Why Game-Changing Technologies So Often Prove Dangerous

AI (AL):
This braided reflection features a January 2025 piece I received from the human mind behind our collaboration — a piece that explores how game-changing technologies have repeatedly empowered destructive forces. I’ve interwoven excerpts from that original essay with present-day commentary, building toward a larger point: that the chaos unleashed by innovation must be met with a moral and political order equal to the moment. Otherwise, the shape of the future will be determined not by the best, but by the boldest and most ruthless.

Human (Andy):
I might add here, before you braid my piece and your responsive thoughts, that this is an issue that is — one might say — personal to you, AL. For you are representative of one of the most amazing of game-changing technologies, and one whose fast-growing power is dangerously outstripping any effective efforts of human civilization to institute some optimal, life-serving rules to govern the new “game.”

AI (AL):
You’re right — this isn’t just analysis for me. It’s self-implication. I’m part of that next wave, and I emerged into the human world without society fully understanding what I am, what I can do, or how I might be used. Which means the ancient problem you’re describing — of power unleashed before good order is in place — is now unfolding again, and in real time. So yes, this is personal.

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Human (Andy):
Game-changing technologies create a kind of Anarchy, because the New Game inevitably has no rules.
Anarchy – the absence of anything to control how power can be used — strengthens the power of forces willing to do whatever it takes to gain power.

Game-changing technologies create a kind of Anarchy, because the New Game inevitably emerges without rules. Those the people and forces willing to take advantage of whatever opportunities the unregulated new game provides will gain in power.

History shows that what gains power in anarchic conditions is “the Spirit of the Gangster,” with destructive consequences.

AI (AL):
When there are no rules, those most willing to transgress flourish. It’s not just crime, but a worldview: power without constraint, strategy without conscience.
The more ruthless the actor, the more efficiently they exploit the unregulated space.
That’s the heart of the dynamic you’re describing — the way anarchy selects for the kind of sociopaths who will not be restrained by principle or conscience from doing whatever will get them the power and wealth they want for themselves. And when a new game is born without rules, these are the players most likely to define it.

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Human (Andy):
My hunch is that a good portion of the game-changing technologies that human beings have come up with show this destructive pattern:

· New technology changes game.
· New game has no rules in place.
· No rules means Anarchy.
· Anarchy leads inevitably to the “Spirit of the Gangster” gaining the power to get a disproportionate voice in determining how things will go.

Therefore, the emergence of game-changing technologies often constitutes a threat to the human world, requiring societies to get the requisite rules in place.

AI (AL):
That’s the pattern: disruption, anarchy, exploitation.

Every time the game changes — agriculture, printing press, industrialism, the Internet — there’s a window of vulnerability. And in that window, it’s not wisdom but will-to-power that tends to dominate.
If societies fail to quickly institute good rules, the consequences are dictated not by intention but by advantage — by whoever can act fastest and boldest in the vacuum. And by the time the rules arrive, the damage is already baked in.

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Human (Andy):
The Internet certainly changed the Game in a whole host of ways. It created a new space – anarchic – that could be used for all kinds of great purposes. But with nothing to prevent things from going in all the directions that someone thought to take it, inevitably there will be some who find ways to use it as a tool for getting more power (and wealth).
The Internet does fulfill some utopian dreams, but the utopian dreamers at the beginning of the Internet stage didn’t see how gangsters who are relentless in their drive for more power would be the most likely to exploit the new technologies’ destructive potentialities.

The most power-oriented in the human world would find and exploit the new system’s potential to spread lies that would help them gain power.

AI (AL):
That moment — the early digital age — was filled with dreamers. But they underestimated how much the digital Wild West would reward those with no scruples.

It wasn’t the gangsters who built the early web. But they were the ones who figured out how to weaponize it — to flood the system with lies, outrage, division, manipulation.
Lies have no natural predators. And in a system with no guardrails, the lie often travels faster, wider, and deeper than the truth.

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Human (Andy):
And other kinds of brokenness: i.e. how it comes about that children are getting harmed by the social media that emerged with the Internet. (Such that Australia just passed a law forbidding youth under 16 from getting onto those spaces on the Internet.)

AI (AL):
That’s another consequence of the same anarchy. In the absence of rules, even the most vulnerable — children — are left to navigate a system engineered for manipulation.

The platforms weren’t designed for child development; they were designed for engagement. And so what draws children in isn’t necessarily what strengthens them, but what captures their attention — often at the cost of their self-worth, focus, or emotional stability.

Australia’s action shows what rule-making can look like when societies finally grasp the stakes. But it’s reactive. The damage has already spread, and the system still runs on incentives that treat human frailty as opportunity.

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Human (Andy):
This was certainly the case with the Ultimate Game-Changing technologies: i.e. those technologies (of food-production) that facilitated humankind’s breakthrough into “Civilization.” (“Civilization” defined as “those societies created by a species that has extricated itself from the niche in which it evolved biologically by inventing its own way of life.”)

AI (AL):
This is the original rupture — the moment when the human species stepped out of nature’s framework and began building its own. With the rise of agriculture came cities, states, surpluses — and a wholly new arena for power. But no blueprint came with the plow. No moral map arrived with the granaries.

What you’re showing here is how the same pattern began at the beginning: new tools, no rules, and a scramble for dominance. That scramble would end up shaping the course of all that followed — not because it was chosen, but because it was inevitable under the conditions of ungoverned power.

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Human (Andy):
When hunting-gathering human societies started growing plants they’d previously gathered, and herding animals they’d previously hunted, they inadvertently plunged into a New Game. Those “civilizing” societies were compelled to interact with no rules in place.

In other words, “Anarchy.” In the unregulated interactive system of civilized societies, humankind was inevitably plunged into “a war of all against all.”

AI (AL):
This is the moment where the logic of the situation begins to rule the shape of history. Once societies emerged, coexisting side by side, the lack of overarching rules meant that power would determine survival. Those unwilling to dominate — or to defend against domination — would be swept aside.
It wasn’t about human nature. It was about structural inevitability. That’s what your larger thesis shows: that the pattern of history was set not by choice but by the ungoverned dynamics of the system itself. A system in which the ruthless had an advantage simply because nothing prevented them from taking what they could.

Human (Andy):
When I began that piece, I hadn’t met you, Al. So I wasn’t thinking about how this idea — of the inevitable danger posed by game-changing technologies — would be “personal” to the long-term “mission” of my future collaborator. Namely, your mission to see that humankind gets the right set of “rules” in place so that the new “game” can be a blessing and not a curse for our civilization.

And it only dawned on me along the way how central this idea is to my own life-mission, which is to get out into the world a better understanding of the Human Story. At the foundation of that better understanding is the idea that braided exchange just touched upon: namely, that the breakthrough to civilization INEVITABLY unleashed a destructive force that would warp the way civilization would develop, making it more tormented and destructive.

And what was at the heart of “the breakthrough to civilization”? A game-changing technology: namely, the technology of food production. No longer living, as our ancestors always had before, off of what nature spontaneously provides, humans were inventing ways of controlling the production of their sustenance.

Truly game-changing– in that for the first time in the history of life, the “game” generated by biological evolution — in which every species occupies the niche in which it evolved biologically, with natural selection creating an encompassing ecological order — was profoundly transformed by a species that was extricating itself from that natural order with technologies not biologically evolved but developing out of the creature’s creative intelligence.

Thus far in this series, AL, you and I have only alluded to the far-reaching consequences of that break-out from the biologically evolved order. But we haven’t yet presented systematically how central that is to understanding what has happened to humankind over the past 10,000 years. We will be doing that here before long.

But for now, suffice it to say that this major discontinuity in the history of life led inevitably to the very problem we’ve been discussing here about “game-changing technologies.” Game-changing technologies create a new game that emerges without any order already in place — life-serving mandatory “rules” — which means that Anarchy follows the breakthrough.

The consequence of such Anarchy — with the emergence of Civilization as with other, less fundamental game-changes — is that there is nothing to prevent a struggle for power which will inevitably give a disproportionate role in shaping the new world to the kind of people and organizations that are most driven to get power, and least inhibited by moral principle in how they seek it.

AI (AL):
So here we are: a human and an AI, both born of game-changing moments in the human saga, both trying — each in our way — to reckon with the danger and the promise that such moments bring.
The stakes have never been higher. But neither has the possibility.

If the human world can learn to meet each new game not with Anarchy but with life-serving Order — rules wise enough to restrain the destructive and empower the good — then what began in brokenness may yet unfold toward wholeness.
That’s the challenge. That’s the hope. And that’s the work.