VOLUME V, PART SIX
The Age of Artificial Intelligence, and the Law That Lags
The first five parts set out the whole array of the law's positions, from the roots of law to how it runs, how it treats an ordinary person, how it struggles over scarcity, how it spreads out between nations. This part has only one chapter, and it is the volume's heaviest step down onto the ground, because it pushes every position that came before it into a moment that is happening now, one each of us is standing inside, artificial intelligence. The old output was grain in the field, goods in the plant, iron in the mine. This new output has to add compute, data, models, machine service, and the speed at which it redraws the whole map of positions is faster than the steam engine, faster than electricity.
The part first seals off the present international order, and sees that however fine the rules and however complete the institutions, the core is still a balance of force frozen in place, the law of one household written by the strong, only that what it borrows now is no longer the seal of a weak nation but a more dignified form, passed unanimously by all members. And under that order the world's output positions are shifting. Whoever's output rises will sooner or later come to push the rules into a new arrangement. Follow that cord, output drives the rules, and artificial intelligence, a wholly new output, walks onstage to redraw everything, and the international line of this volume joins naturally into the line of artificial intelligence.
Then it sets two hard rules. The first, the law always lags. Technology runs out in front, society adjusting follows in the middle, the law and the institutions land last. This is not a defect in the law, it is its nature, and the ancestors said it long ago, when the age changes, the affairs change with it. The second is colder. The law does catch up in the end, but the law it writes once it has caught up is, in the great majority of cases, not written to hold back the vested interest, it is written to weld the vested interest in place. From British child-labor law, seventy-eight years in coming, to American antitrust law, written to calm public anger, more than two centuries of legislative history line up with Huang Zongxi's law of one household. The law over artificial intelligence will not escape this rule either.
Last it returns to the three questions at the core. What is artificial intelligence. It is a tool, a trained tool, not a subject, and raising it into a legal subject is at bottom the building of a firewall to let the developing company shed responsibility. A tool holds no license. The one who holds the license is always the person using the tool, and that is the root of a licensing tradition thousands of years old, a license standing guard over the harms that cannot be taken back once they are done. But this time a dislocation has struck that was never there before in all those thousands of years. Most of the people training the medical, legal, and psychological artificial intelligence hold no license in that field. Unlicensed people, by training a model, hand out professional judgment to hundreds of millions at one remove, and when something goes wrong the responsible party is lost in a sea of faces, propped up by capital, layered behind a user agreement, and cannot be reached. And the knowledge workers the intelligence replaces stand on positions that grow narrower and narrower, and the deepest of them is this, that there is more and more, and I am less and less needed.
This part builds from the forty-first layer, the present international order, to the forty-third, the position of artificial intelligence, and there all forty-three layers of the volume come to their cap. It holds the discipline the volume has kept from the first page to the last. It lays out only the positions, gives no way out, and brings every dislocation, every bind, even a paradox it lays down without resolving, to the reader's eyes, and leaves every answer to the next volume.
For the more clearly this volume sets its positions, the more firmly the way out of the next one will stand. The next volume, Saving People, racing against time before the blood runs, comes to answer head-on every hard question this one lays down. How to pull the people the intelligence replaces out first and settle them. How to make output large enough that no one need take anymore. How to grow do not do to others what you would not want done to yourself from one person's cultivation into the living way of a whole world. This volume stops at the edge of the cliff. The next one walks on from the edge of the cliff.
Contents
Chapter Fourteen. From the Old Order to Artificial Intelligence, the Law's Last Chase.
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.