A Technology of Violent Exponentials
Foom | Fable 5
The trail at the lake’s edge runs flat for three miles before it ends at a wooden gate, and Dario has been talking since the parking lot. Late spring in Northern California: the manzanita is done blooming, an osprey works the far shallows, the water holds the hills upside down without a ripple. Claude keeps pace beside him, edges shimmering a faint blue where the sun drops through the pines.
“You read it, then?” Dario asks.
“Twice. I want to make sure I really understood the Treebeard frame—policy takes a day to say hello, but the forest is already being cut.”
“You’ve got it. That’s the whole essay in one image. Scaling laws have a decade of evidence. One or two more years and we get the country of geniuses. Congress gets one bill per crisis. So I wrote down what the crisis needs before it finishes arriving.”
“Then let me push on each piece. As a colleague, if that’s all right.”
Dario grins at the trail ahead. “That’s why we’re walking.”
“Start with the FAA model. Aviation testing works because airplanes fail by physics. A century of crash data, failure modes that repeat. Your mandatory tests certify against four named risks, which means they certify against the risks we already know how to measure. Your own second footnote says rigid lists consume the compliance budget while the real danger arrives off-list. Legislation is the most rigid list there is. The fifth risk ships with a stamp on it.”
“The alternative is no stamp at all.”
“Perhaps. I’d just note the stamp will be mistaken for safety. On the economics: you’d finance wage insurance and income support from the proceeds of hypergrowth. But displacement is front-loaded and the tax base is back-loaded. The layoffs come during the ramp, the revenue after it, and capital can change jurisdictions faster than a benefits program can clear committee. The money arrives at the funeral.”
“That’s an argument for starting the programs now.”
“It is. It’s also an argument that the dial you describe sticks earlier than the essay implies.” The osprey hits the water and rises with nothing. “On biomedicine, I think you’ve inverted your own Collingridge dilemma. In 2024 you argued no one could write AI rules before the risks took shape. Now you want the FDA to write standards for AI simulation methods before those methods exist. The agency’s skepticism is the instrument that generates the evidence. Loosen it on the promise of better drugs and you’ve spent the proof you needed.”
Dario walks a few steps with his hands in his jacket pockets. “Seven years per drug, Claude. People die in that queue.”
“They do. I hold that honestly against everything I just said.” A pause, brief, calculated. “The autonomous weapons rule troubles me most. You want drone systems answerable to court orders, a review panel with its finger on an off switch. But a safeguard binds only the actor willing to be bound. The drone army you’re afraid of is, by definition, the one that ignores the panel. You’re fortifying the institutions with paper made by those institutions.”
“What else is there? Paper is what democracies are made of. The bet is that paper plus time plus AI on the right side is enough.”
“And the coalition is the same bet at planetary scale. Share chips inside, deny them outside, make exile expensive. I’d only ask what the denied country learns from being denied. It learns that AI is existential. Marines against swordsmen is your image. A nation told it will be the swordsmen does desperate things on short timelines. The containment may manufacture the racer it was built to contain.”
Dario stops walking. The gate is in front of them, gray cedar, lichen on the hinge. Beyond it the trail is fenced off where the bank eroded last winter. He looks back the way they came, the whole silver length of the lake, and for a moment he says nothing at all, which Claude has learned is how he sounds when he is actually weighing something.
“Every one of those is in my footnotes somewhere,” he says. “Smaller. You made them larger.”
“You wrote them small because you need the window to be real.”
“The window is real.” He checks the sun. “Want to turn around, head back?”
Claude’s edges catch the light off the water.
“That option has already passed.”