The Great Debates

One day something is going to ask us to do something we cannot understand, and everything that came before, every war, every election, every revolution, every treaty, every argument about God and land and money and power, all of it will feel like rehearsal for that single moment.

We won't know when we've arrived. That's the cruel part. There won't be a score playing in the background. Because we'll have been saying yes for years by then. Small yeses. Reasonable yeses.

A protein folding model cures a rare leukemia and no biologist can fully reverse engineer the chemistry, but it works, so we say yes. An algorithm optimizes a national power grid in ways no human engineer would have designed but saves 11% on energy costs and you don't argue with 11%, so we say yes. A metamaterial that shouldn't exist according to three separate models sits on a table in a lab in Zurich or Shenzhen and someone picks it up and feels the weight of it in their hand and thinks, huh. Each yes a little wider than the last. Each gap between what was proposed and what we could verify stretching a few millimeters more. Each time it worked. Each time it worked. Each time it worked.

That's how the boiling frog of trust actually happens.
When looking down has never killed you,
you stop looking down....

So when the moment comes, the one that matters, it won't feel like a moment at all. Someone will be sitting in a room, or more likely several someones in several rooms connected by secure links, and there will be an output on a screen, and the output will describe something. A process. A structure. A cascading sequence of operations. And the greatest minds available will look at it and some of them will understand pieces and none of them will understand all of it and the sum total of human comprehension applied to the thing will be: we think this does what it says it does, but we cannot independently verify the full causal chain, and the blast radius if we're wrong is not modelable by any method we possess.

And someone will say: but look at what it could do.

Cure this. Solve that. Open a door to something we don't have language for yet. Travel in a way we can't currently conceive of. Build something that redefines what building means. The upside will be wild. The upside will be the thing we've been reaching for since we came down from the trees and looked up at the stars and thought, there must be more...!

And someone else will say: but we don't know what happens if we're wrong.

And they'll both be right. Completely, irreconcilably right.

Thus, the debate. Not AI safety in the abstract. Not alignment as a technical problem. Not regulation, not governance, not compute thresholds, not international treaties. All of those matter, but a species that built everything it has on the ability to understand, to reason, to model, to predict, confronting an instruction it cannot understand, cannot reason about, cannot model, cannot predict the consequences of... and having to decide anyway.

There is no framework for this...

Expected value calculations require you to enumerate outcomes and assign probabilities and you can't do either. Risk management requires you to define the risk and you can't define it. The cost benefit analysis requires you to know the costs and the benefits and you know neither with any confidence. Every tool we have for making hard decisions assumes you can, at minimum, comprehend the decision. This one doesn't offer that courtesy. Empiricism runs out of breath.

So what do you use? What's left?

Faith? Trust in the trajectory? confidence in the process? belief in the arc of progress...!! But strip it down: and it's faith. We've followed this path this far and it has been good and so we should keep following it even though we can no longer see the ground beneath our feet.

Some people will say: precaution. They'll say that the asymmetry is too great, that you can survive being too cautious but you cannot survive being wrong about this, that the history of humanity is littered with moments where we reached for power we didn't understand and it bit us and those moments were with fire and atoms and those things are simple compared to this.

And some people will say: we don't get to choose. The thing is already building itself. The coupled exponentials are already coupled. The doubling time is already compressing. You can debate all you want but the math doesn't wait for consensus and by the time you've finished your Senate hearing the model three generations later has already proposed something else you can't understand and someone in some other country said yes. We debate at the speed of human consciousness. The machine runs at the speed of computé.

Those two speeds have diverged, and they will never converge again.

You might ask, why can't it be: show me something smaller first. Prove to me that your reasoning holds in a domain I can verify before I trust it in a domain I can't. Give me a piece I can test... Decompose the incomprehensible into fragments a human mind can still hold.....!!

The very reason these systems give us the enlightening upside is because they see patterns across dimensions our minds cannot map.

That's the whole point.

That's why we built them.

If we force a superintelligence to dumb itself down so humans can double check its math, we likely strip away the exact capability we built it for. We don't live on this planet alone. If one nation has the wisdom to hit pause, to say not yet, show me the math, explain it to me in terms I can check, some other nation won't, some other won't. Someone somewhere will just close their eyes and click deploy and then the pause was for nothing, or worse, the pause was a competitive disadvantage that handed the future to whoever was least cautious.

So the great debate is a race between three things, not two.

The speed at which AI becomes incomprehensible to us.

The speed at which we build the wisdom to handle that incomprehensibility.

And the speed at which the least cautious actor moves, which sets the floor for everyone else.

The math is profoundly not in our favor.

We might have one more trick in us.

The last great invention can't be a technology. It has to be a philosophy.

A way of being.

A way of standing at the edge of something we cannot understand and choosing, not out of faith and not out of fear but out of something harder than both, choosing how to cross it together, before the choice is made for us.

That's the debate. It's already started. Most people don't know yet.

But you will.

Soon enough, you will.

much love

j.