys’ are going to win (and remain good guys).” That seems to be too subjective to be much help to me.
I think capacity races to deter deployment races are the best from this perspective: develop decisive capability advantages, and all sorts of useful technology, credibly signal that your could use it for coercive purposes and could deploy it at scale, then don’t abuse the advantage, signal good intent, and just deploy useful non-coercive applications. The development and deployment process basically becomes an escalation ladder itself, where you can choose to stop at any point (though you still need to keep people employed/trained to sustain credibility).
I would probably rephase the “good guys” statement in terms of value alignment. For competitions where near term racing risks are low, long-term racing risks are high, the likely winner from starting race conditions earlier would be more value aligned with your goals, then racing may make sense. If initial race risks are high, or a less aligned actor is disproportionately likely to gain power, then pushing for more cooperative norms at the margin makes sense. You want to maximize your ability to foster or engineer risk reducing cooperation before the times of highest risk, and you want to avoid forms of cooperation that increase risk.
Which seems a lot like one might characterized basic research in many ways—it seems a bit wasteful and doesn’t really accomplish a lot that is directly useful to anyone on most practical levels initially. However ultimately it tends to plant a lot of seeds or open a lot of new development branches that do.
So are arms races, particularly those that don’t end in an armed conflict, something we can view as just another form of basic research? Or is the arms race side of this just one of the branches that stemmed from the basic research and maybe we shouldn’t give the arms race or the zero-sum power game much credit for the spin offs?
I’m also not quite sure what to make of “if the ‘good guys’ are going to win (and remain good guys).” That seems to be too subjective to be much help to me.
I think capacity races to deter deployment races are the best from this perspective: develop decisive capability advantages, and all sorts of useful technology, credibly signal that your could use it for coercive purposes and could deploy it at scale, then don’t abuse the advantage, signal good intent, and just deploy useful non-coercive applications. The development and deployment process basically becomes an escalation ladder itself, where you can choose to stop at any point (though you still need to keep people employed/trained to sustain credibility).
I would probably rephase the “good guys” statement in terms of value alignment. For competitions where near term racing risks are low, long-term racing risks are high, the likely winner from starting race conditions earlier would be more value aligned with your goals, then racing may make sense. If initial race risks are high, or a less aligned actor is disproportionately likely to gain power, then pushing for more cooperative norms at the margin makes sense. You want to maximize your ability to foster or engineer risk reducing cooperation before the times of highest risk, and you want to avoid forms of cooperation that increase risk.