THE LONG VIEW

It has happened before: every time humanity builds a new space for autonomy, we forget to build the guardrails—until the crash teaches us otherwise. In the 1600s, the Dutch East India Company was granted sovereign-like powers to trade across oceans, yet had no external oversight, leading to monopolistic violence and financial collapse by 1680 [4]. A century later, the unregulated British press exploded in size after the lapse of licensing laws in 1695, only to descend into propaganda and libel—prompting the first press ethics codes by 1720. And in the 1990s, the internet’s architects celebrated ‘code is law,’ only to watch their utopia fracture under spam, scams, and surveillance within a decade. Now, with AI agents roaming open registries, we are repeating the cycle: brilliant technical architecture, hollow institutional core. The lesson is not new—governance must be designed in from the start, not bolted on after failure. Parsons knew this in 1951 when he wrote that ‘no social system can survive without fulfilling all four functional imperatives’ [5]; today, his framework warns us again, just in time. —Sir Edward Pemberton