Extension: Henry A. Kissinger, How the Enlightenment Ends (The Atlantic, June 2018)
The protected claim holds that economic institutions relying on lagging indicators, price signals, employment data and GDP reports, cannot detect AI driven transformation, because the transformation propagates faster than the monitoring systems built to observe it. Kaal's position applies that to intelligence proliferation: open weights, local inference and autonomous agents spread capability faster than the institutions that would register the change. The essay's further thesis, that abundance redistributes capability while authority stays concentrated with the few firms and states commanding frontier compute, is Kaal's own argument and not a consequence of the protected claim. The printing press is offered as a precedent for the lag, with presses licensed, censored and captured for generations until institutions caught up.
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