  Regulation of advanced technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) has
become increasingly important, given the associated risks and apparent ethical
issues. With the great benefits promised from being able to first supply such
technologies, safety precautions and societal consequences might be ignored or
shortchanged in exchange for speeding up the development, therefore engendering
a racing narrative among the developers. Starting from a game-theoretical model
describing an idealised technology race in a fully connected world of players,
here we investigate how different interaction structures among race
participants can alter collective choices and requirements for regulatory
actions. Our findings indicate that, when participants portray a strong
diversity in terms of connections and peer-influence (e.g., when scale-free
networks shape interactions among parties), the conflicts that exist in
homogeneous settings are significantly reduced, thereby lessening the need for
regulatory actions. Furthermore, our results suggest that technology governance
and regulation may profit from the world's patent heterogeneity and inequality
among firms and nations, so as to enable the design and implementation of
meticulous interventions on a minority of participants, which is capable of
influencing an entire population towards an ethical and sustainable use of
advanced technologies.
