At the end of the day it’s an empty platitude and vain hope that work will pause or be considered carefully. Certainly public entities can be made to pause, but nation states won’t. If there’s an advantage to be had; the work will continue in secret. Vernor Vinges “Bookworm, Run” had a take on this situation.
They’re talking about pausing research and talking together about the path forwards, not stopping research and letting <whatever country your paranoid about> build terminator.
We have to take unintended consequences into account. It's unlikely that we will be able to get all corporations and governments to agree to a pause and be able to enforce it. The question then is what are the consequences of some people pausing and not others? Does this decrease risk or increase it?
