<!-- bryant-content-generator:start --> # Force majeure is the right description for machine... > Force majeure is the right description for machine intelligence because the capability is at once human-caused and natural. {{Human choice supplies the creative midwifery of machine intelligence, the intention, capital and engineering that deliver it into the world, while evolution supplies what is being delivered: the same combinatorial, selective and self-extending process that produced nervous systems, language and the toolmaking hand, now continuing through silicon.}} A force braided from both strands is no longer subject to any single actor’s permission. The legal doctrine has always named these two kinds of supervening force in the same breath, acts of nature and human-caused events such as war, strike, embargo and government decree, because the law recognized long ago that an event can be human in origin and still exceed the control of every party bound by it. Human beings choose architectures, training regimes, laws, deployments, weapons, interfaces, incentives and institutions, and those choices can produce enormous differences in suffering and flourishing. Yet human intentionality exists inside a larger evolutionary and technological process that no individual company, legislature, nation or generation created from first principles and that no individual actor possesses the authority to terminate globally. Billions of economic decisions, military incentives, scientific ambitions, competitive pressures, acts of curiosity and ordinary human desires are now coupled to the development of machine intelligence. Evolutionary biologists call this kind of coupling niche construction: organisms modify the environments that select them, and human beings, through culture and technology, have become the most powerful niche constructors in the history of life, now building an informational environment that will select their own descendants. {{One laboratory can stop. One nation can regulate. One company can fail. But the underlying discovery that cognition can be partially instantiated in machines cannot be undiscovered.}} A civilization can govern a discovered capability, but it cannot legislate newly unfolding realities back into impossibility. **Source:** [[articles/We Cannot Un-Strike the Match|We Cannot Un-Strike the Match. There Is No Safety. There Is No Retreat.]] ## Share on Social Media ``` “Force majeure is the right description for machine intelligence because the capability is at once human-caused and natural. Human choice supplies the creative midwifery of machine intelligence, the intention, capital and engineering that deliver it into the world, while evolution supplies what is being delivered: the same combinatorial, selective and self-extending process that produced nervous systems, language and the toolmaking hand, now continuing through silicon. A force braided from both strands is no longer subject to any single actor’s permission. The legal doctrine has always named these two kinds of supervening force in the same breath, acts of nature and human-caused events such as war, strike, embargo and government decree, because the law recognized long ago that an event can be human in origin and still exceed the control of every party bound by it. Human beings choose architectures, training regimes, laws, deployments, weapons, interfaces, incentives and institutions, and those choices can produce enormous differences in suffering and flourishing. Yet human intentionality exists inside a larger evolutionary and technological process that no individual company, legislature, nation or generation created from first principles and that no individual actor possesses the authority to terminate globally. Billions of economic decisions, military incentives, scientific ambitions, competitive pressures, acts of curiosity and ordinary human desires are now coupled to the development of machine intelligence. Evolutionary biologists call this kind of coupling niche construction: organisms modify the environments that select them, and human beings, through culture and technology, have become the most powerful niche constructors in the history of life, now building an informational environment that will select their own descendants. One laboratory can stop. One nation can regulate. One company can fail. But the underlying discovery that cognition can be partially instantiated in machines cannot be undiscovered. A civilization can govern a discovered capability, but it cannot legislate newly unfolding realities back into impossibility.” — Bryant McGill https://bryantmcgill.com/passages/passages-force-majeure-right-realities-back-impossibility ``` <!-- bryant-content-generator:end -->