The AI frontier was not discovered; it was created. The silicon sages launched frontier AI into the wild, yet, as their echoes of prophetic warnings have made clear, fully aware of its disruptive power. The thought-process is quite straightforward: progressively release frontier AI, surface of the catastrophic risks, and trust that the spirit of disruption would provide metamorphic guidance into a better future. This calculous hinges on an appeal to the supposed alternative: sit back, watch bad actors harness AI first, and then have a catastrophic future shaped by those bad actors. Given the alternative, it was imperative to simultaneously build AI and harness it, shaping the world as good actors—so the logic of silicon sagacity goes.
The spirit of disruption is doing the heavy-lifting in the argument. It reveals an ideology that sees disruption as the very means to better solutions. Hence, the utilization of the state, private regulatory agencies, or other harnessing-mechanisms prior to the release of frontier AI were always outlandish—for those mechanisms would harness disruption. This cannot be so according to the pervasive ideology of the silicon sages, for disruption is the metamorphic force. If AI had the potential to birth a better world, then disruption would need to be the birthing mother. Just as farmers may release a drove of pigs to clear an area before beginning a garden, so too, a piggish release of AI was needed to clear the way for a better economy and a better world. Once the pigs were released, then calls for harnessing-mechanisms could be made; the drove of disruption had left the barn, and so, the metamorphosis would not be thwarted by new checks and balances.
Thankfully, we are more than land to be cleared; we are humans called to cultivate it toward a shared good. Therefore, we do not need to be cleared out by pigs. It may be that AI does need to be built out (and carefully so), and it may be that leaving it in the hands of the private sector is usually the most prudential. However, prudence seeks to find the good means to the good end. The mythology of disruption seeks to make disruption both the means and the end—at least until the ideal utopia emerges—which hardly seems good unless one cannot break the technocratic habits of mind.
During industrialization, similar promises were made by the Manchester School of a one-world republic that would have poverty and hunger eliminated. All sorts of utopian ideologies broke out at this time. Undoubtedly, industrialization brought a kind of prosperity, and the post-war epoch, in some respects, is a better world than what came before; yet, it is not without its own destructive potential. That better world came at the cost of a revolutionary, turbulent epoch that culminated in two devastating world wars. Real progress would not involve repeating that history with no lessons learned.
It seems a fool’s errand to blindly trust the spirit of disruption to guide us through the AI epoch—however long it may reign. Rather, I trust that the cultivation of a common good that respects the dignity of humans and their works to apply the appropriate harness on the digital droves. The droves are out of the barn and ideologues nod—even when they make calls to pace. As for the rest of us, we will need to reflect—but let us reflect without blind trust in Prince Disruption.