CONCEPT
The Already-Done Rule
Margaret Atwood’s self-imposed constraint on her speculative fiction—that she will include nothing humanity has not already done somewhere, at some time—which becomes, applied to AI, the most practically useful filter for distinguishing credible risk from science-fictional distraction.
When
Margaret Atwood composed
The Handmaid’s Tale in the early 1980s, she imposed a rule on herself that has since become among the most analytically powerful instruments in the AI debate: she would include nothing that humanity had not already done somewhere, at some time. The forced reproduction, the public executions, the seizure of bank accounts by a change in the law—none of it was invented. All of it was sourced. This discipline is why the novel reads as prophecy: it is archaeology arranged to look forward, and archaeology turns out to be the correct posture for a technology that converts the unthinkable into the unremarkable faster than the imagination can object. Applied to AI, the already-done rule performs a critical function: it strips the debate of the exotic and returns it to the documented. Strike from the ledger the scenarios that require the machine to become something it has shown no evidence of becoming—the sudden godlike awakening,