Tomy Lorsch

“I’ve always passionately believed in the power of the state to improve lives. Before my career in AI, I worked in government and the nonprofit sector. I helped start a charity telephone counseling service when I was nineteen, worked for the mayor of London, and co-founded a conflict resolution firm focused on multi-stakeholder negotiation. Working with public servants—people stretched thin and bone-tired, but forever in demand and doing heroic work for those who need it—was enough to show me what a disaster it would be if the state failed. However, my experience with local government, UN negotiations, and nonprofits also gave me invaluable firsthand knowledge of their limitations. They are often chronically mismanaged, bloated, and slow to act. One project I facilitated in 2009 at the Copenhagen climate negotiations involved convening hundreds of NGOs and scientific experts to align their negotiating positions. The idea was to present a coherent position to 192 squabbling countries at the main summit. Except we couldn’t get consensus on anything. For starters, no one could agree on the science, or the reality of what was happening on the ground. Priorities were scattered. There was no consensus on what would be effective, affordable, or even practical. Could you raise $10 billion to turn the Amazon into a national park to absorb CO2? How are you going to deal with the militias and bribes? Or maybe the answer was to reforest Norway, not Brazil, or was the solution to grow giant kelp farms instead? As soon as proposals were voiced, someone spoke up to poke holes in them. Every suggestion was a problem. We ended up with maximum divergence on all possible things. It was, in other words, politics as usual. And this involved people notionally on the “same team.” We hadn’t even gotten to the main event and the real horse-trading. At the Copenhagen summit a morass of states all had their own competing positions. Now pile on the raw emotion. Negotiators were trying to make decisions with hundreds of people in the room arguing and shouting and breaking off into groups, all while the clock was ticking, on both the summit and the planet. I was there trying to help facilitate the process, perhaps the most complex, high-stakes multiparty negotiation in human history, but from the start it looked almost impossible. Observing this, I realized we weren’t going to make sufficient progress fast enough. The timeline was too tight. The issues were too complex. Our institutions for addressing massive global problems were not fit for purpose.”
― Mustafa Suleyman, The Coming Wave: AI, Power, and Our Future