I’ve spent a good part of this summer immersed in Inga Strümke’s Maskiner som tenker. While I don’t agree with her on everything, her brilliance is undeniable—and the read has been nothing short of illuminating.

Toward the end of the book, there’s a discussion about morality and its application to AI—an area that deserves slower, more careful consideration.

While I understand the Scandinavian tendency to position governments as the guarantors of morality when conflicts of interest arise, we shouldn’t lose sight of a deeper question: what does morality actually stand for?

At its broadest, morality—as we interpret it—and the institutions that uphold it are social contracts: shared agreements we’ve constructed as collectives to improve our overall quality of life.

There’s no real mystery there—but we often gloss over a key point: morality is ultimately an expression of the collective will.

So when we say we disagree with the political class for failing to act decisively in these areas, what we’re really expressing is a misalignment with the values represented by our elected officials.

While this challenge may well be exacerbated by the growing diversity of our societies, it’s still essential to recognize that meaningful change requires a broader societal agreement.

This failure to align around collective principles can also be seen in areas like climate policy, or even in the debates surrounding which biases we consider acceptable—or beneficial—for our communities.

Perhaps what we’re approaching now is a moment of reinvention—one that calls us to confront the values that shape our collectives and reset the foundations for how we approach matters of shared importance.

After all, no policy—no matter how firmly encoded in law—will ever hold if the public doesn’t believe in it. 

In her book, the author calls for more ethicists to take part in shaping the dialogues that will define our future. And while their expertise is undoubtedly valuable—just as any consultant’s would be—in this case, we may need something more fundamental: a bottom-up consultation.

A moment where we come together once more to reexamine, articulate, and reforge the values we want to live by.

Unfortunately, societies that are unable—or unwilling—to uphold their social contracts inevitably fall prey to the kind of violence it takes to reset those structures.

That’s the historical reality we’ve seen time and again—and one worth remembering as we delay action on technologies capable of massive social engineering, simply by virtue of how many people they can reach.