The First Force: Intelligence Becomes Abundant

The most consequential of the converging forces is the rapid increase in the capability of artificial intelligence. We will not speculate here about its ultimate trajectory, because honest people disagree about it and certainty would be a form of the false urgency we are trying to avoid. We need only observe what is already underway and reason carefully about its implications for coordination.

Artificial intelligence is, among other things, a multiplier of capability at a scale and speed that compress into years what previous technological transformations took generations to accomplish. It amplifies what individuals and small groups can do — to build, to persuade, to discover, to disrupt — by orders of magnitude. And here is the implication that matters for this book: a technology that dramatically amplifies human capability is a technology that dramatically amplifies the consequences of human coordination, and of human coordination failure, alike. The same leverage that allows a coordinated group to accomplish unprecedented good allows an uncoordinated, fragmented, or adversarial deployment to produce unprecedented harm. Leverage is indifferent to the coherence of the hand that wields it.

This is why the development of artificial intelligence is, at its foundation, a coordination problem before it is a technical one — a point we touched in the first chapter and now must press. The question of whether powerful artificial intelligence is developed safely, deployed wisely, and governed in the interest of humanity rather than captured by the narrow few is not, finally, a question that will be settled in laboratories. It will be settled by whether the human institutions surrounding the technology can achieve the trust, the alignment, and the long-horizon coordination that the situation demands — the very capacities that are already failing. A civilization that cannot coordinate is a civilization that cannot steer its most powerful technology. And the technology is arriving faster than the coordination capacity to steer it.