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.
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.