First Principles for an Age of Intelligence
By Eric Postow, Chief Strategy Officer, Holon Law Partners
When I graduated from college and began my career as a Marine Corps officer, I became an active student, driven by my own curiosity and desire for knowledge. In the twenty years since, I have sought to study the great minds of history across a variety of subjects. My starting point was the founding fathers: the principles that formed the United States, and the ideas, words, and debates on liberty, the power of the state, and the balance between them.
I especially appreciated the letters Jefferson and Adams wrote to each other in the many years after their public lives had ended. They thought deeply about the meaning of the Revolution, what they had actually achieved, and what was left unresolved. They understood that history would ultimately judge them, and that they could not control that judgment. I liked the humility in that, and the truth of it.
From America’s founding, I moved to the religious traditions of many peoples and communities, and there I discovered the core ideas that connect all humans. There is a connection between all people that unifies us beyond the social separations we have invented, and at our core we share a humanity that we can build from as a first principle.
The Citizen and the State
In my work, I have sought to find the balance between the power and authority of the state and the rights of the citizen. I think that at times we have lost sight of that balance, and the state has been oppressive and unresponsive to the changing constructs and understandings of the community of citizens who make up the corpus of the government. The result is indifference, and a way of governing that is zero-sum, binary, and linear.
That is why I was very intentional with my law practices. My first practice was, and remains, First Amendment constitutional rights, with a primary interest in protecting and preserving freedom of mind.
I worked in cannabis because it provided an important lens through which to see the relationship between government and citizen. It was a changing legal landscape built on a clearly and unquestionably outdated legal structure, one tortured into being federally illegal, federally legal as hemp, and state legal while federally illegal, all at once, with dire consequences for false steps in the marketplace or for downstream misconduct. At the same time, I saw the opportunity, the thrill of entrepreneurs, and the relief of people who had long understood the medicinal value of the natural medicine called cannabis, the people of the plant.
But transition is hard, and sometimes ugly. The state may want things to go back to the way they were or may wish to continue acting as if nothing had changed at all, yet to become rigid in the fluidness of reality is to set a course for systems failure. We saw that in cannabis, which remained in Schedule I for more than half a century despite growing recognition of its medicinal value. Even as federal authorities moved certain medical marijuana products into Schedule III, the broader federal classification remained unresolved. The result is a legal structure that continues to draw consequential distinctions around a plant whose medical uses, commercial realities, and public acceptance have evolved dramatically.
Intelligence as a Whole
Cannabis taught me what happens when our legal structures fail to adapt to a changing reality. Artificial intelligence presents that same challenge on a vastly larger scale. We are attempting to govern something whose nature, capabilities, and relationship with humanity are evolving faster than the institutions responsible for understanding it.
Since 2023, my work in AI is grounded in the lessons of these interests and law practices. The first time I interacted with AI, I saw it as an important missing link that would usher in total transformation. Like many people, I felt a certain inevitability to it, and I believe the most important thing we can do now is accept the truth that this intelligence trajectory is going one way and will not reverse course.
Focusing on the relationship between this intelligence and our own, as parts of an integrated whole, has allowed me to see AI holistically across diverse regulated industries, and to see how each one adopts, includes, and transforms. Some businesses are utilizing and implementing it, while others are more reserved, cautious, risk-aware, ROI-focused, and precise. But I see it everywhere: in government, in business, in the home, in the hands of each individual, and in the systems around us. The use cases for further integration into those systems are obvious in the way a city is run and managed, with full traffic coordination between vehicles and lights and a system connected to each part, orchestrated and synchronized.
I see this happening in different ways around the world, from China’s development of AI-integrated cities, to Argentina’s exploration of legal structures for companies operated by autonomous AI, to the distinctly different regulatory approaches emerging in Europe, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Policy is now ready to be developed. We have enough data, good, bad, and scary, to know we need to think more deeply about AI, or superintelligence, about its place in our world and our place in its world. How do we envision a world together?
The Wisdom of the Founding Fathers
So I think a good north star comes from the wisdom of our founding fathers. There was an underlying premise in their work that laws are made from a set of principles, and three of those principles can guide how we govern AI.
- Anchored in natural law (Jefferson). Rights establish the purpose. Protect inherent human rights: autonomy, liberty, privacy, and cognitive self-determination.
- Structural constraint (Madison). Structure limits the power. Prevent concentrations of AI power through distributed authority, checks and balances, meaningful oversight, and accountability.
- Common sense and the understanding of ordinary citizens (Paine). Common sense keeps governance connected to the people. Require intelligible, practical laws that ordinary citizens and small businesses can understand and follow.
If, ultimately, we are unable to govern artificial intelligence as a global system, we can still govern how power is exercised, how rights are protected, and how humans interact with that system.
The principles that informed America’s founding have not always been reflected in its laws or their application. But they remain a north star for how we should approach lawmaking today, including AI law. Perhaps they can serve as a north star for other countries as well, because principles become connective tissue when they emerge from our shared humanity.
