I’ve been thinking about Sir David Attenborough. Not for the first time. But this week, a clip resurfaced – a 2020 interview with Anderson Cooper for 60 Minutes, filmed when Attenborough was promoting A Life on Our Planet. In it, he’s asked what he’d say to world leaders. His answer: find an international ambition. Work together. Cooper pushes back, isn’t the opposite happening? More nationalism, less cooperation? Attenborough pauses. ‘That’s what’s going to sink us.’
He said that six years ago. About climate and nature. And we’re still watching it back and nodding.
Which got me thinking about AI. And an empty cinema.
Because the same week I watched that clip, I walked into an Everyman cinema to watch Mo Gawdat’s film Chasing Utopia – a film telling us there’s a ten to twenty per cent chance of human extinction within 30 years [1], and there were just five of us in the room. Five.
I’m not saying people don’t care. But if we can’t fill a cinema for that, and we still haven’t found the international ambition Attenborough called for six years ago — what will it actually take?
With AI, everyone is climbing a different ladder. Individuals want an advantage. Companies want dominance. Nations want supremacy. Nobody is climbing in the same direction. And there’s no agreed framework at the top — no international rules of engagement, no shared destination. It’s the space race, except the prize isn’t the moon. And unlike the space race, no one is prepared to stop racing and chasing. Unless everyone else stops first!
So what fills the vacuum? Big tech. Which means the burden moves from international agreement to corporate conscience. But conscience struggles to compete with momentum, money, and fear of falling behind. Innovation rarely pauses voluntarily.
Attenborough is one of the most trusted voices on the planet. If he can’t complete the circle and bring us to an agreed international ambition on nature — something we’ve had decades to work on — what hope for AI, which is moving in months what climate moved in years?
Maybe that’s what both Attenborough and Gawdat are really saying.
The world is worth getting together for.
The cinema was nearly empty. That’s the problem.
Which leaves me wondering:
Can humanity coordinate fast enough to keep up with the technology it creates?
Happy 100th birthday, Sir David Attenborough.
Source: [1]. Geoffrey Hinton. https://www.dongascience.com/en/news/69256
