What Remains Open

The deepest open question about AI governance within Providence concerns what happens as AI capabilities advance beyond the current state of the art. The constitutional prohibitions in this chapter are drawn in terms of what AI is doing — making governance decisions, determining trustworthiness, operating without transparency — rather than in terms of specific technical capabilities. This means the prohibitions should remain relevant as capabilities advance: an AI system with dramatically more sophisticated capabilities would still be prohibited from making binding governance decisions, regardless of how much better its decisions might be than the human decisions it would replace. But the pressure to cross the prohibition line will grow as AI capabilities advance, and the governance mechanisms for holding the line will face increasingly sophisticated challenges. How those mechanisms are maintained under that pressure is a question that the current state of the art does not yet answer.