Wendell Wallach

Wendell Wallach spent two decades naming a structural condition that, more than any specific algorithm or breakthrough, defines the anxiety of the present moment. He called it the pacing problem—the steadily widening gap between the rate at which powerful new technologies are introduced and the rate at which the laws, regulations, norms, and oversight mechanisms required to govern them can be established. The problem is not that any given innovation is dangerous in isolation. It is that invention is fast and accelerating while governance is slow, reactive, and lumbering, and the space between them is where harm accumulates. Wallach saw this with unusual clarity because he came to ethics from practice: before taking up the chair of technology and ethics at Yale's Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics, he had run two computer consulting firms, building systems for organizations from PepsiCo to the State of Connecticut, and he understood