AI's Dominance Is Not a Done Deal
The spread of artificial intelligence feels inevitable to many people. It isn't.
Key points
- Many people assume AI's widespread adoption is unavoidable once the technology exists.
- History shows societies have shaped technology's role through collective decisions.
- Communities can set the terms of AI's integration rather than simply absorbing it.
- Philadelphia residents are already doing exactly that, as we reported on 16 September.
The assumption goes like this: once the ideas and means to build a technology exist, its spread is locked in. Accept it, adjust, tolerate it. Algorithm-driven social media hardened that fatalism in a generation of policymakers. Now AI is inheriting it.
That assumption is wrong.
Can society influence AI's role?
Yes, and the historical record is the evidence. Countries have previously come together to reach international agreements when facing existential threats, demonstrating that collective decision-making can redirect even powerful technological forces. The question is whether the political will exists to repeat that.
The honest answer is: not yet, and not automatically. The fatalist reading of AI's future is self-fulfilling only if enough people accept it. When they don't, as our 29 July story "AI's Role in Deepening Global Inequality" showed, the costs of passivity fall hardest on those already left behind by the last wave of technological change.
Should you worry?
Worry is probably the wrong frame. The more useful question is whether the institutions around you are making active choices about AI or deferring to whoever built it. Regulation, procurement rules, planning decisions: these are the levers. They are slow, unglamorous and genuinely consequential.
Priya's read: what gets undersold in almost every AI-dominance narrative is that "inevitable" is a political position, not a technical one. Someone benefits from you believing the outcome is already written. Watch who is saying it.
