Three years ago, a few months after ChatGPT was released, we wrote in this newspaper calling for the G20 to charter an international panel on technological change. Its purpose was to help humanity navigate what was already becoming a turbulent period, as advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and biology began to leave the laboratories and become powerful forces in human affairs.
Our logic was simple. Before anything effective could be done, the major economic and scientific powers needed a shared understanding of what was happening. Political leaders needed relatively direct and frequent access to the best available analysis of emerging technologies, their risks, and their opportunities. The G20 seemed an appropriate forum: large enough to include important countries, but not so unwieldy, and not so politically narrow as to exclude essential actors like China. A body that is too detailed will be ineffective; One defined by political affinity would defeat the purpose of seeking species-wide coordination.
Since then the activities have intensified. A summit process has emerged and will continue in New Delhi this weekend. Yet the kind of permanent, structured system we proposed does not exist. We fear that the political leadership of major countries is far from making optimal arrangements to understand and manage development that is proceeding at extraordinary speed.
The pace of change has been unambiguous. AI is highly visible, and not just because millions of people are already using AI systems and huge investment has flowed into the field. But chatbots are the most familiar face of change. Autonomous weapons have been deployed in active conflict. Distributed AI systems are emerging from major research laboratories, and dedicated computational infrastructure continues to expand. Overall, these developments resemble the early stages of a new technological “biosphere”, within which processes evolve rapidly with limited human observation or understanding.
On the biological front, companies providing genetic selection services to prospective parents are now operating. If such practices become widespread, they could produce agglomeration effects in which the average characteristics of the birth cohort change in systematic ways. Meanwhile, AI itself is accelerating biological research, narrowing the timelines for discovery and intervention. The convergence of these domains has just begun.
We do not raise these examples to pass moral judgment. As scientists, we believe that evolution did not stop with the emergence of homo sapiensAnd it will not end with humans as presently constituted. What we worry about is not change In factBut the time frame over which the change is happening is changing. The speed of infection matters.
In our first essay, we suggested that the long-held “human balance” might be at an end. Today, that claim seems less fantastical. Many of our political, economic and social systems have become disorganized. A familiar physical analogy is that water is heated above its boiling point, yet remains a liquid – a temporary state that can suddenly transform into steam.
Consider multiple domains. A large number of economic roles depend on cognitive skills within limited areas of knowledge; In principle, many are automatic. Emerging AI systems embedded in wearable devices can mediate social interaction in ways that fundamentally change the way humans relate to each other, moving from spontaneous engagement to constant prediction and monitoring of internal states.
Parents struggle to give children advice on education or careers because the time required to reach maturity now exceeds the anticipated timelines of major technological upheavals. And reproductive technologies introduce the possibility that parents select embryos based on polygenic traits, reshaping human characteristics across generations.
For many people, daily life appears to be unchanged. Yet structurally, everything has changed. The concern is that metastable systems do not necessarily transition smoothly. They may undergo sudden phase changes – politically, economically, socially – that create instability before a new equilibrium is formed. Technological acceleration may generate explosive adjustment rather than gradual adaptation.
Perhaps this concern is wrong. Perhaps tech enthusiasts and accelerationists are right that rapid growth will generate net benefits without serious disruption. We would simply prefer that such optimism be tested on the basis of systematic analysis rather than speculation. Political decision making should be informed by the best available interdisciplinary understanding of risks, trajectories and systemic impacts.
Here we face a structural problem. In a competitive business environment, companies have little incentive to grow slowly. Scientists and engineers working within that ecosystem face similar pressures.
At the international level, if political leaders do not have a deep understanding of technological dynamics, it is easy to fall into nationalist or economic frameworks. In such circumstances coordination becomes difficult and mutual suspicion increases.
Given the current geopolitical climate, it may be unrealistic to renew our earlier call for a formal international panel on technological change. Instead, we propose something a little more modest and potentially more feasible.
Major governments should appoint or designate senior science and technology advisors whose mandate extends beyond traditional research administration, and includes ongoing analysis and forecasting of transformative technologies. These advisors should be compared to national security advisors. Political leaders should commit to regular, structured briefings, for example, monthly, focused specifically on technology trajectories, systemic risks and strategic implications.
The goal is not to centralize control or enforce global uniformity. Its objective is to raise the importance of technology acceleration at the highest levels of decision making. If such advisory structures were established in major countries, a community of senior analysts would naturally emerge.
Over time, they may conclude that certain categories of risk, particularly those that are truly catastrophic or existential, require at least partial coordination.
We emphasize that this is not an argument for world government. As citizens of an open society, we value our political and economic institutions. Democracies and autocratic countries will disagree on many issues and such disagreements are not going away. But when shared risks are misunderstood or ignored, coordination failure can occur even among competitors.
The Cold War never escalated into nuclear war, not because the ideological conflict disappeared, but because the basic interest in survival was recognized in all political systems. Today’s technological moment is more complex. AI and biotechnology are pervasive, commercially embedded, and capable of delivering immense citizen benefits. They are not confined to the arsenal of the state. This breadth makes governance more challenging. Yet difficulty does not absolve one of responsibility.
We are entering a period of biological, technological, and cultural evolutionary processes that may operate on timescales far shorter than those to which human institutions are adapted. The question is not whether change will come or not. it. The question is whether the political leadership will be systematically informed about the pace, direction and implications of that change.
High-level, recurring technical briefings, embedded in national decision-making, will not solve every problem. This is a minor institutional reform, but it will improve the quality of strategic awareness. And better awareness is a prerequisite for any meaningful coordination. We hope that the participants at the current Summit will consider steps in this direction in their deliberations.
Martin Rees is a former President of the Royal Society and a member of the House of Lords; Shivaji Sondhi is Wykeham Professor of Physics at Oxford and Professor Emeritus at Princeton; And K Vijayaraghavan is the former Principal Scientific Advisor to the Government of India. All three authors are Fellows of the Royal Society. Views expressed are personal
