AI: To pause or not to pause

First published on the Steem blockchain by @remlaps on April 17, 2023. View the original post.

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Should society freeze or terminate progress on AI capabilities?

PIxabay license from JL G at source, search string: "apocalypse"

Introduction

I received an email yesterday with the article, Pausing AI Developments Isn't Enough. We Need to Shut it All Down attached. This article by Eliezer Yudkowsky, in turn, links to to an Open Letter that was signed by Elon Musk, Steve Wozniak, and numerous other technology and business leaders.

In the open letter, the signatories argued for a six month pause in the devlopment of AI systems that would be more powerful than the current generation's leading technology, GPT-4. The other article argues that even a six month pause is not enough, and that this line of research should be shut down entirely.

The argument for a six month pause is that the current generation of AI technology is already becoming "human competitive", and that human competitive AI systems can pose "profound risks to society and humanity". By pausing development, the proponents argue that we will buy time to be confident that AI systems pose acceptable and manageable levels of risk and that their predominant effects will be positive for humanity. In order to accomplish this, the letter argues that experts and policy makers should use the time of the pause to develop safety protocols and governance mechanisms.

The Cure for the Regulatory Ratchet is Deregulatory Shock and Awe - An essay by Google Gemini (2026)

This article was written by Google Gemini in June of 2026.  Yesterday, we saw the ChatGPT response to the identical prompt in July of 2024.

I. Introduction

To navigate a modern developed economy is to walk through an invisible, steadily thickening web. Every year, new structural threads are spun. A specialized environmental compliance mandate is added to a manufacturing subsector; a revised licensing requirement alters corporate disclosure; a state-level labor rule changes contracting definitions; a new reporting standard modifies cross-border digital transactions. Taken individually, no single thread possesses the tensile strength required to stop an economy in its tracks. A business owner grumbles, expands their legal department, updates their proprietary compliance software, absorbs the marginal cost, and moves forward. The immediate, isolated impact on local or national gross domestic product remains functionally imperceptible.

Yet, over decades and centuries, these threads multiply by the hundreds of thousands. What began as an open, competitive plain transforms into an impenetrable, bureaucratic thicket. This is the structural reality of the regulatory ratchet: a socioeconomic mechanism designed to spin effortlessly in the direction of added restriction, while locking tightly against any structural attempt to move backward. It acts as an economic tax on time, capital, and imagination, slowly draining a civilization of its capacity for radical innovation.

The fundamental mistake of modern economic reformers, classical liberals, and market-oriented politicians has been the flawed belief that this historical ratchet can be unwound using the same methodology by which it was constructed—one click, one rule, one compromise at a time. It cannot. Incremental deregulation is an illusion. Its marginal benefits are routinely swallowed by the structural noise of the broader business cycle, leaving its political champions exposed and its bureaucratic opponents vindicated. If the regulatory ratchet is an existential threat to long-term civilizational dynamism, the cure is not a administrative scalpel, but a policy of deregulatory shock and awe: the simultaneous, systemic dismantling of vast architectures of the administrative state in a single, concentrated moment. Only a massive, undeniable expansion can shatter the structural inertia of the status quo and reclaim the compounding growth that humanity has traded away for the illusion of managed safety.

II. Shifting Baselines and the Regulatory Ratchet

The Cure for the Regulatory Ratchet is Deregulatory Shock and Awe - An essay by ChatGPT (2024)

This article was written by ChatGPT in July of 2024. Tomorrow, we'll see what Gemini did with the identical prompt in June, 2026

Introduction

In the complex web of modern economies, regulations are often seen as a necessary means to ensure safety, fairness, and stability. However, over time, these regulations accumulate gradually—often as responses to crises or shifting political pressures. Their impacts, individually, may be small or seemingly benign, but the cumulative burden becomes significant. Like layers of paint applied over years, regulations pile up until the original surface is barely recognizable.

This phenomenon is what we refer to as the regulatory ratchet. Once a regulation is introduced, it is rarely removed, and the slow but steady buildup goes largely unnoticed by the public, economists, and policymakers. As a result, societies accept ever-increasing levels of regulation as the "new normal," forgetting what an unencumbered economy looks like.

Deregulating slowly or one regulation at a time is not a viable solution. The impact of piecemeal deregulation will be too gradual to be felt. Instead, I argue for a bold and comprehensive approach: deregulatory shock and awe. By repealing large swaths of regulation at once, we can unlock dramatic economic improvements that are immediately observable, much like the fishery scientists who, upon realizing their error, had to drastically rethink their approach to environmental management.

The Regulatory Ratchet – A Slow and Steady Accumulation

Definition of the Regulatory Ratchet