The Biggest Room in the World
So there I was...
This morning I was reading an article on my phone at the kitchen counter, hair still wet, first cup of coffee going. Every morning at sunrise my wife and I swim a mile of breaststroke in our pool, out here in the rural suburbs west of Austin. She is an accomplished ocean swimmer, so a backyard mile is a warm-up for her and a life goal for me, and we keep a rhythm side by side while the hummingbirds work the feeder we set up for them every morning before we get in. They hover and squabble and sip a few feet from our heads, completely unimpressed by us. Then coffee. Coffee is exactly what we do afterwards. That is the whole ritual, and it is a good one.
The article was from UN News, datelined Geneva. Two days, July 6 and 7, and by the sound of it every kind of person who can get a badge: governments, technology companies, academics, civil society. The occasion was a report from the UN's Independent International Scientific Panel on AI, forty experts drawn from every region of the world, and the launch of something called the Global Dialogue on AI Governance. Forty experts. Every region. It may be the biggest room anyone has ever built for a single question.
And the question is not small. Yoshua Bengio, who co-chairs the panel and who has spent a career building the very thing he was there to talk about, told the room that AI is approaching or surpassing human capabilities in many domains, and then he said the sentence that made me set the coffee down: science currently cannot guarantee that as capabilities continue to increase, AI will not cause catastrophic harm.
Read that one again. Not "we are working on it." Not "risks remain." Cannot guarantee. Catastrophic.
The ambassadors were more hopeful, and they were hopeful carefully. Rein Tammsaar of Estonia said that for many countries AI could be a great equalizer, and in the same breath warned it could be used for coercive purposes, to erode trust in governments. Egriselda López of El Salvador put it plainly: the AI divide is real. Some nations have the infrastructure. Some are still fighting for basic connectivity. And Maria Ressa, who won a Nobel Prize for refusing to stop telling the truth, cut to the center of it: if you can't tell fact from fiction, you cannot have a democracy.
Here is what stayed with me on the second cup.
Everyone in that room in Geneva had a badge, a chair, and a microphone. That is what rooms like that are for, and I am glad the room exists. But I kept thinking about the chairs that were not there. The farmer in a village where the connectivity Ambassador López described has never arrived, whose economy is about to be repriced by systems he has never touched. The kid who will be born in 2036, who will inherit whatever gets decided, or not decided, in rooms like this one, and who cannot exactly submit comments to the panel. The person scrolling tonight who genuinely cannot tell anymore which video is real, which voice is synthetic, which fact is a fact. None of them were in Geneva. All of them were the subject of Geneva.
The speed problem makes it worse. The article says what everyone in the field already knows, that the technology is moving faster than the ability of any parliament or agency to keep up. When the stakes are that large and the mistakes are the kind you cannot take back, the instinct is to move fast and let the future sort it out. The future, of course, was not given a badge either.
I don't know if a summit can fix any of this. Forty experts and a global dialogue are not nothing; they may even be the beginning of something. But a room is only as honest as the chairs it remembers to count, and the most important ones are always the hardest to see: the ones that are empty not because someone skipped the meeting, but because they were never invited, or never born, or never asked. This morning I watched a hummingbird hang in the air six inches above the water, wings going eighty beats a second, entirely dependent on whether two swimmers remember to fill a feeder, and entirely without a vote in the matter. It seemed relevant.
So here is my question for you this morning, whatever room you sit in, whether it holds forty experts or four people and a whiteboard. When the next big decision lands on your table, and it will, who is affected by it that will never hear about it, never get a vote, and never know your name?
And when you decide anyway, as you must, can you say out loud what you decided on their behalf?
Source: Global push for AI governance amid warnings of 'catastrophic harm', UN News, July 5, 2026
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