Tristan Harris

My entire career has been dedicated towards what is actually in service of protecting the well-being of humanity.

I've been doing that for 13 years.

The only thing that I care about is what will actually help create a future that you and I would both want our own children to live in.

This is coming from love of what actually creates that future.

I think that if people showed up with that same energy of like asking just an open-ended question of what would be the conditions that create that future that we want,

If everybody did that, policymakers did that, if CEOs of AI companies did that, I think that we would have a chance of getting to that different future.

And if you say that international coordination is impossible or collaboration between the US and China, that's never going to happen.

First of all, that is a totally legitimate view to have, given the current political headwinds.

But many people don't know that even under maximum geopolitical rivalry...

There have been many examples in history when countries actually collaborated on their existential safety.

The Soviet Union and the US during the Cold War, during the smallpox sort of breakout, they collaborated on smallpox vaccines while they were in the Cold War.

India and Pakistan were in a shooting war in the 1960s, and they signed during that time the Indus Water Treaty to collaborate on the existential safety of their shared water supply while they're shooting bullets at each other.

The Soviet Union and the US did the first arms control talks after the film The Day After, by the way, which created the conditions in part for those arms control talks to prevent a dangerous nuclear outcome that was an existential scenario.

And even just two years ago in the last meeting that President Biden had with President Xi of China, President Xi requested to add one thing to the agenda.

Do you know what that was?

to keep AI out of the nuclear command and control systems of both countries.

Meaning that, look, the US and China are maximally cyber hacking each other and they're screwing each other up every day.

And when there's a set of stakes that are existential, two countries that are even in conflict can collaborate on existential safety.

I'm not saying this is easy.

I'm not saying it's going to happen by default.