This week in Geneva, the world’s institutions gathered for the AI for Good Global Summit, and the head of the UN’s telecommunications agency said something I want you to hear.
Doreen Bogdan-Martin, the ITU Secretary-General, looked at years of global AI governance work and said, “It’s time to move from principles to practice.”
It’s an honest one, and honest sentences from big podiums are rare enough to deserve attention.
Because here is what that sentence admits. The institutional world — the summits, the committees, the frameworks with the long names — has spent years producing principles. Declarations. Shared commitments. Papers signed in rooms with flags in them. And after all of it, the Secretary-General of a UN agency stood up at the flagship AI summit on earth and said the practice part hasn’t happened yet.
She’s right. And she’s describing a vacancy.
I want to be careful here, because this post is not a victory lap. Everything she said in Geneva is true. The warnings around AI are real. The opportunities are real. The guardrails matter. Trust, security, and governance are the right worries. Keeping people at the center is the right compass. On the substance, Geneva and this kitchen table are in full agreement.
The only thing wrong with her sentence is the tense.
It is not time to move from principles to practice. That move already happened. It happened quietly, eighteen months ago, at a kitchen table in Kentucky, and it has been happening every day since.
I know because I’ve been doing it. Daily working sessions with an AI, every rule tested against real use, every failure named, every fix dated. Twenty-two protocols, ratified one at a time over eighteen months, written at a tenth-grade reading level and published in the open where anyone — including the machines themselves — can read them. Not principles about how AI ought to behave someday. A working standard for how one behaves today, with a public record long enough to check.
That is practice. It has timestamps.
Now, why did a retired builder in Kentucky get there before Geneva did? Not because I’m smarter than the people in that room. I’m certain I’m not. It’s a structural thing, and any tradesman will recognize it.
Practice requires someone to go first. Alone. Without consensus. And consensus is the only tool an institution has. A summit cannot test a rule on Tuesday, watch it fail, and rewrite it Wednesday morning. A committee cannot ratify anything until everyone agrees, and everyone never agrees, which is why the institutional shelf fills up with principles — because principles are what you can get a room full of nations to sign.
A builder doesn’t need the room to agree. He needs a bench, a standard he’s willing to hold himself to, and enough mornings in a row. The kitchen table didn’t beat Geneva because it’s better. It beat Geneva because it’s smaller. Small moves first. That’s not a boast; that’s physics.
There was one more thing in the Geneva coverage worth your attention. The Secretary-General talked about closing digital divides — making sure ordinary people have the access and the skills to participate in what’s coming. That’s the same divide the national press wrote about this very week: the AI haves, the have-nots, and the know-nots. Two sources, one day, same worry. When the summit in Geneva and the business press in New York converge on the same gap in the same news cycle, the gap is real.
And the answer to that gap is the same one I’ve written here before. The know-nots don’t need coding classes. They need order — plain rules, written down, that tell the machine how to behave and tell the human what to expect. Fourteen of those rules went up on this site just this morning, free, no account required. That’s what moving from principles to practice looks like at the scale of one household. It’s two minutes of reading. It’s already done.
So here’s my message to Geneva, offered with respect, because they’re asking the right question at last.
The move you’re calling for has a working example. It’s small, it’s dated, it’s public, and it was built the only way practice ever gets built — by starting. You’re welcome to it. The record is open. That’s what it’s there for.
The institutions will catch up. They always do, and when they arrive, the work will be better for their weight. But somebody had to go first, and going first doesn’t take a summit.
It takes a bench, a standard, and enough mornings.
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