Speed and the Destruction of Deliberation

The ethical traditions of the West were built for a world in which the interval between action and consequence was long enough for deliberation to intervene. The legislator could debate. The community could consult. The individual could reconsider. The temporal margin between deciding and doing provided a natural habitat for moral thought — a space in which the question 'Should we?' could be asked and sometimes answered before the question 'Can we?' had rendered it moot. The compression of this interval is not a side effect of the AI transition. It is the transition's defining feature. ChatGPT reached fifty million users in two months. The telephone required seventy-five years. Each compression represents shrinking of the interval in which societies can evaluate, adapt to, and construct governance frameworks before the technology saturates the population. Two months is, in practical terms, the elimination of the deliberative interval — the reduction of space between deployment and saturation to a duration in which meaningful ethical evaluation is