Every technological epoch produces its own unique brand of administrative hubris. In the industrial era, governments assumed they could manage environmental degradation through localized zoning laws. In the early days of the internet, policymakers believed that regional copyright treaties would easily constrain borderless data flows. Today, the rapid proliferation of frontier artificial intelligence has produced a familiar, comforting illusion: the conviction that democratic institutions can domesticate autonomous systems through standard legislative oversight, compliance disclosures, and high-level ethical declarations.
The reality is far less reassuring. What we call "AI governance" today is largely an exercise in retrofitting nineteenth-century legal concepts onto a twenty-first-century infrastructure that resists centralized control by design.
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