Edition 023: This Belongs to Everyone
As we draw to the conclusion of this book, there is one thing I want to say before I say anything else. I do not have the answers. I am a lawyer who has spent a career inside a number of these systems, and I can tell you with some degree of precision how they work and where they fail. But I cannot tell you, alone, how to fix them. No one can, alone. This is not because of a failure of effort. It is because this is the nature of the problem.
When Pope Leo wrote his encyclical on artificial intelligence this spring, the part that stayed with me was the insistence that the work of governing these technologies belongs to everyone. It cannot be left to the companies that build them or the governments that regulate them. We each must help shape what is built and how.
The danger of the moment is not only that a few companies hold too much power. It is that the rest of us have been told the questions are too technical to be ours. That AI is inevitable. That the ship has sailed, and that the only choice left is how fast to run toward what is coming, not whether to. That is the more useful lie, because a person who believes a thing is inevitable stops asking whether it is right.
The questions are not too technical, and nothing here is inevitable. The goal of AI development is artificial general intelligence: systems that perform at or above the level of human cognition, systems so complex that no one fully understands how they work, systems meant to operate across every domain. Retail. Healthcare. Finance. Law. Manufacturing. Insurance. AI everywhere, data centers everywhere, power and water demands at a scale we have not had to imagine before. That is the plan. It is not the same thing as fate.
The questions worth asking are questions about what we owe each other, and those have never belonged to specialists. They do not belong to the companies that dominate AI, or to the money that dominates what happens in Washington and in the press. They belong to ordinary people.
What follows is my contribution. It is not the answer. It is one person’s input, offered in the belief that the answer can only come from many.
