CONCEPT
Institutional Plasticity
The period during which governance arrangements surrounding a new technology remain responsive to intervention — a window that closes as arrangements harden into structures requiring generations to reform.
Institutional plasticity is the specific temporal condition that shapes the stakes of current AI governance decisions. Technological transitions follow a characteristic pattern: an initial period of experimentation during which governance architecture is still responsive to intervention, followed by consolidation during which that architecture hardens into structures resistant to modification. The first decades of industrialization were a period when alternative arrangements were imaginable — the factory system might have been organized differently, distribution of productivity gains might have been governed by different rules. But the arrangements that actually emerged hardened into structures that required generations of political struggle to partially reform. The AI transition is currently in its period of plasticity; the governance arrangements being established now will determine distributional outcomes for generations.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The concept provides the temporal frame for Fung's argument about the urgency of institutional innovation. The governance decisions being made in this narrow window will harden into structures that last decades or centuries; the framework knitters of