Trump’s recent assembly of many of the very top people in AI must be counted among the most momentous political occasions in U.S. history — and perhaps human history. It comes at a time of extreme instability, uncertainty, and acceleration.
Even — or especially — those at the summit of tech and politics are unclear on what is going to happen and why. But they do know one thing: The nature of ultimate power on Earth is changing, and they are positioned to receive more of that power than almost anyone else.
Laws will not save us. Algorithms will not save us. Mere adherence to the letter of any code, however intelligently written, will not save us.
Power does not arrive alone. Rapidly acquiring unprecedented power brings anxiety, pressure, exhaustion, confusion, and the temptation to mistake possession for mastery.
The important thing about this is precisely that it is an experience. To deal with the consequences of a profound infusion of power is to plunge into the mysterious depths of being — the realm philosophers call ontology — in stark contrast to epistemology, the realm of knowing.
Power reminds us that knowledge arises from being, not the other way around.
For anyone operating at the highest levels of tech and politics, that reminder is crucial. Decades of bad modern philosophy and overzealous nerdery have encouraged the opposite idea: that being arises from knowledge.
That fake news is bad news. It feeds the fear that we have poured so much knowledge into machines that they are about to spring to life as an altogether new form of being — uncreated by God, no less — that will instantly dwarf and dominate us.
Yet one prominent techno-utopian belief treats the same prospect as good news, almost literally a new gospel. In this telling, the machine is not merely a rival life form. It becomes the vehicle for a new man. Rather than dwarfing and dominating us, the alien intelligence will fuse with us, becoming in effect a new god and a new soul, transforming us into Adam 2.0.
People who recoil from that prospect, and fear it could become real, are scrambling to fight or slow it through new law. The impulse is understandable. But it carries the seeds of its own failure.
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Christians know there are sharp limits to what lawgiving can accomplish. St. Paul wrote that, having died to what bound us, we have been released from the law so that we serve in the new way of the Spirit rather than the old way of the written code (Romans 7:6). He also wrote that God “has made us competent as ministers of a new covenant — not of the letter but of the Spirit; for the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life” (2 Corinthians 3:6).
Paul’s point is spiritual, but it bears directly on our technological confusion. Treat lawgiving as the highest activity of man and God, and you begin to imagine that being arises from knowledge. If being arises from knowledge, then creating knowledge can create being — as if the Golem of Prague or Frankenstein’s monster could be brought to life by sufficient information.
That is not life. It is a parody of life: death pretending to be life and producing more death.
At the intersection of unprecedented technological and political power, we have to remember that epistemology is downstream, not upstream, of ontology.
That is why the new “White House Accord on Super Intelligence,” signed by Trump and six of the industry’s most powerful executives, is so momentously uneventful. The companies say they “should implement” four basic layers of controls and audits: robust internal safety controls; an empowered internal team to make sure those controls work; an independent external auditor or evaluator; and an independent board committee to oversee the whole structure and make sure problems are fixed.
That’s it.
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The accord adds that the companies will meet regularly to establish standards and best practices. “Over time,” it concludes, “it may make sense to codify these steps into laws or regulations.” But for now, no. Basically, it is a plan to get better organized about not screwing up the whole AI thing.
That may sound a little scary, considering how fast things are moving and how deep the trust gap has become between many Americans and the tech titans.
But it would be scarier if the companies threw themselves at the feet of lawgiving and tried to fob off responsibility onto a new written code. Because if they did that, they would in effect force the rest of us to do the same.
That kind of thinking is what got us into this mess in the first place.
Laws will not save us. Algorithms will not save us. Mere adherence to the letter of any code, however intelligently written, will not save us. Christianity’s warning against pharisaical faith in the letter is not an invitation to lawlessness; it is a warning against confusing compliance with righteousness.
It is good that the accord is simple and unsensational. Strip away all the words, codes, boards, controls, and audits, and there are still people underneath — people who can run from responsibility but can never finally hide from it.
All told, the accord is being-first — human-being-first. That is exactly what it needs to be if we are to avoid the false faith that our identity is merely the slave of information.
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