AI Can’t Be Contained — Here’s Why That’s a Problem

The proliferation of massively disruptive technologies isn’t happening in the not-so-distant future. It’s already here.

At this year’s World Economic Forum in Davos, artificial intelligence took center stage. World leaders discussed whether or not it should be regulated and what regulation would even look like.

The short answer is yes, AI needs to be regulated. But the reality is that regulation alone is insufficient. With so many different stakeholders vying for power, it’s impossible to find common ground to successfully enforce guardrails that enable the safe proliferation of AI.

The problem is that the emergence of new technologies like artificial intelligence has created a fundamental paradox that regulation simply cannot resolve. With the spread of these new technologies, a new form of government will have to emerge. That government will establish new institutions that are not bound by our current social contract. New norms and values will have to be created as well, some of which we don’t even have the capacity to envision yet.

In his book The Coming Wave, DeepMind co-founder Mustafa Suleyman paints a stark portrait of how the paradoxes inherent in the proliferation of new massively disruptive technologies make it impossible to plan for. He argues that these new…