It took decades of wrangling, but most of the world's nations finally took the threat of climate change seriously enough to do something about it.
Climate change deniers still abound, but since about the year 2000 most environmental scientists agree that not acting quickly risks a global catastrophe that could threaten life on Earth.
It may not be obvious to many people, but climate change and artificial intelligence (AI) have much in common.
Humanity's greatest advances happened because humans communicated and then worked together.
To help speed up communication, we developed increasingly sophisticated tools, from slates to pens, typewriters to printing machines, computers to smartphones, and satellites to the Internet.
The latest communication technologies exchange information at the speed of light.
Yet, that incredibly fast data transfer is stymied by an obstacle that's been around since prehistory: human beings.
We cannot communicate our thoughts by joining our brains directly to another person's.
Instead, we have to convert those thoughts into language and output them as sounds or images, usually in the form of speech or writing.
Regardless of how quickly that output is transferred to another person, that person must register it with their eyes or ears and then process it. Communicating in this way is very slow, imprecise, and error prone, and means we often communicate the wrong or unintended information.
In addition, our brains are unreliable storage devices, often misinterpreting and sometimes forgetting information. Worse still, when we die, all the data in our brain dies too.
The human brain took millions of years to evolve, while today's computers reached their present state in just about seventy years, and their processing power is doubling every few years.
Because of easy networking and increasing processing power, computers continue to become smarter. In short, unlike humans, computers thrive on joined-up thinking.
Most AI experts believe that machines will attain our level of processing power and acquire self-knowledge, i.e. consciousness, sometime this century.
Once that happens, machine intelligence will surge past ours simply because machines will process data so fast and will rarely lose any of it. It's very unlikely that we'll know what conscious computers are thinking.
Indeed, it's more likely that they will become so smart so quickly that, even if we knew what they were thinking, we wouldn't understand it.
Is it reasonable, then, for us to believe that we will be able to control those machines?
The term "joined-up thinking" is commonly used to mean intelligent reasoning. In a team context it means each person communicating efficiently with the others and everyone acting together to reach an agreed target.
Most experts in AI believe that our wisest (not just smartest) scientists, philosophers, and politicians need to start working together soon to plot the course of AI development in order to avoid a future where super-intelligent machines threaten humanity's existence. They emphasize that this work needs at least as much attention as climate change is now receiving.
Eminent theoretical physicist, Professor Stephen Hawking, acknowledged in 2015 that the development of artificial intelligence would be humanity's greatest achievement. However, he added a sobering warning "...but it may be our last."
Speaking in another era, Robert Oppenheimer, the famous nuclear physicist and father of the atomic bomb, said:
"When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it, and you argue about what to do about it only after you have had your technical success."
As if to prove him right, today scientists continue to develop increasingly powerful computer systems though they have no clear idea where their work will lead.
It may greatly benefit humanity, or herald its extinction. We probably won't discover which until we've had our "technical success."
At that point, though, it may be too late to do anything about it.