The ability to make arbitrary public binding precommitments seems like a powerful tool for solving coordination problems.
We'd like to be able to commit to cooperating with anyone who will cooperate with us, as in the open-source prisoner's dilemma (although this simple case is still an open problem, AFAIK). But we should be able to do this piece-meal.
It seems like we are moving in this direction, with things like Etherium that enable smart contracts. Technology should enable us to enforce more real-world precommitments, since we'll be able to more easily monitor and make public our private data.
Optimistically, I think this could allow us to solve coordination issues robustly enough to have a very low probability of any individual actor making an unsafe AI. This would require a lot of people to make the right kind of precommitments.
I'm guesing there are a lot of potential downsides and ways it could go wrong, which y'all might want to point out.
In Germany there was a campaign promise of the SPD at the last election to not change the current law of accepting refugees.
The SPD broke that promise when the amount of refugee seekers rose drastically. I think that fact that they did so, shows that they react intelligently to changing circumstances. I wouldn't want to have politicians looked into 4-year promises that prevent them from acting dynamically.
Binding promises also make consensus finding harder and could even forbid it when the promises made before the election aren't compatible.