Eric Schmidt and the distinguished signatories of “We Must Act Now” are right to warn that artificial intelligence could produce large-scale job displacement and economic disruption. Their call for incentives, guardrails, and institutions is necessary. But is it sufficient?
AI is not entering a coherent civilization. It is entering one already fragmented by economic inequality, political polarization, ecological destabilization, war, technological acceleration, and institutions increasingly unable to respond except through crisis and emergency.
Artificial intelligence is an emanation of human mind — just as our sciences, technologies, economies, languages, and cultures are. Once externalized, these creations condition the minds and societies that produced them. AI now accelerates this recursive relationship on an unprecedented scale.
The defining challenge, therefore, is not simply how to regulate AI or protect existing employment. It is whether humanity can develop the civilizational coherence necessary to guide a technology capable of reorganizing nearly every domain of human life.
Civilizational coherence does not mean ideological agreement or centralized control. It means developing the collective capacity to recognize interdependence, learn from consequences, adapt intentionally, and redesign, or, where necessary, completely transform our economic, political, educational, healthcare, technological, and cultural foundations before systemic breakdown performs that reorganization for us.
AI may indeed become radically more powerful over the coming decade. But power is not intelligence, and greater technological capability does not ensure greater human coherence. Unless the development of AI is situated within a much broader inquiry into the civilization directing it, guardrails may merely manage the consequences of a system whose underlying trajectory remains unchanged.
Where civilizational coherence does not guide adaptation, crisis and emergency will become its governing instruments.
If Eric Schmidt finds this framework worthy of deeper consideration, I would welcome the opportunity, as a fellow Santa Barbara area resident to explore what civilizational coherence might entail in practice, and whether our community could become a living laboratory in which that inquiry can begin.
