Stephen Kotkin: Will There Always Be War? | AI Podcast Clips
00:00:00.000 | Do you think there will always be evil in the world?
00:00:05.160 | Do you think there will always be war?
00:00:08.840 | Unfortunately yes.
00:00:10.280 | There are conflicting interests, conflicting goals that people have.
00:00:17.040 | Most of the time those conflicts can be resolved peacefully.
00:00:21.440 | That's why we build strong institutions, to resolve different interests and conflicts
00:00:26.800 | peacefully.
00:00:28.600 | But the fact, the enduring fact of conflicting interests and conflicting desires, that can
00:00:38.680 | never be changed.
00:00:41.120 | So the job that we have for humanity's sake is to make those conflicting interests, those
00:00:50.560 | conflicting desires, to put them in a context where they can be resolved peacefully and
00:00:59.400 | not in a zero-sum fashion.
00:01:02.080 | So we can't get there on the global scale.
00:01:06.960 | So there's always going to be the kind of conflict that sometimes gets violent.
00:01:13.560 | What we don't want is a conflict among the strongest powers.
00:01:19.760 | Great power conflict is unbelievably bad.
00:01:24.720 | There are no words to describe it.
00:01:26.800 | At least 55 million people died in World War II.
00:01:32.400 | If we have a World War III, a war between the United States and China or whatever it
00:01:37.560 | might be, who knows what the number could be.
00:01:41.360 | A hundred and fifty-five million, two hundred and fifty-five million, five hundred and fifty-five
00:01:47.160 | million.
00:01:48.160 | I don't even want to think about it.
00:01:50.480 | And so it's horrible when wars break out in the humanitarian catastrophes.
00:01:56.600 | For example, Yemen and Syria and several other places I could name today.
00:02:02.760 | It's just horrible what you see there.
00:02:05.120 | And the scale is colossal for those places.
00:02:08.540 | But it's not planetary scale.
00:02:11.140 | And so avoiding planetary scale destruction is really important for us.
00:02:17.480 | And so having those different interests be somehow managed in a way that they don't,
00:02:25.600 | that no one sees advantage in a violent resolution.
00:02:30.880 | And a part of that is remembering history.
00:02:33.240 | So they should read your books.
00:02:34.520 | [END]
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