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The Lens
The institutions we trust to govern transformative technologies - legislatures, regulatory agencies, international bodies - were designed for a world that moved slowly. They deliberate in months and years. AI moves in weeks and days. This is not a fixable lag. It is a structural incompatibility.
The question is not whether institutions will catch up. The question is whether the concept of institutional governance is compatible with the pace of exponential technological change. If the answer is no, then the most fundamental assumption of democratic governance - that the people, through their representatives, can shape the terms of their collective future - collapses.
This essay examines the temporal mismatch between institutional capacity and technological acceleration, and asks what it means for the social contract when the most consequential decisions of our era are made faster than any democratic process can respond.
The False Remedies
”Just regulate it”
The most common response to AI governance concerns is a call for regulation. But regulation assumes a stable object to be regulated. AI capabilities shift between the drafting and passage of any law. By the time a regulatory framework is enacted, the technology it addresses may be two generations obsolete - or three generations more dangerous.
The European Union’s AI Act, years in development, was already struggling to account for foundation models by the time it reached final negotiations. This is not a failure of political will. It is a category error: applying tools designed for stable industries to an exponentially evolving technology.
”The market will self-correct”
The argument that competitive pressures will naturally restrain dangerous AI development confuses incentives with outcomes. Markets optimize for profit within existing legal frameworks. When the frameworks lag the technology, markets optimize for whatever is technically possible and commercially viable - regardless of social cost.
The history of every major technological disruption, from industrial pollution to social media, demonstrates that markets externalize harm until forced to internalize it. With AI, the harms may be irreversible before the correction arrives.
”Existing frameworks are sufficient”
Some argue that existing legal frameworks - tort law, product liability, antitrust - can handle AI. This view underestimates the novelty of the challenge. Existing frameworks assume identifiable actors, traceable causation, and bounded harm. AI systems can produce diffuse, emergent, and unattributable effects that slip through every existing legal net.
What We Actually Need
National
A new institutional architecture designed for the pace of technological change. This means agencies with the technical capacity to understand what they govern, the statutory flexibility to act without years of rulemaking, and the democratic legitimacy to make consequential decisions quickly. Something between a central bank and a public health authority - technically expert, operationally independent, democratically accountable.
Global
An international framework that acknowledges the transnational nature of AI development. Not a treaty that takes decades to negotiate, but a rapid-response coordination mechanism - more like the WHO’s emergency protocols than the Paris Agreement’s long-term commitments. The pace of AI demands governance infrastructure that can act at the speed of the technology it governs.