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This was more wordplay than it was serious. I was playing on the word “race”. But it has become a race, and it's just another example of how we should be focusing in on AI ethics, but at this point the race is on, with hardly any rules.  

As regards changing the rules of games, I’m reminded of art historian Kirk Varnedoe’s book A Fine Disregard. All this disruptive rule-changing is not just fun and games.

Somewhere back in a rainy summer in the 1970s, I made a pilgrimage of sorts to a place in the north of England that had fascinated me for years, it's a playing field that's part of the rugby School and on the wall next to that field is fixed the marker I came to see. It reads, this Stone commemorates the exploit of William Webb Ellis, who with a fine disregard for the rules of football has played in his time, first took the ball in his arms and ran with it, thus originating the distinctive feature of the rugby game.

It's a long tale of how the game spread, then changed into 11-man block and tackle football, and thus spawned a vast, expensive industry that absorbs American Saturdays and Sundays from the sweat of August to the ice of January. But in the late 1960s, a lot of American collegians, disenchanted with the corporate, semi-military aspects of that industry, regressed against its grain. They went back to what seemed the simpler fun of rugby, a rough but virtually equipmentless game without substitutions or timeouts, then played by makeshift clubs with few spectators and no publicity, in a spirit of sportsmanship that revered In about equal measure, a hard contest and a good party afterward.

Webb Ellis’s exploits still seems to me to be as sharply chiseled out a colonel as we could hope for of what cultural innovation is all about. Somebody operating in the context of one set of rules sees that there is another way to go, and takes matters into his or her own hands, and someone else, or a lot of others, chooses to view this average move, not just as a failure or a fool, but as the seed of a new kind of game, with its own set of rules.

Innovation is a kind of secular miracle: Secular because it happens amid the humdrum machinery of life getting along, and virtually everything about it is comprehensible without recourse to any notion of Supernatural mystery or fated destiny, Miraculous, not only because it can change things dramatically, but because none of that machinery suffices to explain why it had to happen this way.

Modern Art after World War II, and after 1960 especially, is not so much a cult with a Bible as a culture without a Constitution, a far-flung, complex Republic that seems to keep flogging the propaganda of its founding guerrilla wars as its only operating Charter.

The more aggressive the changes, the greater the apparent need to claim a basis in something permanent and objective. When early modern painters broke established rules, and let go of resemblance to mundane reality, proponents typically maintained that they were actually following better rules that charted a higher reality, according to the dictates of platonic philosophy.