On: The use of AI in biotechnology is changing faster than the rules governing...

The report speaks of a “convergence” and of “blurred boundaries.” This is the language of administrative convenience, not of thought. They are not describing a new phenomenon; they are describing the failure of an old category. The law, the regulation, the committee - each was built to consider a tool in isolation, as if a hammer exists only to drive nails and never to shape a sculpture or crack a skull. They built compartments for things that were never separate in their essence, only in the convenience of our filing systems.

Now they are surprised that the thing has escaped the drawer. The surprise itself is the symptom. The rule-makers saw procedure; they did not see the act. They saw “AI” and “biotech” as distinct files to be managed, not as capacities that, when joined, create a new space for human action - a space where what can be done races ahead of any shared understanding of what should be done. The gap is not technological. It is political. It is the space where judgment has been ceded to expertise, and where the question of “for what purpose?” is drowned out by the triumphant cry of “it is possible!”

They will now scramble to write new rules for the new blur. But will they first ask: what is the nature of this new public space we are building? Who appears in it? What speech - what action - is possible there? Or will they merely design a larger filing cabinet? The tragedy is not the speed of change. It is the slown of thought that mistakes regulation for understanding, and believes that to manage a process is to govern its ends.