To further the metaphor, didn't the ban on nuclear weapons research work? We don't have pocket nukes, and there's very little risk of random countries acquiring their own due to the amount of work involved. To be concrete to AI: if we stop work on the frontier, the best we can do is make the current frontier easier to get to and more accessible. And while current frontier is strong, it's not world-changing so. The only way for the frontier to get to that level is to do research on it, and stopping that research gives time to help develop plans to not make it world-changing when we get to it.

Not in the way you seem to be thinking, no. Nuclear weapons can be banned because they are prohibitively expensive to research and build. You can't reliably hide a nuclear program.

In contrast, rewind to the early 1800s and there is zero hope of a ban on the R&D of small arms being effective in the long run. The only thing it might maybe ensure is that no legitimate actors that fall under your jurisdiction are involved in it.

Basically I think that current trends point to an eventual situation where world changing research doesn't require anything more than consumer level compute. Pandora's box has already been opened.

> We don't have pocket nukes

Bit of a tangent but we do, actually. At least depending on if you consider an artillery shell to be pocket sized. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_artillery

This one is a bit long to fit in a pocket but you could certainly sling it over your back. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W45_(nuclear_warhead)

> We don't have pocket nukes,

What do you call the Davy Crockett warheads like the W54 ? The 0.3 kiloton low yield B61-12 ? The Chagai-I boosted fission warheads demonstrated by Pakistan in 1998 ?

> and there's very little risk of random countries acquiring their own due to the amount of work involved.

And yet North Korea, Isreal and Pakistan got there ... and India speed ran five tests in 1998 that caught the US completely by surprise.