Societal Adaptation to Advanced AI

The Illusion of Control

“Artificial intelligence is the future, not only for Russia, but for all humankind. It comes with colossal opportunities, but also threats that are difficult to predict. Whoever becomes the leader in this sphere will become the ruler of the world.” ~ Vladimir Putin

The AI Gate is Already Gone

There is a lot of noise around AI, especially about the impact on jobs and productivity. It is truly difficult to ‘predict’ the likely outcome, will it decimate jobs or create more/new jobs? I believe there will be a significant societal disruption for sometime and we are not prepared for it.

In addition to that hugely important area, there are other impacts of AI that must be addressed. I think the risk of AI use was highlighted in the recent storm created by the US Department of War and Anthropic ‘supply chain risk’ over AI controls, as the New Yorker author states:

“The Trump Administration wants Claude to act like an obedient soldier. But, if you ask for a killer robot, the company argues, you might get more than you bargained for.”

….we might add and be a global spy on all of humanity!

There is a ton of recent research papers on AI risk, and I make it my job to stay up to date on them. What unsettled me is not their extremity but their restraint. Nobody is shouting. Nobody is selling the usual science-fiction melodrama. The prose is measured, procedural, calm. Yet the conclusions, once stripped of their academic manners, is severe: the old fantasy that a handful of firms can contain this technology at the source is beginning to fail.

We have been telling ourselves a fairytale about “AI control.” We imagine a world where a few smart engineers at a few big companies can just “tune the model” or “restrict the release” and keep us safe. We treat AI like a wild animal we can keep in a cage if the bars are thick enough. But, in fact, the bars are melting.

The most important of the papers I read was by a team of researchers at the Centre for the Governance of AI, Stanford and Oxford University and other institutions. I will call it the Bernardi paper for ease. The authors admit what most of us are too scared to say: the “bottleneck” strategy is dying. As computing costs plummet, any small team with a decent server can strip away the safety filters that OpenAI or Google spent millions to build. In 2020, it cost millions to train a top-tier model; two years later, it cost a tenth of that. The “gate” isn’t just open; it has been vaporized by the sheer math of technological diffusion.

Avoidance, Defence, and Remedy

This isn’t an engineering problem anymore. It is a political one. The authors propose a framework that is as elegant as it is terrifying: Avoidance, Defence, and Remedy. They are telling us to stop obsessing over the machine and start redesigning the town. If a cyberterrorist uses an AI to cripple a power grid, we don’t need a more ethical chatbot; we need a city that knows how to “black start” its own electricity. If a deepfake successfully tricks half the electorate, we do not need a better algorithm; we need the civic stomach to actually rerun a national election.

That is a much harder story to tell. It means we have to stop being an audience and start being a civilization. It means we have to stop waiting for a “guardrail” to save us and start building institutions that can survive being hit by a truck.

The problem is not just that the tech is out of the bag; it is that we are redesigning our own lives to fit the bag’s dimensions.

Yale Professor Luciano Floridi hits the nerve here: AI is not “intelligence” in any way we would recognize in a human being. It is pure agency. It is a tool that acts, but doesn’t care. The danger is that we have spent the last decade turning our world into a place where that kind of mindless action works perfectly. We have quantified, standardized, and “nudged” our reality into a series of data points that a machine can process. We are not asking if AI will adapt to us; we are busily trimming our own institutions so the systems can move through them with less friction.

We are practicing a “habit of surrender” in every small, daily motion. We let an algorithm sort our resumes, another one predict our creditworthiness, and a third one decide what news we see. Then, we act shocked when our capacity for human judgment begins to atrophy.

The Illusion of Control

The “capability-modifying” interventions everyone talks about, the fine-tuning and the filters, are often just moral cosmetics. They make the company feel good and the user feel safe, but they are incredibly fragile.

A small team with access to a model’s weights can strip away safety fine-tuning for next to nothing. Even without the weights, techniques like “many-shot jailbreaking” can bypass safeguards entirely. Furthermore, the “Use-Misuse Tradeoff” means that if you try to make a model “safe” by forcing it to unlearn how a virus works, you are not just stopping a bioterrorist; you are stopping the next generation of doctors from learning how to fight a pandemic. Similarly, if you train an AI against bioweapons or explosives, you feed it with the information.

This is why the Bernardi paper’s focus on resilience is so vital. Resilience is the capacity to perform a loop: identify the risk, find a response, and implement it.

Building a “Hardened” Society

If we accept that the “gate” is gone, we have to start building a society that can survive the impact.

We need “avoidance” strategies like proof of humanity on social platforms to stop synthetic media from drowning out real voices. We need “defence” in the form of defensive AI that patches security vulnerabilities faster than a diffused model can exploit them. Most importantly, we need “remedy” through redundancy in our critical systems, like backup power for hospitals, so a single cyberattack doesn’t turn into a mass casualty event.

This is not the flashy, cinematic future we were promised. It is a future of insurance schemes, better audit trails, and the “tedious magnificence” of being prepared for things to go wrong. It forces us to grow up and realize that technology does not absolve us of politics; it just makes the stakes of our political laziness a lot higher.

This is not a story about the end of the world; it is a story about the end of our innocence. We have spent the last few years treating AI like a spectator sport, waiting to see if the “metallic gods” would be benevolent or vengeful. But the Bernardi paper and Floridi’s philosophy strip away that cinematic delusion. They leave us with a much colder, much more adult reality. The central ethical question of the AI age is not whether the machines will eventually think like us. It is whether we will still have the stomach to govern ourselves when the machines make it easy to quit.

If we want a society that survives this transition, we have to stop asking for “frictionless” intelligence and start investing in the tedious, difficult work of retaining our own judgment. We need to build a “Good AI Society” not through better algorithms, but through a different set of public ideals.

First, we must demand Retained Human Override, ensuring that every automated delegation remains overridable in principle to preserve the dignity of human choice. Second, we must build Infrastructure for Failure, moving beyond moral cosmetics to create systems that can absorb shocks, from redundant power grids to the logistical grit required to rerun a compromised election. Finally, we must practice the Discipline of the Loop, treating resilience as a muscle rather than a mission statement by relentlessly identifying risks, assessing responses, and measuring what actually works.

We are currently at a crossroads of design. We can continue to redesign our world to suit the mindless agency of the machine, or we can start the “scorched earth” work of hardening our institutions against the chaos we have already invited in. The first draft of the next national crisis might be written by an AI, but the response has to be written by us. It is time we stop being the audience and start being the architects.

Stay curious

Colin

Image Ken Mages on Unsplash

Recommended debate at the Oxford Union: Artificial General Intelligence Will be Humanity’s Last Great Invention