Wanna slow down AI? These biologists can help.

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Alex Capron (0:17)

This is Planet Money from NPR.

Nick Fountain (0:22)

There's a very strange puzzle at the center of the AI debate right now.

Alex Horowitz-Ghazi (0:27)

If by strange you mean like totally terrifying and apocalyptic.

Nick Fountain (0:30)

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 speed running the apocalypse.

Alex Horowitz-Ghazi (0:45)

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.

Nick Fountain (0:57)

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.

Alex Horowitz-Ghazi (1:10)

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.

Nick Fountain (1:25)

It's a heady time, and there doesn't really seem to be a way out. But sometimes, history offers a way.

Alex Horowitz-Ghazi (1:32)

So we headed to the stacks over to the Dewey Decimal section for collective action problem, and we found this wildly analogous story of a time when a new technology promised to transform life as we knew it, but also to potentially destroy the world along the way. The people most invested in that technology got together and puzzled through this question. Could they collectively find a way to stop this runaway technology before it was too late? Or would their fear of missing out make that impossible?

Hello and welcome to Planet Money. I'm Alex Horowitz-Ghazi.

Nick Fountain (2:12)

And I'm Nick Fountain. If the tech barons actually want to meet, actually want to slow things down, may we offer a lesson from biology?

Alex Horowitz-Ghazi (2:20)

That's right. The mitochondria is the powerhouse of the... No, I'm just kidding. Today on the show, we're going to tell the story of the time when scientists, faced with this new technology that they worried could lead to highly contagious diseases, bio-weapons, weird eugenics and a whole host of other problems, figured out how to push past a collective action problem.

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Nick Fountain (3:36)

What's scary about this moment is that there's this society-morphing, world-changing, maybe economy-wrecking technology.

And it's not only the Luddites who are saying let's slow down, it's the people who are leading the charge. But they aren't slowing down because they know it'll be bad for them, individually.

Alex Horowitz-Ghazi (3:55)

And if the story that we're going to tell today is an allegory, they are kind of right. This might be bad for them. When you solve a collective action problem, someone is likely to get hurt.

Just ask Janet Mertz.

Nick Fountain (4:08)

As far as I understand it, this whole story starts with you.

Janet Mertz (4:12)

Yeah.

Nick Fountain (4:15)

Are you bummed about that?

Janet Mertz (4:16)

No.

Alex Horowitz-Ghazi (4:17)

Janet is a big shot biochemist. In the 1970s, she was a 21-year-old getting a PhD at one of the premier programs in the US at Stanford University, working on research that was revealing the very nature of how life worked.

Nick Fountain (4:31)

Did you have ambition of winning a Nobel?

Janet Mertz (4:34)

Um, we were all thinking about that back in that era.