Technology and regulation have a dance of ice and fire

Let’s take a clear pond flourishing with various aquatic plants — water lilies, duckweeds, water milfoils, you name it. The variety of these plants provide a delicate balance, feeding the pond with nutrients, and this very natural filtration system. The algae still tries to outcompete the aquatic plants, but these plants still have an edge (at least for now). The microbial balance ensures the pond stays in a stable state with manageable algae levels. It’s in stable equilibrium.

But unfortunately, the pond starts having even more higher levels of nutrients feeding in. The runoff is too high, or a group of fishermen have one day decided to start dumping all the fish waste into the same pond.

Now the stability gets disrupted. And it slowly accumulates and grows towards a tipping point. It might just need a small push towards either clear water, or towards an algae-dominated state. In systems theory, you call this tipping point as an unstable equilibrium.

If you think this essay is about the ponds, and the tiny little fish, and the plants, you’re mistaken.

This is a story of the same patterns which we see in ponds, the dance between stable and unstable modes of equilibrium reflected across our economy, especially in the dance between technology and regulation that countries perform — Are they pushing for more regulatory capture? Or are they immersed in risky bleeding-edge technologies?

When Marie Curie won the Nobel Prize for the discovery of Radium in 1903, she also suffered from the consequences of being on the bleeding edge— she was on the receiving end of aplastic anemia and died due to harmful exposure due to radioactive exposure. But then again, the field of radiology was invented giving birth to various other innovations. A gift to humanity that kept on giving.

We see this continue to happen, even now with the advent of biohacking, where we see some of us taking early risks in the middle of a promising technology that’s just taking shape.

I’m recalling a similar such topic where Balaji S talks about the idea of bio-engineered individuals with muscular hypertrophy mutations so huge that they could be likened akin to real-life X-Men scenarios.

This concept may extend to other genetic enhancements in the future, such as artificial immunity to COVID-19 and its variants. Even the case of Lance Armstrong provides an interesting perspective on this issue. While his doping violated Tour de France rules, the chemists who helped him overcome testicular cancer and win the race could be seen as pioneers in performance enhancement. Their work, despite initial risks, could potentially benefit many cancer patients.

This scenario illustrates how early adopters of risky bio-innovations can pave the way for safer, more widespread use.

A similar principle was applied during the COVID-19 pandemic when challenge tests were proposed to accelerate vaccine development. Harvard Professor Matthew Liao suggested using healthy volunteers for controlled SARS-CoV-2 exposure to expedite the process from pandemic outbreak to functional vaccine. These trials offered distinct advantages over traditional field studies which might have taken 10-15 years to develop. When you gain something, you might also lose something (in this example, approximately 1% of early testers reported long-term symptoms).

However, as research progresses, we may see more instances of genetic modifications that push the boundaries of human capabilities, reminiscent of the X-Men but grounded in real scientific advancements.

And for any such ‘frightening technology’ being discussed and implemented, we have the ‘big daddy regulators’ trying to give a pushback on this accelerationism by applying screeching brakes. If the challenge trials represented the tech innovation led approach towards solving the global pandemic. The regulatory approach would be stringent lockdowns implemented by various countries (especially China and UK).

In fact, regulations are one of the major bottlenecks for progress. And they also do exist rightfully so. Talking about our current AI landscape, at present, all the major FAANG companies are building massive GPU cluster farms that are being created needing vast computing resources. In 2024, we were used to having these clusters of 100 MW, two more years, we might have a 1 GW Cluster. If we soon see trillions of dollars invested into these GPU clusters, we might very well see a 100 GW cluster. To accommodate these ambitious targets, we’re seeing a huge push from the libertarian technocrats to now build nuclear capacity to manage the hungry AI farms. Post-Fukushima, it’s been quite controversial to even approach the nuclear topic, and most of these nuclear proposals face an immense regulatory pressure.

Take for instance the construction of Hinkley Point C in UK which took almost 10 years. By contrast, France and Finland built similar reactors in just three or four years (Hinkley Point C had to go through a 44,260 page environmental impact assessment (EIA) and 2,229 written questions at examination stage of Sizewell C, the next reactor after Hinkley Point C, facing enormous expenses before the spade was even in the ground, it is still not). In fact, Sizewell C’s EIA was more than 30 times longer than the complete works of Shakespeare.

We’re a quarter of century into the 21st century, and we’re still dealing with regulatory bureaucratic paper work. Recently, Elon Musk also highlighted an example from the German bureaucracy during the establishment of Tesla’s first European plant where he revealed that the permit application process required up to 25,000 pages of documentation, which not only had to be printed on paper but also needed multiple copies made. The sheer volume of paperwork was so extensive that it literally required a truck to transport all the documents. And this is 2025.

We see dangers of regulatory capture all around with FDA and European Medicines Agency (EMA), but there are various merits of a healthy dose of regulation. Despite the backlash against European regulation, we see its merits when it comes to food regulation, where Europeans have better life expectancy and have lesser preventable deaths compared to Americans. This is majorly because of Europe’s EFSA where food regulatory policies focusing on additives to be proven safe before approval, whereas US FDA allowing food additives unless proven harmful.

Coming back to the story of the delicate equilibrium of the biosphere in ponds, the dance between regulation and innovation quite mirrors this delicatedness: if you push it too far, there might be unrestrained technological acceleration and we risk drowning in toxic algal blooms of unforeseen consequences, and yet too much regulatory stagnation leaves us with a lifeless pond unable to sustain new growth.