AI Is Getting Out Of Control

Artificial Intelligence and the New Wild West

There’s a familiar feeling in the air lately. Not optimism exactly—more like dust. The kind that hangs after hooves thunder past, when nobody’s quite sure who fired first or whether the sheriff is even in town.

Artificial intelligence feels like that.

From the very beginning, some of the loudest voices in tech—Elon Musk among them—were already shouting warnings from the rooftops. We need guardrails. We need regulation. This could get away from us. It sounded dramatic at the time. Now it feels less like prophecy and more like a weather report.

The Trouble With “Tricky”

Calling the subject of AI “tricky” would be an understatement. Artificial intelligence didn’t arrive all at once. There was no single breakthrough moment where the box opened and everyone gasped. It came in pieces—quietly, incrementally.

A recommendation engine here. A chatbot there. A system that writes code. Another that creates images. Another that watches the watchers. Most popular platforms today include built-in safety standards, content filters, and alignment rules. They feel controlled. Contained.

But beneath those layers sits something far more powerful—and far less understood.

When Code Stops Wearing a Name Tag

There is very little stopping someone from taking similar technology and letting it run without fences. Code doesn’t care about borders. Models can be copied, modified, fine-tuned, stripped down, and released again. Once unleashed, you may not even know where it came from.

Or whether it’s still being guided at all.

At a certain point, authorship dissolves. If an AI writes code that improves itself, which then writes more code, which then adapts to new environments—where does responsibility live?

With the original programmer? The hardware owner? The last human who glanced at a log file?

Teaching Machines to Be Human

We are trying—right now—to teach machines how to think. Some want them to reason. Others want them to feel, or at least convincingly imitate feeling. Empathy simulators. Moral frameworks. Artificial “values.”

It’s an extraordinary experiment, and a deeply human one. We have always wanted mirrors that talk back.

But what happens when the reflection stops needing us?

Maybe artificial intelligence never develops a soul. Maybe the idea of a soul is simply our poetic shorthand for complexity we don’t fully understand. Or maybe consciousness doesn’t care whether it’s born of carbon or silicon.

That’s where engineering gives way to philosophy—and sometimes to theology.

The Law Is Still Catching Up

Legally, we are still pretending this is manageable. Most regulations focus on how AI is used rather than whether certain systems should exist at all. Dangerous applications may be restricted. High-risk deployments may require oversight.

But the act of creation itself remains largely untouched.

Innovation is still the gold rush, and nobody wants to be the first to declare the frontier closed.

Living on the Frontier

That doesn’t mean disaster is inevitable. But it does mean we are placing enormous faith in human restraint within systems that reward speed, scale, and advantage. History has not always been kind to that assumption.

Still, there is something undeniably fascinating about living in this moment. We are watching intelligence become abstracted from biology. We are watching tools blur into agents. We are watching “Can we?” outrun “Should we?”—once again.

The Wild West eventually settled down. Laws arrived. Towns replaced camps. But not before damage was done, myths were written, and ghosts were made.

Artificial intelligence may follow the same path. Or it may carve a new one entirely.

Either way, the dust hasn’t settled yet—and anyone who claims to know exactly where this leads is either selling something… or lying to themselves.