August 29, 2026 • AI
Artificial intelligence should be illegal until we figure out how to deal with its social consequences. This may sound extreme, but the speed at which AI is advancing is fundamentally incompatible with the speed at which societies can adapt to it.
Like is widely known the most immediate problem is job uncertainty. People are being asked to invest years of their lives learning skills for careers that may not exist in the same form by the time they graduate. This creates not only employment uncertainty, but career uncertainty: how can someone responsibly choose a profession when its long-term existence is increasingly impossible to predict?
BTW it is also naive to believe that simply understanding how AI works internally, programming AI systems, or following the latest model releases will keep someone’s job safe. If AI’s defining advantage is its ability to learn and improve faster than humans, then any new job created around today’s limitations can eventually become a target for automation too. In other words any job AI can create it can automate.
There is also a deeper economic danger. If robots eventually perform most productive work, money could become less important as a mechanism for negotiating human labor. The ultra-rich might consequently place greater value on controlling the raw materials, energy, land, and infrastructure required to manufacture and operate robots than on preserving the value of dollars or other currencies. In an economy where machines produce everything, being wealthy may increasingly mean possessing the physical resources that machines require, rather than possessing money that humans need to exchange for their labor. This could concentrate power in ways our existing economic systems are not equipped to handle.
Is also worth mentioning AI is likely to have significant psychological and societal consequences by changing how people relate to creative work and to one another. When music, images, writing, or other forms of art are increasingly generated by machines, people will have fewer opportunities to connect with the experiences, intentions, and perspectives of other human beings through culture. This could gradually weaken the social function of art as a way of creating shared experiences and shared understanding.
Of course, making AI illegal would be technically difficult. Some people would inevitably continue using it secretly, just as there are many illegal endeavors people continue doing in search of economical gains. But full compliance should not be the only measure of whether a law has value. A prohibition could establish a powerful social expectations that certain forms of work are supposed to be human-made. It could also encourage the development of new ways to verify human authorship: cryptographic proof of creative processes, trusted certification systems, hardware-based attestations, or platforms specifically designed to establish that a person actually created a work. Even if illegal AI use could never be eliminated completely, the combination of legal restrictions, social pressure, and continuously-evolving methods of proving human involvement could be enough.
At the end the question is whether society should permit technology to transform employment, economics, creativity, and human relationships faster than we can understand the consequences. There should be exceptions for things like cancer research and other medical endeavors that are agreed to be unquestionably good for mankind. But for most applications until we have credible answers, restricting AI may be less an attack on progress than an attempt to ensure that progress remains something humans can co-exist along without instilling misery upon mankind.
Meet the author
- Ivan Castellanos
Ivan was born at a very young age, this has made a lot of people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move.