Epistemic status: Hare-brained scheme

Suppose the state of Arkansas decided to levy a fine of $1000 on anyone attempting to push the state of AI forward. Further, Arkansas decreed that this $1000 fine would be paid directly out of the coffers of those found guilty, and directly towards the people who turned them in - a 'fine bounty', if you will.

$1000 is not a lot of money in the grand scheme of things. However, like most people in Arkansas, I don't have $1000 to spare, so I would decide to just not risk working on advancing AI. Nor would I join an organization involved in such activities, lest I be caught in the crossfire. The more coworkers I had, the more likely it would become that one bad apple would turn everyone in at once to collect the $n000 reward. (turning themselves in would just mean paying $1000 to themselves, which makes 'getting away' with this a lot easier).

This is the essential thrust of Robin Hanson's Privately Enforced & Punished Crime; he calls this the fine-insured bounty (FIB) crime law system in a follow-up post. He is much more cogent in spelling out the edge cases of the system in general there, so I will focus on some details which I think make this system unusually well-suited to the problem of how one deters technological development, such as AI development.

It scales. It is very hard to develop new AI capabilities without someone suspecting what you're up to. Even if they cannot prove it, the insurance mechanism in the fine-insured bounty system means even a low-fidelity suspicion can carry with it considerable economic value. Much like how someone with a history of running red lights may have a higher car insurance premium, someone with a history of buying GPUs may have a higher AI bounty insurance premium. (Someone running a virus which collects a fingerprint of GPU activity at scale likely has a valuable source of information to sell to insurers and prospective bounty hunters alike.)
It chills. To use a leaky pipeline argument: Few people are smart enough to advance AI capabilities in the first place; of those, few possess the conscientiousness to build out such a project by themselves; of those, the world is already their oyster, and almost all of them have found better things to do with their time than labor in solitude. The chilling effect of knowing this will be your fate so long as you pursue this should not be un

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