WHY TODAY’S AI RULES WILL DEFINE THE FUTURE

French philosopher Nicolas de Condorcet noted it took centuries to resolve the disruptions created by the printing press.

He was writing in 1794 - and hiding from the guillotine in a Paris safe house. Condorcet lamented the two centuries of information chaos, institutional collapse and reinvention that had ensued from a single innovation.

Stanford professor Andy Hall constructed his own AI governance argument around this recently. His point? We won't get 200 years this time.

Most governance conversations focus on what framework to adopt, which standard to align with and how to build a responsible AI committee. All very reasonable and necessary. But are we considering the deeper problem?

The governance choices enterprises make right now - in working groups that half the leadership team can't name - will define accountability structures for at least a generation.

Governance crystallises. It becomes the thing organisations build on top of. The thing nobody revisits because it's already handled.

Condorcet didn't live to see the implications of the printing press settle. But we'll likely live through the AI turmoil to its own settling - and be empowered or burdened by the equivalent institutional structures that emerged during the turbulent centuries after the printing press - copyright, censorship law, academic publishing and professional journalism. Which shaped the ongoing course of business, economics, society and history.

Most of these were established not through grand design but via expedient decisions that calcified.

That pattern is repeating now. And most AI governance decisions are being delegated to a committee on a Tuesday afternoon.

So what's today's in-the-end-at-the-end?

The governance defaults we set now won't just manage AI - they'll be the institutional architecture we inhabit long after the technology has transformed everything else around it.

Perhaps we should be bearing that in mind?