Collective action problems

Their wordsa hard-earned lesson of the past few months is that mobilizing collective action against the federal government is hard.

Their wordsIndividually, we have very little power, but together we have a great deal of power.

Their wordsMany of the challenges implied by increasingly powerful systems that may eventually build themselves run through solving collective action problems among humans - namely, how we can get companies and governments to coordinate in thinking about how to develop this technology and what kinds of mechanisms may be desirable for being able to control the speed at which it develops.

Their wordsMore pragmatically, nations without cultural unity have difficulty providing public goods; politics tends to break down into an ethnic spoils system instead of being run for the benefit of the masses.

Their wordsMost users don’t actually impose costs back to maintainers: they download the code and never interact with the project.