Silicon Boundaries
Overview
Understanding, anticipating, and managing the societal instability that can be caused by AI and related technologies.
Silicon Boundaries is a joint programme from Theia Finance Labs and the Oxford Sustainable Finance Group.
Societies, like ecosystems, have conditions they need to function. They need a certain level of trust between people. They need institutions that work. They need economic systems that allow broad participation. They need people to be healthy enough, both physically and mentally, to engage in civic and economic life. These are not luxuries. They are preconditions for everything else, including the financial returns that investors depend on.
A Silicon Boundary is the point at which the scale or the nature of AI and related technologies begins to erode one of these preconditions. It is the threshold where the costs start to outweigh the benefits, and where continued deployment of such technologies without adjustment pushes society towards instability. Crossing these thresholds can trigger non-linear change and, in some cases, irreversible tipping points.
Similarities with Planetary Boundaries
Silicon Boundaries are analogous to Planetary Boundaries. One crucial difference is that the thresholds of Silicon Boundaries are not fixed. With climate, for example, you have relatively clear physical thresholds: 1.5 degrees, 2 degrees, the point at which ice sheets become unstable. The physics does not negotiate.
With Silicon Boundaries, the thresholds depend on context. They depend on how the technology is deployed, what safeguards are in place, how society responds, and what alternatives exist. That means boundaries can move, and are not the same in every society.
Boundaries move outwards when society adapts in ways that increase its resilience to technology risks: stronger regulation, better digital literacy, investment in real-world alternatives to screen-based activity, and robust institutions. All of these push boundaries further away, meaning society can absorb more compute without crossing the threshold into instability. Boundaries can also come closer when safeguards are absent or eroded.
Investors and companies are betting trillions on continued compute expansion. If society acts to constrain compute in order to stay within Silicon Boundaries, capital currently allocated to AI infrastructure and technology companies may be significantly mispriced. This is the Silicon Bubble, a concept that draws on our previous work on stranded assets, unburnable carbon, and the carbon bubble.
The Silicon Boundaries Framework
Our aim is to provide tools that can help companies, financial institutions, and governments contribute to society remaining within a safe operating space while realising the benefits of AI and related technologies.
To do this, we need to better understand how societal stability is affected by AI and related technologies, identify and monitor relevant thresholds, and develop responses that enhance resilience while dampening the drivers of instability.
We have created initial draft categories of Silicon Boundaries:
- Information Integrity & Shared Reality
- Social Cohesion & Connectedness
- Political Stability
- Economic Participation & Distributional Stability
- Physical & Mental Health
- Safety, Security, & the State's Monopoly on Violence
- Financial Stability & Capital Misallocation
- Rights, Consent, & Human Dignity
- Environmental Sustainability
Read the Report and listen to the Podcast
You can read our first report and listen to the accompanying podcast, which discusses the framework and its implications. Once we have established the boundaries, we will define workable and practicable thresholds, and develop scenarios, data, and models that measure their impact on companies and portfolios, enabling investors, policymakers, and companies to assess and respond to Silicon Boundaries.
Directors
- Dr Jakob Thomä, Co-Founder & Research Director, Theia Finance Labs
- Dr Ben Caldecott, Director, Oxford Sustainable Finance Group and the Associate Professor of Sustainable Finance, Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment, University of Oxford