2026-10-15
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This is Planet Money from NPR.
There's a very strange puzzle at the center of the AI debate right now.
If by strange you mean like totally terrifying and apocalyptic.
All those things.
And that is that many of the people in charge of the AI companies are begging for someone,
anyone, to be the adult in the room that tells them to stop speedrunning the apocalypse.
Yeah, they're saying like, given that there's even a tiny chance that the products we're building...
Could lead to the end of human life,
seems like it might be a good idea for everyone to just pump the brakes a little bit.
But at the same time, none of them are taking any meaningful individual steps to slow down.
Probably because unless everyone else agrees to get on the same page, they fear falling behind and losing the race.
In other words, what we've got on our hands is a collective action problem,
where people know they need to come to an agreement,
but they don't want to do it because of their self-interest
and because they worry the other tech bros might defect or won't play by the same rules.
It's a heady time, and there doesn't really seem to be a way out.