OPINION:
On a stifling hot August afternoon in 1949, 15 elite smokejumpers parachuted into Mann Gulch in the remote Montana wilderness to fight a newly started wildfire.
Shouldering their tools and packs, they started down the gulch just as their leader, R. Wagner “Wag” Dodge, saw a 30-foot wall of fire jump the gulch less than 100 yards ahead and race toward them. He turned the crew away from the fire and up a steep, grassy slope.
Then he did something incomprehensible: He struck a match and lit the first-ever recorded “escape fire,” an intentionally set, controlled burn started in front of an oncoming wildfire that, once stamped out, creates a safe zone over which flames pass without harming those in it.
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The escape fire burned away the grass, leaving the advancing flames nothing to consume. Dodge lay down in the ashes and shouted for his men to join him. None did. Thirteen men perished. Dodge and two others survived.
The U.S. Forest Service faulted the men for failing to follow orders. Yet organizational theorist Karl Weick, in a landmark 1993 paper, found a deeper failure.
Dodge was the only one to see the fire jump the gulch, but he did not explain what was happening or what an escape fire was. Worse, he had never worked to forge the crew into a cohesive team, bound together by a shared mission and mutual trust.
Therefore, when the crisis erupted, those fragile bonds shattered and the crew fell apart just when the men needed one another most.
Today, we face our own wall of flame, and those who see it coming are the ones who lit it. Last week, in its filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, tech giant Anthropic acknowledged that rapid advancement in artificial intelligence will affect society and the economy in potentially disruptive ways.
Bill Gates has warned that “even under the best circumstances, the transition to this new AI era will be one of the most turbulent times in human history,” and no one has a plan for it.
It was not a lack of courage that killed the smokejumpers in 1949, but the loss of what Mr. Weick called “sensemaking.” When the crew came apart, every man ran from an unknown idea. In the age of AI, the path to safety will look just as strange. A fractured public will run from it, just as the smokejumpers did.
We will follow a counterintuitive approach only if we trust the person holding the match and the people running beside us. The lesson of Mann Gulch is that crews who hold together live to fight another day.
Yet our leaders are not building the required crews. We are entering an era that will demand extraordinary collective action precisely when our ability to agree, trust one another and act together is deteriorating. Only one-third of Americans now say that most people can be trusted, down from 46% in 1972, according to the General Social Survey and Pew Research Center.
Catastrophes can bring out the best in people. Strangers rescue strangers. Still, those instincts alone cannot manage a sudden, massive transformation of our daily lives. That takes institutions capable of creating shared understanding and collective action: government, congregations, schools and universities, the news media. Those are precisely the institutions being eroded.
Still, the future is not hopeless. From Sept. 11 to Superstorm Sandy to COVID-19, I have managed enough catastrophes to know how the story ends: We will find our way through the AI revolution. The only question is how long and rocky the transition will be.
The time to build the crew is before the fire. Government, despite its flaws, is the only institution capable of convening a national response at the necessary scale. It must bring industry, labor, educators and communities together to confront the risks, protect the vulnerable and establish a credible path forward.
Politics cannot be our excuse for inaction.
On that day 77 years ago, there was a way out. The tragedy was that the smokejumpers did not recognize it. Today, the AI fire is racing up behind us. Somewhere ahead, someone is lighting an escape fire. The question is whether we can find it together.
• Kelly McKinney is a former deputy commissioner at the New York City Office of Emergency Management and served on the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s National Advisory Council.
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