It might be interesting for someone to look into: Have there been large coordinated attempts to wean an industry off of blood money? (Successfully or not.) E.g. blood diamonds, blood gold, blood chocolate, blood cobalt, etc. What can we learn about that task from historical examples? What might transfer to frontier AI research and the surrounding ecosystem? E.g., is it at all possible to get “harvest” companies to be satisfied with some fixed level of model and not pay for advances? I know the answer is “no” but just saying it might be interesting.
I read an article in Fortune magazine twenty years ago about this, for blood gold. According to the story, the industry had so many layers of middlemen that it was impossible in practice to figure out where any given gold came from. The big change was when Walmart decided they wanted to offer clean gold products. They’re such a large buyer that they could negotiate for source tracking through the whole chain, and it was worthwhile for suppliers to put that tracking in place.
… though it’s not not a puff piece for Walmart, so take with a lot of salt.
It might be interesting for someone to look into: Have there been large coordinated attempts to wean an industry off of blood money? (Successfully or not.) E.g. blood diamonds, blood gold, blood chocolate, blood cobalt, etc. What can we learn about that task from historical examples? What might transfer to frontier AI research and the surrounding ecosystem? E.g., is it at all possible to get “harvest” companies to be satisfied with some fixed level of model and not pay for advances? I know the answer is “no” but just saying it might be interesting.
I read an article in Fortune magazine twenty years ago about this, for blood gold. According to the story, the industry had so many layers of middlemen that it was impossible in practice to figure out where any given gold came from. The big change was when Walmart decided they wanted to offer clean gold products. They’re such a large buyer that they could negotiate for source tracking through the whole chain, and it was worthwhile for suppliers to put that tracking in place.
… though it’s not not a puff piece for Walmart, so take with a lot of salt.
Isn’t the attempt of trying to get people off blood diamonds a lot about DeBeers not wanting people to buy diamonds that don’t come from DeBeers?