Tristan Harris

We had the technology of CFCs, this chemical technology that was used in refrigerants, and that collectively created this ozone hole.

It was a global problem from all these countries in an arms race to deploy this CFC technology.

And once we had scientific clarity about the ozone hole, 190 countries rallied together in the Montreal Protocol.

We did a podcast episode about it with Susan Solomon, who wrote the book on how we solved that problem.

And countries rallied to domestically regulate their domestic tech companies, their chemical companies, to actually reduce and phase out those chemicals, transitioning to alternatives that actually had to be developed.

We are not doing that with AI right now, but we can.

You gave the example of blinding laser weapons.

We could live in a world where there's an arms race to escalate to weapons that just have a laser that blinds everybody.

But there was a collective protocol in the UN 1990s where we basically said, yeah, even though that's a way to win war, that would be just inhumane.

We don't want to do that.

And even if you think the US and China could never coordinate or negotiate any agreement on AI, I want people to know that when President Xi met

President Biden in the last meeting in 2023 and 2024, he had personally requested to add something to the agenda, which was actually to prevent AI from being used in the nuclear command and control systems, which shows that when both countries can recognize that their existential safety is being threatened,

they can come to agree on their existential safety, even while they are in maximum rivalry and competition on every other domain.

India and Pakistan were in a shooting war in the 1960s, and they signed the Indus Water Treaty to collaborate on the existential safety of their water supply.

That treaty lasted for 60 years.

So the point here is when we have enough of a view that there's a shared existential outcome that we have to avoid, countries can collaborate.

We've done hard things before.

Part of this is snapping out of the amnesia.

And again, this sort of spell of everything is inevitable.

We can do something about it.