Why Game-Changing Technologies Require New Rules for the New Game

Probably no technological breakthrough in our lifetime has so thoroughly warranted the name “game-changer” as AI. But what makes a technology truly game-changing is not simply that it changes the game. It creates an entirely new game, and a new game does not come with a set of rules already in place. It is from that inevitable lack of rules that the profound implications arise.

“No rules” means all the players can do whatever they choose. That is the state of ANARCHY. In such circumstances, those with both the ability and the will to take advantage of the ungoverned state of the game will do so to get what they want, even at the expense of others. In other words, the lack of rules opens the door for the Spirit of the Gangster to get a disproportionate role in how the new game will evolve.

(In living memory, for example, we have seen how Warlords — i.e. gangsters — have risen to control failed states in Lebanon in the late 70s and in Somalia in the early 90s.)

And so it threatens to be with AI. So long as there are no rules to control how this extraordinarily powerful technology will develop, and will be employed, the people with the power to employ it as they please will govern the way the game-changing technology will affect the evolution of the human world. In the corporate world, it is already visible how the creators of this technology — operating in a power-maximizing market system — are maneuvering to use the technology to maximize their own wealth and power, perhaps in ways that work against the common good. And we can see how AI is entering the realm of the inter-societal struggle for power, as it changes the nature of warfare. We can see also how regimes can make use of AI to tighten their control of their populations.

More power to those who have power and seek to extend it. No rules means that it isn’t humankind that gets to decide the human future, but rather a particular subset—selected by the dynamics of anarchy: those best able to grab power. It is a non-random process of selection—one that condemns the human world to be ruled not by the will of humankind, but by the dictates of power.

Without rules, anarchy thus gives what might be called “the Spirit of the Gangster” a disproportionate say in determining the human future. Which is why it is essential that human civilization work as fast as it competently can to institute a system of rules to govern AI, and to channel this powerful technology in a direction that is life-enhancing in the human world.

We should appreciate the opportunity we have, and make the most of it. For there was another major juncture in human history when it was impossible for humanity to institute rules for the new game that a truly game-changing technology had created: the momentous transition from hunting-and-gathering to food production.

Being the first species to extricate itself from the niche in which it evolved biologically was truly game-changing: when people started GROWING the plants they used to gather, and HERDING the animals they used to hunt, human societies left the natural order that biological evolution had fashioned over more than three billion years. A whole new game.

The natural order inevitably evolves so that the interactions among the life-forms maintain the viability of the system. When humans made the breakthrough to FOOD PRODUCTION, they created societies whose interactions with other societies were not regulated to keep the system synergistic.

That NEW GAME among civilized societies—with no rules to regulate how those societies will interact—meant anarchy. And—as an anarchic system of societies inevitably leads to a struggle for power—the result was that tragic problem: “the Spirit of the Gangster” got a disproportionate role in shaping the human future. So five thousand years after the first gardens and corrals came into existence, the human world consisted of empires ruled by tyrants that enslaved the mass of those under their domination.

(For readers interested in a fuller account of this social evolutionary dynamic, see “The Ugliness We See in Human History is Not Human Nature Writ Large,” and Chapter 1 of The Parable of the Tribes: The Problem of Power in Social Evolution.)

And there was NO WAY that it could be stopped—because there was NO WAY that humanity could come together in that fragmented worldwide system to institute rules governing how societies could behave toward one another. Even if one region had agreed upon such rules, it would still have remained vulnerable to the entry of some gangster power from elsewhere on the globe.

(Indeed, even now—as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine demonstrates— some ten thousand years after the New Game began, WE STILL DO NOT HAVE ENFORCEABLE RULES IN PLACE that effectively constrain an ambitious power from behaving like a gangster toward its weaker neighbor.)

But in the 21st century, the situation is substantially different. Rule-making is genuinely possible. It is possible WITHIN nations, of course, where governments can legislate limitations and incentives to guide how a game-changing technology like AI develops. But it is possible also among nations.

There exists a kind of “world community” that has occasionally been able to come together to try to end the anarchy with agreements. Like the agreement to ban chlorofluorocarbons so that humankind would stop destroying the earth’s ozone layer. Like efforts toward a Law of the Sea, and toward capping emissions of greenhouse gases to blunt the gathering danger of climate change.

So unlike the emergence of civilization, the emergence of this remarkable new form of “intelligence” is a game-changer that COULD be accompanied by the creation, adoption, and enforcement of rules designed to make AI more of a blessing than a curse in the human story.

There is reason to hope that humankind is capable of responding to an urgent need for rules. We can draw hope from another game-changing technology in living memory: the development of nuclear weaponry. The two nuclear superpowers faced each ofher in that anarchic system of civilized societies, and they came to understand that Mutual Assured Destruction threatened to be the outcome of there remaining NO RULES governing the new game. It took a while, but eventually the humans running the competing superpowers began sitting down and coming up with rules to prevent catastrophe: rules to prevent the players from having reason to launch the first strike, for example. No first strike, no retaliation, no Assured Destruction.

When it comes to what the nations and peoples of the world will do with AI, it will doubtless depend on how well people understand the dangers and the opportunities.