Above the Fray of the Moment: Why Free Societies Must Evolve or Perish

A few days before DeepSeek made headlines, I was asked to speak at a Buffet Institute event on AI and Geopolitics. In the video: I called out that current GenAI approaches that were doubling down on energy-intensive & hardware-intensive methods would find themselves disrupted by other approaches to AI, including Active Inference.

As I now reflect on our current technological landscape, I continue to believe we need more people to recognize what I have been advocating for several years now:

Through the combination of Internet, smartphones, apps, and AI, we have effectively "democratized" capabilities that were once exclusive to intelligence agencies like the CIA and KGB in the 1970s.

Today, over 2 billion people, primarily in free societies, possess these powers, with another 1 billion people set to gain access to these technologies over the next five years for less than $100 USD in the near future.

What concerns me deeply is that our societal structures - our civic institutions, defense mechanisms, and public safety frameworks - haven't evolved in parallel with this technological revolution. Traditional government policy reforms alone can't bridge this gap, given the unprecedented pace and scale of these changes.

Towards Community-Centered and Market-Driven Solutions

Solutions for the future ahead, I believe, lie in a new paradigm: tasks previously reserved for governments must now be tackled through a combination of community-led and private-sector initiatives. Yet this presents its own challenges. The private sector typically prioritizes profits and shareholder value, while communities often struggle to think beyond their immediate vicinity.

This transition will be particularly challenging for free societies, where market forces have historically been singularly focused on improving financial returns. We've inadvertently created a world where nation-states alone can no longer govern effectively in traditional ways - a parallel to how the Catholic Church's support of the printing press ultimately transformed its own power structure.

The historical parallel is striking: just as the Catholic Church couldn't have anticipated how their investment in the Gutenberg printing press would catalyze the Great Schism within a century, the West now grapples with the unforeseen societal implications of Internet, smartphones, apps, and AI fifty years after their inception.

We're witnessing what appears to be every nation for itself on the global stage, with free societies facing the greatest challenges due to their fundamental commitment to freedom of thought and dissent. This stands in stark contrast to autocracies, which enforce singular narratives through coercion and force.

It Rarely Looks Like History While We're Living It

Our 'old world' way of working may indeed be fading, and unless we experience an EMP blast that temporarily reverses our technological progress (and even then, we would rebuild), we must rapidly devise ways to create a new world that prioritizes human communities and benevolent outcomes. It's worth noting that for approximately 200 years after the printing press, people lamented the end of the world as they knew it - and in some ways, they were right. There was no returning to the 1300s, just as we cannot return to a pre-digital age.

Yet, I remain optimistic. History shows us that adaptation is possible - just as the Treaty of Westphalia emerged roughly 200 years after the printing press, establishing new principles of international relations. The world keeps turning, and solutions emerge through evolution and adaptation.

Our path forward involves both strategic "unplugging" from technology and leveraging the inherent strength of free societies - our grassroots decentralization. Rather than waiting for a centralized solution, we must embrace our capacity for distributed, community-driven actions. The very essence of free societies lies in this ability to adapt and evolve through collective, bottom-up initiatives.

The challenges we face are significant, but they're not insurmountable. By acknowledging these realities and actively working to reshape our approach to civic engagement and technological integration, we can build more resilient societies that harness the benefits of innovation while preserving our fundamental values and freedoms.

Here's to helping to build better futures for our communities together.