3.2: Renewable Energy Technology [TIER 4 - PRIORITY #2]

The Dominant AI Governance Discourse: A Spectrum of Managed Delusion

The global AI governance discourse operates within a remarkably consistent framework across all major power centers, unified by one fatal assumption: we can regulate our way to beneficial AGI while maintaining competitive development. This manifests through five dominant narratives shaping policy and public consciousness:

1. The "Responsible AI" Corporate Framework (Silicon Valley/Big Tech) claims self-regulation through ethics boards, safety teams, and constitutional AI will ensure beneficial outcomes. OpenAI promises "safe AGI," Google speaks of "AI for good," Anthropic develops "harmless assistants." This narrative dominates tech discourse while companies race toward capabilities that make safety impossible—like teaching fire safety while pouring gasoline on flames.

2. The "Comprehensive Regulation" Government Response (Brussels/Washington/Beijing) assumes traditional governance mechanisms can control exponential technology. The EU's AI Act creates risk categories, the US Executive Order mandates reporting requirements, China implements algorithm registrations. Each framework presumes stable institutions, international cooperation, and enforcement capacity that won't exist during civilizational breakdown.

3. The "AI Safety" Research Community focuses on alignment problems, interpretability, and value learning while accepting continued development as given. Thousands of papers on making AI do what we want, none questioning whether we should build systems we can't control. Like nuclear scientists in 1944 discussing reactor safety while building atomic weapons.

4. The "Pause/Slow Down" Movement calls for moratoria, compute thresholds, and international treaties without addressing the competitive dynamics making pauses impossible. The Future of Life Institute's 6-month pause letter gathered 30,000 signatures but zero implementation because it challenged symptoms not structures.

5. The "AI Democracy" Narrative advocates for public participation, algorithmic transparency, and citizen assemblies while ignoring that democratic mechanisms are already failing under simpler challenges. Asking collapsing democracies to govern exponential technology is like asking someone drowning to conduct a swimming lesson.

What's Entirely Absent: The Convergence Reality

Missing from all governance discourse is recognition that AI develops not in stable prosperity but during:

• Energy systems failing (EROI declining below industrial thresholds)

• Democratic institutions collapsing (trust below 20% globally)

• Climate chaos accelerating (multiple tipping points crossed)

• Resource wars intensifying (competition for declining reserves)

• Population pressures mounting (8 billion during carrying capacity contraction)
  

No governance framework addresses: What happens when the data centers can't get power? When supply chains for chips collapse? When climate refugees overwhelm borders? When financial systems cease functioning? When the humans supposedly governing AI are themselves struggling for survival?

Applying the GCF Lens: Why We Cannot Govern What We Cannot Survive

PAP analysis reveals the fatal misalignment destroying governance possibility:

Base Layer Reality: The material conditions for AI—massive energy consumption (training GPT-4 used as much power as 50,000 homes), rare earth extraction, semiconductor fabrication, cooling infrastructure—depend on industrial systems already failing. Each AI doubling requires 10x more resources when resources are depleting.

Structure Layer Impossibility: Every institution assumes AI development within growth paradigm. Tech companies require returns impossible without AGI. Governments need AI for competition while fearing its implications. The structure demands acceleration while governance requires deceleration—an unresolvable contradiction.

Superstructure Delusion: Public consciousness, shaped by decades of sci-fi and tech propaganda, oscillates between utopian hope (AI solves everything) and dystopian fear (AI destroys everything) without recognizing the mundane reality: AI systems will fail alongside the infrastructure supporting them. We're not heading toward omniscient AGI but toward data centers going dark.

The Discourse Transformation Required

TERRA assessment reveals how current governance discourse maintains impossibility while genuine alternatives starve:

Current Governance (Quadrants I-II):

• $340 billion toward regulating acceleration

• Comprehensive frameworks for impossible futures

• 99.9% of AI governance resources

• 
  

Required Transformation (Quadrant IV):

• Community-controlled AI development

• Democratic ownership of computational resources

• Bioregional applications within energy limits

• Currently receiving less than $1.3 billion globally

The question isn't "How do we make AI safe?" but "How do communities maintain beneficial computation during civilizational collapse?"

Overview

"From AGI Governance to Community Computation: Navigating AI Through Collapse"

The mainstream AI governance discourse assumes a future that physics precludes. Every framework—from the EU's comprehensive AI Act to OpenAI's alignment research—operates on the premise that complex global institutions will govern exponentially advancing AI while maintaining economic growth, international cooperation, and democratic legitimacy. This overview demonstrates why these assumptions guarantee governance failure and outlines pragmatic alternatives based on community control, energy constraints, and bioregional applications...