David F. Brochu: Welcome to the world of bounded chaos featuring AI

To The Daily Sun,

Things feel like they’re spinning: politics, prices, weather, screens full of noise. It looks like chaos, but it isn’t random. It’s bounded chaos, and right now it’s profitable.

Pure chaos eventually collapses, and collapse is bad for business. But high chaos is a gold mine. More stressed families mean more medical bills. Weaker schools mean more undereducated kids needing remedial services or drifting into addiction. Every breakdown creates another “market opportunity” for someone to sell a fix.

That is the capitalist imperative: keep growth going, even if the system is fraying. AI is now being plugged into every domain to accelerate this — finance, advertising, medicine, education — amplifying noise and confusion because a confused, anxious public clicks more, buys more, and depends more on the very systems that are destabilizing them. As the Domain Saturation Factor rises and AI touches more of our lives, the horizon of collapse keeps getting pushed just far enough away that we’re told to work harder, earn more, and protect “me and mine,” while the underlying structure gets weaker.

There is a line where bounded chaos either gets steered back toward stability, or tips into the kind of collapse that takes communities down with it. We’re edging toward that line. The question for Laconia is simple: do we keep rewarding systems that profit from disorder, or do we start insisting that any “smart” technology we adopt must make our town measurably more stable, healthier, and better educated over time — not just more “efficient” on a spreadsheet?

David F. Brochu

Belmont