Global governance
Coordination across states for problems no state can solve alone.
What it commits you to
Global governance is the weakest form of coordination and the only one available for AI, since no state has a domestic authority that reaches its own firms' behaviour abroad. The 2024 General Assembly resolution and the 2025 international safety report are both evidence that coordination is beginning. Neither is evidence that it will bind, which is the distinction Grotius drew in 1625.
Which realms lean on this
Procedure, not conviction. This is the vocabulary of constitutions, audits and the people who have to sign.
governance · 2 realms — The Contractual Court, The Ubuntu Weave.
Canon that discusses this
modern · 2002
No Future Without a Past
Tutu argues from ubuntu — that a person becomes fully human through relationship with other people — to a politics of shared responsibility rather than blame. The formulation that matters for a governance question is the negative one: a future without the past that made it is not a future anyone can build on. The excerpt below paraphrases the essay rather than quoting it.
modern · 1950
The Human Use of Human Beings
Wiener applies the theory of feedback and control to law, politics and medicine, and argues that communication is more fundamental than command. The book that gave cybernetics its name in 1948 becomes, two years later, the founding text of the ethics of steering large systems without crushing what they steer. The excerpt below paraphrases the book rather than quoting it.
See also
International law
governanceRules binding on states rather than on systems, with no forum above them.
EU AI Act
governanceThe European Union's risk-based regulation of AI, phasing in from 2024.
Arms race dynamics
governanceThe pattern in which each party's precautions are read by the other as a threat.
Compute governance
governanceGoverning the hardware that trains frontier systems rather than the software.