Nuclear non-proliferation has slowed the distribution of nukes; I acknowledge that this is slowing distribution rather than development.
There are conventions against the use of or development of biological weapons. These don’t appear to have been completely successful, but they’ve had some effect.
There has been a successful effort to prevent genetic enhancement—this may be net-positive or net-negative—but it shows the possibility of preventing development of a tech, even in China which was assumed to be the wild West.
But going further, progress studies wouldn’t exist if we didn’t think we could accelerate technologies. And as a matter if logic if we have the option to accelerate something we also have the option to not accelerate it, otherwise it was never an option. So even if we can’t slow a harmful technology relative to a baseline, we can at least not accelerate it.
I enjoyed this interview. I found it particularly interesting to hear how you were originally skeptical of the stagnation view and only came around to it later.