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Setting the scene
This has given me hope that you can convert death into life, that however difficult it may be that you can create a world without war.
Welcome to Imaginize World where we hear from forward thinkers, activists and scifi visionaries. Sundeep Waslekar is a visionary and strategist who explores global challenges for the future of humanity in particular the dangers of nuclear weapons associated with AI. He proposes specific actions with his think tank across 65 countries and many global organizations. Let’s listen to what he has to say.
How did you start?
How would you want me to finish this sentence? the idea is yourself in one word. If I said I just had a great conversation with a really interesting guy. He is a…
SUNDEEP
a rolling stone who gathers moss.
JANE
You are dealing with such critical issues for humanity and for the planet, and it’s a little difficult to know where to start.
I’d be very curious to know how you got started on this whole foresight work that you do. Was it something in your youth? Did you meet someone? What put you on this path?
SUNDEEP
I spent my childhood and youth in slum of Mumbai or outside Mumbai which I was staying in a what’s called in Mumbai (inaudible) or in Brazil they call it favela. So it’s a residential tenement without a toilet with bathroom but without a toilet. And I was staying in a place with maybe 200 square feet or maybe less with a family of four and my father’s family. And I had no exposure outside of that little slum. And then I used to walk up and down on the veranda of my tenement.
And I used to think without reading anything or reading a few things, used to think. And just while thinking up and down on the veranda, I had a thought that I had to do something about making the world a better place at the global level, not at the local level, not at the national level, but at the global level. And so at that time, when I was 20 years old and now I just finishing my college, I thought about repairing the international economic system and just in my mind I created a formula for restructuring the global financial system and it got published in a newspaper in India.
At that time the photocopying was a new technology but there was a rich guy staying not too far from the house who had taken a liking for me so he got me a few photocopies done and I sent them off to various people. I went to a library, I got the addresses of various people, and I sent them off, and I heard from the president of the World Bank, Robert McNamara, he said, well, this is a brilliant idea, and I’m going to circulate it all over the World Bank. And then I heard from John Tinbergen who was the first person to receive Nobel Prize in economics. And he said, well, this is what should be on the agenda of the global economic discourse. And then one by one, almost every well-known economist of 1970 and 1980 wrote to me and offered his comments and support for my ideas. And every single political institution, such as the US Congress and the State Department and the White House and the European Commission,
They all wrote to me saying that they opposed me. So I had the world divided between scientists and the politicians, with the scientists supporting me and the politicians opposing me. And I was 20 and they had no clue who I was. I was so fortunate that there was no Google and no internet, so they couldn’t find anything about me.
JANE
What a beginning. That’s extraordinary.
SUNDEEP
And since then it has been just rolling and rolling and rolling and that’s why I said I’m like a rolling stone but I gather the moss.
The Strategic Foresight Group and A World Without War
That is an absolutely incredible story. Now you created the Strategic Foresight Group recognized all over the world for your work and for the other people who are also in it. And you wrote a book, A World Without War, which is quite a challenging title, and you told me that there were two things that you were especially focused on right now. Could you talk to us a little bit about the nuclear dimension and the AI dimension and how they fit together?
Well, a few weeks ago, somebody read my book and somebody in North America and he found my number and he called me and he said, you know, from your name, it sounds like you’re Indian and your number, it’s an Indian number. But I read your book and I couldn’t make any sense of your nationality at all. You are working for humanity. And he’s a person who is a very prominent personality in the publishing world worldwide and who everyday deals with books and authors. So for me, I am really looking at humanity, where we are, where we are going. And I feel that as human civilization, we are in a very dangerous period.
Civilizational or national? A dangerous period
More and more our problems are civilizational, but our response is national. And so there is a fundamental malfunctioning of the international system. Even in the United Nations, which is a universal organization with almost all the countries in the world being its members, it is used as a place for bargaining national interest, not as a place for developing civilizational response to civilizational problems.
So our architecture of the world is extremely weak. It’s almost fragmented.
But the problems that humanity faces, they have an integrated response. So if a problem takes place, it would have a worldwide response and the entire human civilization or at least the human society of 8 billion people would be affected. So in this paradigm, the most serious expressions of the problems that threaten the survival of humankind are the nuclear weapons and artificial intelligence if something goes wrong with artificial intelligence not artificial intelligence by itself I mean artificial intelligence can be very useful in uplifting society and in addressing many problems and particularly resolving intractable medical problems and the climate problems and problems of urban management, but if they go out of human control, then artificial intelligence can be a threat to the very survival of humanity. So that is the reason why I am focusing lot of my energy on the worst is if there is a conversion between these two arms races. So nuclear arms race on its own is a threat to humanity. Artificial intelligence arms race is a threat on its own.
Danger of convergence between nuclear and artificial intelligence arms races
But if there is a convergence between nuclear weapons systems and artificial intelligence, then you don’t know, we’ll be dead. And this could happen in five to 10 years. And the priority of all the countries and all the people in the world should be to prevent such a catastrophe. It has taken 12,000 years for the project of modern human civilization
and it will take 12 hours to finish the entire human civilization And this can happen by intent, it can happen by incident, or it can happen by accident. And because it’s about survival of…
of the entire humanity but also personally my children, my family, your family, my neighbors, your neighbors, it’s everybody’s survival. And so I feel that that is what I want to focus my energy on and I hope more and more people try to at least understand the problem and see what they can do about it.
European Parliament and Stefan Löfven
Before we actually go into detail about what can individual people like me and, know, and “entre guillemets” as we would say in French, normal people can do who are not scientists or researchers. But first, you sent me a couple articles from Le Monde, in particular one where you and a Swedish former Prime Minister Stefan Löfven
That’s right. And it’s a relatively short article that you wrote, and there’s going to be a meeting at the European Parliament, you said, in the month of May, where the points that you make in this article will be discussed. And it seems to me that’s really touching on something that’s very, very, very current right now, in addition to the actual points that you’re talking about. Could you summarize for the people who are going to listen to our conversation what you and your Swedish colleague have said? You have a list of actions, an action plan that’s very pragmatic. It seems to me maybe a little difficult to achieve. I don’t know, but you’ll tell me what you think.
Action Plan Proposed. Early Precedents
Well, I told you a minute ago about a person in the publishing industry who called me after reading my book. And I get few such calls which make me happy. one such call I received was from Stefan Löfven. He read my book. I didn’t know him. And he was the former prime minister of Sweden. But he was at that time the co-chair of a high level advisory board established by the United Nations Secretary General. And he read the book and he called me and he said, know, I want to do something. What can I do? Let’s have a Zoom call. And so I had a conversation with him. Then I visited him in Stockholm and we spent a day together.
And he said, look, we have to provide actionable framework to the community of nations. And he said that he can draw that framework from the last chapter of my book, A World Without War in English or Entre Guerre et Paix in French, soon coming out in Spanish as Mundos Sin Guerras.
In the last chapter, I have talked about UN General Assembly Resolution 1722. It was passed unanimously by all the members of the United Nations. It was proposed by United States and the Soviet Union jointly in the middle of the Cold War. It was about the time the Berlin Wall was being constructed.
So while the two superpowers were involved in a conflict, their special envoys were meeting secretly in Belgrade to try to see how to construct a world without war. And so that was the second time in the last century when a blueprint for a world without war was presented. And it was agreed by the two superpowers by their presidents, is President Kennedy and Chairman Khrushchev. It was presented to the UN and it was adopted unanimously by the UN General Assembly. So we thought that there is already a General Assembly resolution. You don’t need to invent a new instrument for creating a world without war. You already have something that exists in the lexicon of the United Nations.
Four factors in our new 21st century age
But we need to adopt it to the new environment to the new context of the 21st century because that was in December 1961 and today the world has changed. So we reached the conclusion that there are four factors which are interlinked. You cannot really take any one of them out.
So one is the arms race in the nuclear weapons.
The second is the integration of nuclear weapons and biological weapons and chemical weapons with artificial intelligence, AI, cyber technology, biotechnology and other emerging technologies.
The third is the growing militarization, including in the conventional weapons.
And fourth is the absence of any mechanism to resolve conflicts between big powers or great powers, as it has happened in the case of the current Ukraine war, that you don’t really have a conflict resolution mechanism where either of the party could go to and have a mandatory resolution of the conflict.
A composite solution to address these four problems.
So these four are integrated problems. And so we have to find a solution which is a composite solution. Because there are people who are working on nuclear disarmament, but they are not succeeding because you can’t look at nuclear weapons anymore without considering the emerging technology.
And you can’t also look at nuclear weapons without considering the militarization. And people and nations will feel the greed to have nuclear weapons and even other lethal weapons, so long as they feel they don’t have security and there is no way to resolve their conflicts. So these four are integrated.
So we suggested a composite solution to address these four problems:
So for the nuclear weapons we suggested that there should be a phased elimination of nuclear weapons. You cannot eliminate nuclear weapons overnight even though that would be ideal within a time bound framework. It’s not just intent to, the intent is there in NPT (editor’s note: Non-Proliferation Treaty), it’s there in TPNW (editor’s note: Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons) in many treaties, but there is no target date, there is no time frame. So, there should be a time frame for phased elimination of the ….
Second, we propose that there should be a global convention to prohibit the use of emerging technologies, particularly AI and cyber technologies to empower any weapons of mass destruction and also lethal autonomous weapons. So because these technologies are new, now is the time that you can have some kind of a global convention. Once they are deep it will be very difficult to prohibit them.
Third, we suggested that there should be a gradual decrease in the military expenditure and weaponization of countries and the resources which are saved should be transferred to a common good and problems like health problems, climate problems and other problems of humanity.
And fourth we said that there should be a robust mechanism for resolving conflicts between big countries which is effective. So, these are the four elements of the package solution, but please do not look at any one of them separately.
So, what is going to happen now is Stefan Löfven has convened a meeting of political leaders and thought leaders in the European Parliament in the last week of May when these thought leaders and action leaders will look at our package and they will assess this package and hopefully they will elaborate. So my dream conclusion of that meeting will be a blueprint.
Nationalism devouring sense of humanity. Historical precedents.
So this is a very difficult time. There is a huge force of nationalism devouring the common sense of humanity. And this is quite evident in Europe as it is in other parts of the world. There is an appetite for spending on arms. There is a gross insecurity.
There is a fear of being invaded by your enemy. So we are living in a period of competing nationalism, competing sense of insecurity and competing greed for arms and destruction of humankind. And so we are going to take a look at our proposal, which is exactly in the opposite direction.
We don’t have any plan to resolve the conflicts which are on the table. But we believe at the same time that it is necessary to provide a structural solution to the way our world is governed. And this has happened before. We are not doing anything miraculous. The Charter of the United Nations was written in the period from 1941 to 1944 when the second world war was raging and none of the rival parties had any idea as to how the war would end. during that period that the charter was drafted and in 1945 after the war got over, I mean it was modified and immediately adopted. So it was written. If you look at Europe,
One of the other big wars Europe had was in the 17th century, what is known as the 30-year war, from 1618 to 1648. And in 1623, five years into the 30-year war, Émeric Crucé, a great French scholar, presented a whole blueprint about how the world should govern in the middle of the war. The UNGA (United Nations General Assembly) resolution 1722 which inspired our article in LeMonde was presented in 1961 in the middle of Cold War. It’s quite common to think of the day after, even when the world is at peril. And so some people might think we are naive to think of this long-term structural problem, but we are not naive. There is a historical president, not one, but there are quite a few.
Resilience in human society
And what it shows is that there is resilience in the human society and there is hope somewhere in the corner of the hearts of humans. And so even when you are facing something like the Second World War and even when you don’t know where you will be tomorrow, there will be some people who will think of the day after. And those are we, the people who are thinking of the day after.
JANE
Chen Stanley Qiufan He’s a Chinese science fiction writer. (editor’s note: co-author of AI 2041: 10 Visions for Our Future). One of the things that he said during his conversation with me that stayed with me was he said that we are trapped in this national state framework of thinking and he develops the idea a little bit and he ends up his idea saying what is the plan? What’s the action? Because it requires sacrifice on economy, recruitment, human labor, trading. It’s all part of globalization but you have to sacrifice a piece of my share and that’s where all the conflicts come from. Does that make sense to you?
Benefits, not sacrifices: I Am because We Are
We have civilizational problem but we are providing nationalist response. That is the most fundamental malfunctioning of the way the world works today. What this Chinese author said is very much echoing the same sentiment that we are trapped in this nationalist mindset but we are facing a global phenomen both in the positive direction and in the negative direction. And therefore, we have to think in universalist terms, we have to think in global terms, but it does not involve sacrifice. In fact, it involves benefit and we have ancient philosophies.
In southern Africa there is a philosophy called Ubuntu and Ubuntu means “I am because we are”.
So I won’t exist if we don’t exist. So I am because we are. So actually to think in terms of we rather than I is in the interest of my survival and my prosperity. So in fact, thinking in terms of we rather than I is gainful, not sacrificial. There is a philosophy in India in my country which we say is few thousand years old and it’s called Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam that’s a Sanskrit word what it means in English is that the world is a family and we are all integrated as a family and we are all related to each other and that is how we have to look at each other and then there is a philosophy in Japan and that is called (indistinct)
And it means there is only one nation on the planet and that is the world. The world is a nation. So you have African philosophy, Indian philosophy, Japanese philosophy, which looks at the world as one being, as integrated. And therefore, to harness our interdependence, to harness our co-existence, to harness our humanity, it’s beneficial, it’s not sacrificial and it’s what we need.
Brainwashed on our screens
Sundeep, how do you get people to understand that? I don’t think most people feel that way.
SUNDEEP
Yes, people are brainwashed by politicians, by the media, by social media these days. People are brainwashed. You know, I’m a person who reads, but I never see television news.
I don’t have social media. My publisher of one of my books earlier forced me to go on social media, so I nominally opened the accounts, I never visit them, except LinkedIn. LinkedIn is the only one I visit because I’m professionally connected, but otherwise Facebook, Twitter, I don’t visit. I don’t read newspapers much. I give half an hour just to take a look at the newspaper headlines. And I’m not missing out on anything.
But people spend hours and hours following the television news or the media or the social media and get brainwashed. And many people don’t even think. And so if you tell people that the world is likely to be massacred by in a nuclear war or in an AI war or even in a climate crisis, they don’t feel. It’s not their problem because they don’t see it on the screens. They just see what is on the screen and screen of the computers, screen of the TVs, screen of their mobile. And on the screen, they are just seeing this artificial films and messages which are produced by political and media masters.
Therefore, they don’t see what’s happening in the world. They just see what’s being presented to them. And so this is a serious problem. So if you ask someone that, you know, would you like to see the word massacred in a nuclear war? And he would probably give you a very distant reply and say that, you I don’t care, and it won’t happen, and you are talking lies.
Making it personal
But if you say that, you know, look, would you like your son or daughter to be murdered tomorrow? And then, of course, his sensitivities would be activated. So people have to realize that this is very personal. I got involved in this and I got intensified because I have children. And I feel if a nuclear war takes place or if an AI-driven war takes place or major climate war, I think my children who are in 20s may not may not see their thirties. It’s very personal. I love my children and it’s the same with your family. You make plans for them, you save for them, you give them education, you give them values. And then to think that they won’t exist for more than 10 years from now. It’s a… And you look at the eyes of your child and imagine that all that he has got is 10 years Not because he has got leukemia or because he’s kids got bad driving habits and he might crash a car but because somebody in Washington or Kremlin might start a nuclear war or worse because the artificial intelligence combined with cyber technology might interfere in the nuclear weapons systems and trigger a war where even White House and Kremlin don’t have control. It’s because of them.
But people don’t think of that. And when people realize that, then they will wake up. But people have woken up. People have woken up. know, certain kinds of weapons have been banned. Land mines have been banned, chemical weapons have been banned, biological weapons have been banned. So it is possible to do certain things which are unthinkable. Out of 93 countries in the world, 23 countries have given up militaries and armies forever.
We may sleepwalk into a war
And 175 countries don’t want nuclear weapons. So it’s only a dozen countries who have all kinds of powers, or maybe 18 countries, are holding the whole world for ransom. And why should we allow ourselves as people, ordinary people, to be held for ransom by the power elite in maybe 20 countries? We don’t like to be cheated by our business partner or by the neighbor, but we like to be cheated for our entire life and for our future by the leaders who are far away, not even our national leaders, leaders somewhere else. And because we are all sleeping, the whole world is asleep. And my biggest fear is that we may sleepwalk into a war.
Can storytelling make a difference?
Do you think that storytelling can make a difference?
SUNDEEP
Yes, We need catalyst.
It was a young woman at that time, Jody Williams, who organized a campaign and got the landmines bank worldwide. (Nobel Peace Prize 1997). She could force the countries to enter into a treaty to ban landmines. It was another young woman called Randy Forsberg who organized the freeze movement in the United States (Nuclear Freeze campaign) and that resulted in President Ronald Reagan who was hawkish to want to get rid of nuclear weapons forever and in Reykjavik, Iceland in 1986 Reagan and Gorbachev agreed to abolish nuclear weapons forever so the world came this close to save ourselves from annihilation.
And then in the last minute something went wrong and that agreement fell through. But it’s Randy Forsberg and there was a movie called The Day After. Since the power of stories, what you said, the power of movies, movie making, that convinced even somebody as strong-willed and as hawkish and as military-style as Ronald Reagan to cross the Rubicon and to call up Gorbachev to go to Reykjavík and to agree with him.
Global framework: mitigation of risks, maximization of benefits
How do you think that we, people, can get the right balance between using technology and living the way we should live, using it for the benefit of the world, for people, the benefit of people? How can we achieve that?
SUNDEEP
That’s one of the objectives I am going to work on in this year because if you look at artificial intelligence but this applies to biotechnology, it applies to lot of other technologies that on the one hand there is the tremendous potential to harness these technology and the knowledge and the mechanisms to uplift humankind.
But on the other hand, there is a tremendous danger that these technologies, if not controlled, can harm human society and maybe even destroy human society. So what we need are global norms, if not a global treaty, on preventing the destructive use of the technology or even the evolution of technology and harnessing the constructive use of the technology.
Scientists are leading, but they are not getting support from people. Jeffrey Hinton, who got a Nobel Prize. He is one of the leading scientists. There are Vandalia who co-founded Skype, you one of the big inventions of yesteryear. And there many other scientists and others who are leading this but they’re not getting support from people. So scientists are only talking with each other because people don’t want to think about the risk. People only want to think about benefits. So we have to develop a framework, a global framework, which balances mitigation of risk with maximization of benefits. And that’s the effort I’m involved in in 2025.
Need to understand the benefits
Maximization of benefits. Normal people have to understand what the benefits are because they can then indirectly and directly put pressure on people who are making decisions.
SUNDEEP
Yes, I mean, with artificial intelligence, you can predict infectious diseases. So if you can predict an infectious disease, you can stop it from spreading and you can put an end to future pandemics. So what happened with COVID-19? 700 million people were affected, 7 million dead. But millions suffered, economics collapsed.
If you can simply predict an infectious disease and how it will spread, which you can actually do with artificial intelligence, you will stop pandemics from happening in the future. There have been pandemics in the past, not just COVID. You had the plague in Europe after the First World War. You had the big plague in Europe in 13th or 14th century. You had the Asian flu in the 1970s. We had pandemics every now and then. Every 20, 30 years, we have a pandemic.
AI if properly harnessed can prevent pandemics
But artificial intelligence if properly harnessed in a collaborative way, we can prevent pandemics. You can increase the productivity of agriculture and you can improve the management of water. So these are our fundamental needs, food, water, and you can improve at a time when there are constraints on the resources. So we should see how to use technology for that not keep on building AI models, which just give us a sense of power.
So currently the focus among some companies and some powerful people is to have an AI model. A lot of Americans, they want to have the most powerful AI model just to be one up on China. And a of Chinese entrepreneurs want to have AI model just to be one up on America. What is America and what is…China if there is a destruction of the whole world, the whole world will be one graveyard. But that same talent what they have, are extraordinarily talented people. If they can collaborate, they can prevent pandemics forever.
When do children start to think “us vs them”?
Do you think that the children of today, can the children of today see the kind of vision you’re talking about? By children, I mean like people sort of under 15. Do you think they are more, they have more of a collaborative nature in them? Or do you think they’ve been too contaminated by social media?
SUNDEEP
I think those who are 12, 13 are still sane. As they start growing up, they start getting poisoned with not so much social media. Social media is an instrument with religion, with nationalism and all kinds of things. And then they start thinking in terms of us and them.
And when they start thinking in terms of us and them, then the path of destruction starts.
JANE
Okay, well, I think we’ve covered a lot of topics, Sundeep. It’s been very interesting listening to you. Do you have any final thoughts that you would like to share?
Final thoughts from Sundeep: you can create a world without war
Yes. You know, I was once…on an aircraft which almost crashed. When my younger son was born, the doctors told me that he wouldn’t survive for more than 12 hours.
And I’ve been in situations where terrorists or criminals could have gunned me down.
And each time I survived and each time I carried on to create a new tomorrow.
And so this has given me a faith, a hope that you can convert death into life, that you can transform despair into hope, that you can shift from violence to peace, that however difficult it may be, but you can create a world without war. Thank you.
JANE
Well, it’s me who should thank you for taking the time to share your ideas and your actions with us. This has been a very, very valuable conversation and I think my listeners are going to appreciate it very much.
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