In recognition of the annual gathering of the United Nation General Assembly, which has just begun here in New York, I wanted to share with you my essay outlining how we can better address our greatest common global challenges. In the essay, I recommend practical steps our various governments and the international community can take now and also suggest broader principles for global operating system reform. The essay is extracted from my new book, Superconvergence: How the Genetics, Biotech, and AI Revolutions Will Transform our Lives, Work, and World.
—
In May 2023, OpenAI cofounder Sam Altman and a growing chorus of others called for the establishment of national and international regulatory bodies for AI, modeled loosely on efforts to govern applications of atomic energy and nuclear weapons since World War II. But these calls, while admirable and essential, didn’t sufficiently take into account one basic and essential reality: while the nuclear efforts have been far better than nothing, they have also significantly failed. Although establishing the AI equivalent of the World Health Organization would be an international achievement of historic significance, we’ve all seen why the WHO itself, for fully predictable reasons, has not been given the mandate or resources to achieve its stated mission, even following the deadliest pandemic in a century.
This contradiction between the nature of the challenges and that of the available solutions is why solving the problems associated with our new and revolutionary technological capabilities require that we think systemically about how to build our best possible future. We must, of course, build better frameworks on every level for increasing the positive opportunities and decreasing the negative risks associated with each individual challenge, including human-engineered biology, AI, climate change, nuclear weapons, and lots more.
But doing all of this essential work is itself not a sufficient solution to our even bigger problem. If we solve for pandemics but not climate change, we lose. If we solve for pandemics and climate change but not nuclear weapons, we lose. If we solve for pandemics, climate change, and nuclear weapons, but not for runaway AI and synthetic biology, we lose. The list goes on.
Seeing each these issues separately is kind of like seeking to create a new vaccine for each flu virus we encounter. This one-by-one approach is certainly far better than nothing, but there are an almost unlimited number of dangerous flu viruses that could evolve over time. To develop a universal flu vaccine, we need to determine, on a molecular level, the common attributes of all flu viruses so we can build a system targeting that. In just the same way, we now need to identify the common elements of all the global challenges we face and begin building upgraded local, national, and global frameworks to address that. We need to think of this moment kind of like the period after the Thirty Years War in 1648 and after WWII in 1945, when global operating systems upgrades were momentarily possible.
The idea of safely and effectively governing some of the most powerful and transformative technologies in human history is tough enough on its own. Calling for this extremely difficult task to be folded into the even more complicated and seemingly intractable problem of global governance more generally makes it seem almost impossibly daunting. It’s hard for us to get our minds around the idea that AI and engineered biology governance are just subsets of technology governance, which is itself a subset of national and global governance, and that success will only be possible by making significant progress on all levels. But if we don’t set out to solve the overarching global collective action problem at the same time we address its multiple manifestations, we’ll forever be jumping from the frying pan of one crisis into the fire of another.
Recognizing that the many challenges we face—from pandemics and biosecurity to climate change to proliferating nuclear weapons to AI governance—all share a common root does not mean we shouldn’t continue to address them individually. On the contrary, it’s essential we do everything possible in our communities, countries, and world to create the positive and negative incentives we need and the essential guardrails preventing abuses. We need new and upgraded national laws and regulatory frameworks and new institutions for AI, synthetic biology, and much else. But because achieving a miracle in any one issue area will not constitute an ultimate win for our species, we’ve got to do more and better.
I understand how strange it might be for people valiantly dedicating their life energy to climate change, nuclear weapons, pandemics, AI safety, or any other single issue to see their particular existential challenge described as only a single manifestation of an even bigger and more vexing global governance and collective action problem, but there is, at least in my view, no way around this essential conclusion.
A central theme of my new book, Superconvergence, is that civilizational advances in science and technology have created new, godlike capabilities for our species that need to be managed on every level in ways that optimize benefits and minimize harms. Because these benefits and harms are two sides of the same coin, we can’t focus on one without paying sufficient attention to the other. If we focus on realizing the great benefits of biotechnologies without considering the potential harms, the rewards of industrialization without addressing its downside consequences, or the positive magic of increasingly powerful technological ecosystems without factoring in the dangers, we will drift toward Armageddon on a mushroom cloud of hope. Instead, we need to start building new norms, processes, and institutions on all levels, local to global, optimizing for the world we want.
We can’t build more effective governance capabilities and solve our broader collective action problem all at once so must build from the ground up, with individuals, communities, companies, and countries all playing an essential role.
In every area where the intersecting genetics, biotechnology, and AI revolutions have the potential to transform life, a hodge-podge of different national regulatory systems currently create a world of highly disparate standards. This is true for human genome editing, the genetic modification of plants and animals, high-risk virology research, and all the other areas explored in the book. In each, some jurisdictions have tough standards, some weak ones, and some none at all. Although technological challenges are significantly and ultimately global and common we regulate those challenges unevenly, or not at all, in different jurisdictions around the world.
Accepting that this mishmash of regulatory systems (and non-systems) poses a problem does not mean there can or even should be one universal system for regulating the many applications of engineered biology across multiple industries. It does mean that we need to do all we can to make sure every country has the best possible regulatory and governance infrastructure in line with its own values and needs and that, collectively, these efforts contribute to better governance globally.
Although no country has sufficient governance and regulatory systems in place to meet the needs of this transformative moment, some countries are doing a far better job than others. While more developed and better-governed countries may be able to move more quickly than others in some areas, the overall process will be most sustainable if there are no regulatory and governance black holes anywhere in the world. Sharing best practices and working to help all societies rapidly develop governance systems in line with their own values and traditions is, therefore, essential. Helping strengthen the ability for government regulators around the world to learn from each other, including by improving and establishing best practices institutes, educational materials, and training programs, will be another critical step in the right direction. So will building a universal framework making it easier the best ideas in one domain—whether IPCC equivalents for pooling knowledge, tool kits helping organizations comply with basic standards, registries to make sure high-impact cutting edge research is not being carried out in the shadows, or global observatories trying to keep tabs on what is going on—can be more easily shared in other domains.
One way of addressing the global mishmash problem will be to simply make sure we’re organized in analogous ways so we can speak with each other. Over recent decades, most countries have appointed coordinators for climate change who oversee efforts toward that critical issue on a national level and interface with counterparts globally. Although a strong argument can be made that similar coordinators should be appointed for other global issues, including synthetic biology, artificial intelligence, and nuclear proliferation, it’s easy to see how such a world could become swamped with crisscrossing coordinators often working at cross purposes. Because these challenges have so much in common, this atomized approach would also prove dangerously distracting and wasteful.
In addition to establishing new or enhanced capacities focusing on the safety and security of human-engineered intelligence and reengineered biology, it will therefore also make sense for each country to appoint a coordinator for common global challenges and opportunities who would oversee discrete efforts in all of these areas, highlighting the many common roots of all of these related opportunities and risks. These national efforts could then be mirrored on the international and global levels and help establish stronger and more meaningful collective norms guiding us forward. At very least, this could also help those working on individual global issues stop continually reinventing the same conceptual and organizational issues in their different communities.
A new international body focusing on common responses to shared, existential challenges could, under the auspices of the United Nations, coordinate the national coordinators and provide a framework for incorporating perspectives of civil society, faith-based, indigenous, and other groups and support plans to make each and all of us better off.
Backed by and coordinating with states, but also operating with a high degree of depoliticized autonomy, this agency could work to build and promote frameworks fostering technological development for the common good, hold regular exercises testing our world’s ability to respond to major crises, and work to identify and analyze our greatest risks on the national and international levels. Grading our world and each country annually on levels of governance and preparedness, it could help develop, coordinate, and implement ongoing action plans for addressing shortfalls, compile and share best practices, lead efforts to build capacity everywhere, prepare for and seek to prevent future global crises, and coordinate emergency responses when crises do occur. This same body will need to ensure that the most beneficial manifestations of our new powers—our ability to better prevent and treat disease, develop life-saving vaccines, sustainably increase agricultural productivity, invent and deploy novel biomaterials, and safeguard the cultural inheritance of our species, to name just a few—are shared as widely as safely possible.
Such a process could be kick-started with a Global Interdependence Summit including the leaders of all world governments and United Nations agencies, as well as leaders in civil society, indigenous, faith-based, youth, and other groups. The goal would be to articulate principles that can underpin the next phase in our collective political evolution as a species and a global systems upgrade based around the mutual responsibilities of our complex global interdependence, with issues of how we can best govern our revolutionary technologies one piece of this broader framework. The overall process would recognize that a stronger collective framework for addressing all of our common problems is necessary for making it possible to optimize the benefits and minimize the harms associated with our revolutionary new capabilities.
Although these efforts will need to be based on the hard-won principles we have already developed, including the 1945 UN Charter, the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights and its protocols, and the 1966 International Covenants on Civil and Political and Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, we’ll also need to establish additional principles suited for the new realities of our rapidly changing world.
If the essential word for the seventeenth century Peace of Westphalia was “national” and the keyword of the 1945 UN Charter was “international,” the one-word descriptor of the upgrade that is now required is “interdependent.” We need an upgrade to our global operating system based on a recognition of the mutual responsibilities of our complex, global interdependence. Whether we like or even accept it or not, our fates are intertwined with each other, with all living beings, and with the health of our planet in our increasingly interconnected world. Because revolutionary science exists within the context of this superstructure, getting the big picture of our collective organization more right will help us get all the smaller pictures more right as well.
It is obviously ironic that our world needs to come together to solve our greatest problems just as big-power rivalries are pulling us apart, but that is the point. Experiencing the fully avoidable COVID-19 pandemic and observing crises and conflicts in Ukraine, the Middle East, the South China Sea, and elsewhere give us a glimpse of the fate awaiting all of us should we not start changing course. While substantial efforts must be made to achieve whatever small and practical progress we can, these small victories won’t amount to much or enough unless we make progress on the superstructure questions.
Articulating the values we hope we will guide us on a journey whose contours we cannot possibly predict is what many societies do as they seek to launch new beginnings. The American Revolution started with a declaration of principles, the 1776 Declaration of Independence, which laid the ideological groundwork for what came later. The United Nations experiment was sparked by the 1941 Atlantic Charter then launched with the 1945 UN Charter setting out its foundational principles. In these cases, an entire, often terrible, history preceded these moments—the decimation of indigenous populations in the case of the United States and the experience of two world wars and the failure of the League of Nations in the case of the United Nations—and terrible things like slavery, imperialism, and systemic inequity followed, but even with all of these massive shortfalls factored in, the US Declaration of Independence and the UN Charter still set an intention, a North Star to orient future efforts.
Turning these types of aspirations into realities will require a monumental allocation of time, energy, and money. These inputs, however, will ultimately prove relatively miniscule compared to the costs of continuing with the status quo, including unrealized human potential, dramatic losses in biodiversity, preventable pandemics, climate change, and technology superenhanced wars potentially killing millions or billions and leading to trillions of dollars in economic losses.
Like Kant imagining a League of Peace in 1795 or Roosevelt and Churchill imagining a United Nations when their countries were losing the war in 1941, the idea of a global systems upgrade may seem impossible now and it will remain an overly idealistic “castle in the air” until we start building a foundation—brick by brick, byte by byte, nucleotide by nucleotide, person by person, idea by idea, institution by institution—under it.
In very short order, we humans have gone from disparate bands of roving nomads to a global species with the awesome power to recast life, engineer intelligence, and remake much of our planet (and potentially other planets)—without developing a global consciousness or politics to match.
If we merely soldier on trying and largely failing to solve our predominantly global problems one at a time without a more comprehensive approach, if we simply accept the broken politics of our dangerously divided world as inevitable while our creative and destructive powers grow, a crisis awaits us, perhaps even an existential one. Those of us who survive this crisis, like our shrewlike mammalian ancestors coming up from their burrows 66 million years ago and our parents or grandparents celebrating the end of World War II, may finally come out of our foxholes, caves, space stations, or other places of refuge recognizing that a new global politics based around the principle of the mutual responsibilities of interdependence must be built.
Our far more desirable alternative is to make the necessary changes now, to follow our ethical North Star toward a world that can be made immeasurably better if we use our new capabilities wisely.
We should all feel this urgency.