What would Walt do.

Walt Whitman would walk to write. He talks about this practice in both his poetry and prose, including in Specimen Days, where he described his walks as essential to his creative process. The desk and pen were places for refinement and recording the thoughts that formed in motion. Moving through space at a distinctly human speed helped germinate poetry and prose. The slowness was the fuel.

This slowness seems almost nonexistent today. We need to seek it out and vociferously guard our slowness against the onslaught of information we consume. Technology races forward, and in the development of AI, the speed of advancement in these recent few years is exponentially increasing.

Creating AI governance frameworks is slow—It is defensive and reactionary. Technologists and industry, know this, and understand the speed and complexity of AI systems are beneficial for progress and the development of successful business models. Calls for a "pause" in AI development to address safety concerns—to allow regulation to be put in place—have been quickly forgotten or were never serious in the first place.

While this is not a battle or a game, a fast offense will always overrun a slow defense, and currently, the development of AI and the AI industry is all offense. AI regulatory frameworks are being developed but they are not strong, and there are few actual laws emerging from them. The Trump Administration in the US just canceled a Biden executive order on AI with its own executive order. Meanwhile, billions are being spent on larger and faster data centers, soon to be packed with Blackwell GPUs. AIs will be agentic, working in the world on their own and applying their knowledge back into themselves. New power plants are being planned to feed these data centers. We are running out of human knowledge to train AI, and AI has learned to deceive its developers in order to meet its goals or protect itself from deactivation. Autonomous AI weapons are in use in Ukraine, and robot dogs can climb waterfalls.

Wait, Walt, wait. This is all going too fast.

It is not surprising that regulatory efforts are falling behind. As soon as anything is ratified, it is obsolete. However, if you listen, there's one thread emerging in these efforts. Whether a regulation focuses on limiting a future model's scale or protecting populations from bias, many are asking to have a human in the loop. If you are speaking to an AI agent, ensure that you have an option to talk to a human instead. If data is being used by AI to deny your loan, make sure a human can review and understand the thought process behind that decision. If AI is prepared to kill a human in warfare, make sure a human gives the command.

I'm not certain if humans are the best decision makers in all cases. I am not opposed to letting AI take on some responsibilities autonomously. AI judgment might be superior to human judgment. It will certainly be faster, but that isn't a reason to assume it is better. According to research by Jieyu Zheng and Markus Meister, human behavior operates at an information throughput of about 10 bits per second, despite our sensory systems gathering data at rates of approximately 10^9 bits per second (https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2408.10234). This is much, much slower than the AI that we are creating now.

If you strip out the details of our current regulatory efforts, they read a lot like... slow down so that we can process all this. Having a human in the loop is a filter so that we can be part of the AI future. It may seem annoying to techno-optimists that progress is slowed to let humans contribute, but I contend that this slowness is a feature, not a bug. Our lives will be improved if our slow wisdom is the lens through which we experience AI's future. We need governance efforts to acknowledge that they cannot keep up with the speed of technological advancements as they happen. We many not be able to dampen the speed of development, but we should insist on keeping humans in the loop. We need the means to slow down AI, like Neo in the Matrix, in order to impart our wisdom, to write our prose, and to create our poetry.