Saturday, a government directive reportedly led to one of the world’s most advanced AI models being switched off for non US nationals.
Saturday, a government directive reportedly led to one of the world’s most advanced AI models being switched off for non US nationals.
Overnight.
No public debate.
No collective decision.
No warning for the people and organisations who had come to rely on it.
Whether the restriction remains temporary or not is almost beside the point.
What stopped me in my tracks was the question underneath it:
Who gets to access intelligence?
We spend a lot of time talking about responsible AI.
Far less time asking who owns it, who governs it, who can withdraw it, and what it costs the land, water, energy systems, and communities that make it possible in the first place.
For years, I have been exploring this tension in my research, advisory work, and keynotes.
This week it became headline news.
Before the algorithm, there was mycelium.
Before the data centre, there was the mycorrhizal web.
More than 450 million years of distributed, adaptive, networked intelligence.
No one owns it.
No one can fence it.
No one can switch it off with a government directive.
Nature wrote the code first.
And now we find ourselves building increasingly powerful versions of intelligence that can be enclosed, controlled, restricted, and revoked.
Perhaps this is not simply a technology story.
Perhaps it is a story about power.
About access.
About memory.
About the assumptions we have inherited regarding ownership itself.
One of the ideas I return to often is that cartography is not home.
The map is not the territory.
The model is not the intelligence.
As we race towards ever more capable systems, I wonder whether the deeper challenge is not technological but relational.
What becomes possible when we remember that intelligence is not merely computational, but ecological?
Not linear, but circular.
Not exclusively artificial, but already alive around us.
What if future literacy requires us to learn from both?
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#AI #ResponsibleAI #AIEthics #FutureLiteracy #WhoOwnsIntelligence #NatureWroteTheCodeFirst #CartographyIsNotHome #GlobalMajority