One warning says the money is moving too fast. Another says the technology is. The Trump administration says America cannot afford to slow down against China. What kind of race are we actually in?
Two warnings about artificial intelligence arrived within days of each other this September.
On September 10, Pablo Hernández de Cos, head of the Bank for International Settlements, warned that the huge amount of money flowing into artificial intelligence could cause financial trouble if the expected profits never show up. Two days later, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei called for AI companies to slow the rate at which they make their most powerful models more capable because of growing safety concerns. He argued that companies need more time to test and control systems that are becoming more powerful very quickly.
These are different warnings. One is about money. The other is about the technology itself.
But together they point toward a larger question.
AI may turn out to be one of the great technologies of this century. The infrastructure being built around it could support new industries, scientific discoveries, better public services, and opportunities we cannot yet see. But governments and companies are making lasting choices about land, electricity, environmental protections, competition, and public resources before anyone knows how large the eventual payoff will be.
My argument is simple: speed should come with a public bargain.
If companies create major new costs, they should carry those costs. Communities should have a real voice before lasting decisions are made around them. And the companies already leading AI should not be allowed to write rules that make their own positions harder to challenge.
In the full essay, I look at the space race, the railroad boom, and the dot-com bust to ask what those earlier moments can tell us about today's AI race, including the push to outbuild China, the enormous financial bets being made, and the consequences for communities living alongside the infrastructure.
Read the full essay, “AI: Space Race or Boom or Bust?”, in The Ready Futures Journal.