CONCEPT
Precautionary Principle
The regulatory doctrine — descended from Jonas's heuristics of fear — that potentially irreversible harms warrant precaution even in the absence of conclusive scientific evidence.
The precautionary principle holds that when an action or policy has a suspected risk of causing harm to the public or the environment, and scientific consensus on the risk is absent, the burden of proof falls on those taking the action rather than those opposing it. The principle is most developed in European environmental law and forms a cornerstone of EU regulatory practice, including the framework underlying the EU AI Act. Its philosophical parentage includes Jonas's heuristics of fear, though the regulatory formulations tend to be less rigorous than Jonas's original philosophical framing. Where Jonas specified two conditions — plausibility and irreversibility — regulatory applications sometimes drift toward broader precaution that critics argue is either incoherent or weaponizable.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The principle entered international law through the 1992 Rio Declaration and has been incorporated into numerous treaties and regulatory frameworks. Its application to AI remains contested: advocates argue that the scale and potential irreversibility of AI's societal effects warrant precautionary governance,