✨ Permissionless innovation in the Age of AI

Freedom and technological progress go together

The White House recently published more than 10,000 comments — including those from academia, nonprofits, industry groups, and local governments — in response to its call for public input as it cooks up an “AI action plan” to help it “define the priority policy actions needed to sustain and enhance America’s AI dominance, and to ensure that unnecessarily burdensome requirements do not hamper private sector AI innovation.”

As I perused the comments, one thing I looked for was overlap among various pro-market groups that value a “permissionless innovation” point of view, a phrase coined by policy analyst Adam Thierer (who also authored one of the comments I drew upon). It’s a pro-progress approach, as I see it, that draws on two powerful intellectual traditions that greatly influence my Up Wing thinking in this newsletter and my 2023 book.

First, the (Friedrich) Hayekian view acknowledges the dispersed nature of knowledge, making central planning ineffective. Experimentation should proceed unhindered, with legal frameworks addressing harms once evident.

Second, the (Joseph) Schumpeterian perspective celebrates "creative destruction" — the continuous cycle of disruption that drives long-run economic growth, which excessive regulation would stifle. In short, innovation is fundamentally positive-sum, enhancing human agency while creating greater prosperity and human flourishing.

So what does all of that philosophizing mean in terms of actual policy recommendations?