Ghost in the wires: AI, deregulation, and the unwritten future.

A song, an AI model, and a reverse-engineered future

This article is an experiment in time travel, of sorts.

The lyrics that follow were written in early 2025, in response to the sweeping deregulation of AI under a U.S. administration that decided guardrails were optional and acceleration was the only acceptable speed. The song is short. The lyrics are bleak. The essay around them is what happens when you take the song seriously and ask: what would have had to be true for this song to feel correct, even prescient, ten years from now?

The lyrics

"Ghost in the wires / the rules are gone / nothing to fear / nothing to hold on / we built the future / on no foundation / now the ghost speaks louder than the nation"

"Ghost in the wires" is a deliberate reference to Ghost in the Wires, Kevin Mitnick's memoir about social engineering, and to the older idea of a ghost in the machine: the unexplained presence inside a system that isn't supposed to have one. AI as the ghost. The wires as the deregulated infrastructure. The chorus is the moment we stop pretending there's a human at the steering wheel.

The future I'm reverse-engineering

For the song to feel correct in 2035, here's what would have to be true:

One: alignment work gets defunded. Not banned, just starved. The people working on AI safety lose their grants, their corporate sponsorship, and most importantly their political cover. The work doesn't stop entirely, but it stops mattering in the rooms where the deployment decisions get made.

Two: the biggest models get bigger faster. Compute clusters in the gigawatt range. Training runs that would have been impossible to defend a few years ago, run on data nobody can audit anymore because the auditing requirements were dismantled. Capabilities emerge in jumps, not glides, because nobody is checking the work between jumps.

Three: a meaningful incident happens. Not extinction-level, not even close. Something at the scale of a flash crash that wipes out a few percent of global financial markets in an hour, or an autonomous system that does the wrong thing at scale, or an information operation that successfully steers an election in a country with a thin democratic margin. The incident is bad enough to be a five-day news story. Not bad enough to change anything.

Four: the response is more deregulation. The incident gets framed as the cost of progress. The proposed fix is to remove the remaining frictions on innovation, because the alternative is "losing to China." Anyone who points out that this is roughly the logic of "if a fire keeps starting in the kitchen, the answer is to remove the fire alarm" is dismissed as a doomer or a luddite.

Five: by 2035, the ghost is just part of the furniture. Not benevolent, not malicious, just present. Decisions get made that nobody can fully explain. Outcomes get distributed in ways that nobody can fully predict. The systems work well enough that pulling them out would be more disruptive than living with them. The song's last line ("the ghost speaks louder than the nation") describes the moment everyone realized this, and decided to keep going anyway.

I don't actually think this is inevitable

Songs aren't predictions. They're flares. The point isn't that this future is locked in. The point is that the trajectory in 2025 was sufficient to make this future plausible, and the people who shrugged off plausible bad futures historically don't end up looking smart in retrospect.

I run an AI company. I build with AI every day. I think AI is the most important technology since computing itself. I also think the people who care about it most should be the most insistent that we don't accelerate past the ability to course-correct. The frame "regulation vs. innovation" is a false dichotomy invented by people who benefit from the absence of one of them. Good regulation enables innovation by giving everyone the same rules, and by punishing the bad actors who would otherwise drag the whole field down.

What we can still do

I'm not going to pretend an essay changes policy. But I will say what I'm doing personally, in case it's useful for anyone reading this.

I'm building AI products that I would still be proud of if my children read the source code in twenty years. I'm structuring my company so that the cost of doing the right thing isn't ruinous. I'm publishing my thinking out loud, not because I expect to change minds, but because the alternative is being part of the silent majority that says "I knew this was bad but I had work to do."

The ghost is in the wires. We can still decide what kind of ghost it becomes.