In AI Needs You: How We Can Change AI’s Future and Save Our Own, Verity Harding argues that AI governance is too important to be left to technologists alone—and that the rest of us need to join the conversation to shape this technology’s future.

Harding is the director of the AI and Geopolitics Project at the Bennett School of Public Policy at the University of Cambridge and the founder of Formation Advisory. She spent more than a decade at Alphabet, first as head of Security Policy at Google, then as DeepMind’s first global head of Policy. In her book, she draws on historical case studies to show that democratic societies have successfully governed transformative technologies in the past.

In her conversation with Nikolaus Lang, global leader of the BCG Henderson Institute, she discusses why the nuclear arms race is the wrong analogy for AI, what the 1967 Outer Space Treaty can teach us about cooperation between rivals, how Britain’s regulation of IVF became a gold standard by depoliticizing the technology, and what business leaders get wrong about their own role in shaping AI governance.

Key topics discussed: 

[01:56] Why the framing of AI as “too complex for nonexperts” is harmful
[07:46] Why the nuclear arms control analogy is counterproductive for AI
[12:25] The Space Race and the 1967 Outer Space Treaty as a model for cooperation
[17:11] IVF, the Warnock Committee, and why a philosopher led the regulation effort
[20:38] The internet: from open ideals to commercialization and surveillance
[26:41] What business leaders can do to shape AI governance
[30:50] Four principles for AI: peaceful intent, embrace limitations, purpose over profit, societal trust
[35:25] If you could mandate one thing for global AI governance, what would it be?