This “race” may indeed be a descending, dissipative system and entropy dividend as a function of the overall approximation towards the median values that percolate to ascendance through the generally recursive computational processing and validation of billions of pre-existing and manufactured datapoints.
Consider, please, and if you will, that what this integrated Rube Goldberg machine of a complex sociotechnical system is being refined (if not curated) for is not the production of intelligence, utility and value. It is being defined and refined as a fulcrum and pivot for the production of precisely the kinds of turbulence and dissonant discontinuity that maximally reproduce the constellation of circumstances through which intelligence, utility and value can be leveraged.
This is neither good nor bad. It simply exists as a dynamical fact as an observation about things in the world.
Systems optimally self-propagate as a function of the exponentiated coding of methods of encoding. That is the biological switch, here. Conjecture.
Technology is the symptom of other, much less black box-able, system properties. The cause is something altogether less subject to deterministic boundary definitions.
Context: Humanity at risk from AI ‘race to the bottom’, says tech expert
Daedelus Kite 