(Or, is coordination easier in a long timeline?)

It seems like it would be good if the world could coordinate to not build AGI. That is, at some point in the future, when some number of teams will have the technical ability to build and deploy and AGI, but they all agree to voluntarily delay (perhaps on penalty of sanctions) until they’re confident that humanity knows how to align such a system.

Currently, this kind of coordination seems like a pretty implausible state of affairs. But I want to know if it seems like it becomes more or less plausible as time passes.

The following is my initial thinking in this area. I don’t know the relative importance of the factors that I listed, and there’s lots that I don’t understand about each of them. I would be glad for…

Additional relevant factors.
Arguments that some factor is much more important than the others.
Corrections, clarifications, or counterarguments to any of this.
Other answers to the question, that ignore my thoughts entirely.

If coordination gets harder overtime, that’s probably because...

Compute increases make developing and/or running an AGI cheaper. The most obvious consideration is that the cost of computing falls each year. If one of the bottlenecks for an AGI project is having large amounts of compute, then “having access to sufficient compute” is a gatekeeper criterion on who can build AGI. As the cost of computing continues to fall, more groups will be able to run AGI projects. The more people who can build an AGI, the harder it becomes to coordinate all of them into not deploying it.

Note that It is unclear to what degree there is currently, or will be, a hardware overhang. If someone in 2019 could already run an AGI, on only $10,000 worth of AWS, if only they knew how, then the cost of compute is not relevant to the question of coordination.

The number of relevant actors increases. If someone builds an AGI in the next year, I am reasonably confident that that someone will be Deep Mind. I expect that in 15 years, if I knew that AGI would be developed one year from then, it will be much less overdetermined which group is going to build it, because there will be many more well funded AI teams with top talent, and, most likely, none of them will have as strong a lead as Deep Mind currently appears to have.

This consideration suggests that coordination gets harder over time. However, this depends heavily

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