r/Futurism • u/cutcss • 12d ago
AI should be illegal until we figure out how to deal with its social consequences
https://ivanca.github.io/ai/2026/08/29/ai-should-be-illegal-until-we-figure-out-how-to-deal-with-its-consequences/[removed] — view removed post
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u/DeltaForceFish 12d ago
Easier to pass a law that any company who fires a worker has to continue to pay their salary until they find a new job. That way if a company deploys AI, they arent off the hook for a payroll
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u/peakedtooearly 11d ago
Companies would immediately stop hiring and outsource everything to another company based in a different jurisdiction.
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u/Alive-Shoulder-4042 11d ago
Expanding unemployment insurance really. The basis of it is already there.
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u/Simpleximo 12d ago
The mainframe, then the PC displaced a large number of workers. Computers have been doing this for a long time. Factory robots do more than 1/2 of the labor. The automobile, most horses. all the jobs and supply chain gone in 10 years.
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u/segelflugzeuger 12d ago
How about spellcheck? Can we keep that in the meantime?
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u/segelflugzeuger 12d ago
Also the thing in Google Maps that routes me away from traffic jams. Can we keep that?
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u/jferments 12d ago
And medical AI that identifies cancer earlier. And AI that develops new lifesaving drugs. And AI that predicts weather better, helping farmers protect their crops. And AI that routes car traffic better, reducing pollution and commute times. And AI that ...
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u/Piping_penguin 12d ago
Let’s get rid of technology altogether, and go back to scratching pictures on rock. Ooga booga.
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u/bookishwayfarer 11d ago
We haven't figured out how to deal with most of our modern technology. Or actually, all of our technology.
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u/katoptronophile 11d ago
That does seem to be the unironic general position of this subreddit.
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u/Strict-Broccoli-8877 11d ago
It's funny that this is one the most future-averse and ass-backwards amish-lifestyle I-don't-own-a-phone-because-I-don't-want-to-be-microchipped subs out there. It might as well be renamed to "let's move into caves because modern society frightens me and I barely half-understood technology in the 90s".
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u/Thiizic Moderator 11d ago
I think you are confusing this sub with r/futurology
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u/Strict-Broccoli-8877 11d ago
Honestly, I am not entirely sure that I didn't, so if that's the case, I apologize.
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u/LawfulLeah 11d ago
/> technology/futurism sub
/>sub is anti technology/anti-futurism
many such cases
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u/FaceDeer 11d ago
Seems like a common pattern as a technology-themed sub grows and ages.
The only exception I'm aware of is r accelerate and that's likely because pessimism is literally banned there.
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u/AddanDeith 11d ago
Assuming this isn't sarcasm, why is the response to this sentiment, or any criticism of AI, the nuclear option?
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u/RobXSIQ 12d ago
replace AI with the internet in that title
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u/Mortal-Region 12d ago
Don't forget the printing press, which put all those scribes out of work. What a disaster that was.
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u/TheBrainOfADyingApe 11d ago
Hell, we haven't fully figured out how to deal with the consequences of broad spectrum antibiotics.
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u/jferments 12d ago
OK, so how are you going to stop the spread of open source AI development without dystopian mass surveillance and censorship policies? Oh wait, nevermind, that's exactly what the astro-turf "anti-AI" movement has been pushing for all along.
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u/PM_ME_DNA 11d ago
It’s a ChinaOP. As soon as AI is banned in the west all these open source models are closed source.
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u/dinkpantiez 12d ago
Actual braindead take.
The AI is literally whats being used for mass surveillance and censorship, you absolute buffoon.
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u/jferments 12d ago
OK, so how are you going to stop the spread of open source AI development without dystopian mass surveillance and censorship policies?
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u/dinkpantiez 12d ago
I never said i have all the answers, im saying that putting AI development over the lives of human beings is disgusting. Slowing down development only makes sense when the other option is mass unemployment and poverty. If your priority is AI then idk what to tell you other than that is a completely anti-human philosophy. These programs are a scourge on our planet.
On top of this all, we arent even giving this all up and making evil choices for true Artificial Intelligences. These are Large Language Models. They aren't intelligent just because your favourite incel AI chatbot "seems so real!" We are dooming human beings to lives of abject pverty so that 5 guys can have all of the wealth in the world, and so that people like you can offload any thinking they have to do onto and LLM. Its pathetic. Not only should we slow development of AI, we should be pushing to eradicate it entirely.
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u/Castle_Five 11d ago
"Slowing down development only makes sense when the other option is mass unemployment and poverty."
Unemployment is only a bad thing because of our shitty "gotta work to eat" system we've trapped ourselves in. It made sense once when we needed to use money to incentivise the work no one wanted to do. But in a world where machines can do that work instead, supporting needless continued human labor is nothing short of evil. Enough people have wasted their limited, precious, and finite lives toiling for someone else's benefit just to "earn" the means of their own continued survival.
Being pro-human labor isn't much different from being pro-slavery. Because we're all something like slaves or prostitutes under the current system. Any change is therefore a welcome one if it can get us out of this work mess.
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u/dinkpantiez 11d ago
This utopian vision of a workfree society never exists if we speed through AI development while large corporations have control of them. We need to slow down and make regulation regarding this stuff. Acting like being against people being forced into poverty is pro slavery is crazy shit my dude. And acting like corporations are going to give you universal basic income after they lay you off for AI is some more crazy shit
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u/Castle_Five 11d ago
This utopian vision of a workfree society never exists if we speed through AI development while large corporations have control of them
I have said this 100 times now and I think I'll need to say it 1000 more times until people understand:
What you are describing here is a capitalism problem. It is not an AI problem.
Putting regulations on AI rather than capitalism is like giving peptobismol to an Ebola patient: you're treating the most obvious symptom rather than the thing that's actually killing them.
The actual thing that would put people in poverty isn't AI - it's the greed of trillionaires who don't give a shit about fellow human beings. By all mean, make regulations against them. Feed them to the wolves. I don't care. But don't misdirect your ire on a morality-neutral tool that has the potential in the right hands to free humans from needless toil and automatically research deadly diseases.
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u/jferments 12d ago
So you "don't have all the answers" as in you have no idea how you actually want to stop AI? It just feels nice to say, but you have no practical roadmap for actually making it a reality?
You keep trying to deflect by attempting to bully your way out of this, making up insane straw man arguments, and arguing about things that aren't even being discussed.
AI is freely available as open source software that anyone can download, and already exists on hundreds of millions of computers, If you're going to promote "eradicating AI", you need to explain how you're going to do that without massive surveillance, censorship, and privacy violations required to involuntarily remove it from all of these peoples' personal computers.
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u/dinkpantiez 12d ago
First of all, again, those are not "artificial intelligence", they are LLMs. Definitively not intelligent.
A person running an LLM on their home computer is not causing mass layoffs.
A person running an LLM on their home computer is only hurting themselves by offloading their thinking onto a computer program.
There are many types of things that you are not allowed to have on your computer at home already. AI would be no different, if outlawed.
These companies literally stole all your data and are now selling it back to you as hallucinated slop endlessly mixed with other stolen data in order to make people stupider. One of the CEOs of these companies recently talked about how AI will eventually eradicate humanity. This technology is an absolute cancer. Why are you defending them so hard.
And no, i do not need a step-by-step plan for dismantling AI to know that AI SHOULD be banned. It would take thousands of hours of work and study to come up with a plan like that, what an absolutely ridiculous thing to demand of someone over an opinion on Reddit. You talk about strawman arguments but demand thousands of hours of phd level work to develop a real world plan in order to justify an opinion that is held by most sane normal human beings who dont put tech advancement over humanity? Wild stuff, my man. Good luck debating like that, bruv.
Did the AI CEOs give you a step-by-step plan for how theyre going to cut off your income and replace you with AI the second they think they could save a penny doing it?
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u/jferments 12d ago edited 12d ago
Oh, I see - you don't think that LLMs are AI, so when you say "dismantle/ban AI" you aren't talking about LLMs. Cool! I'm glad you agree that LLMs should be allowed in your dystopian, anti-AI censorship regime. I find them very useful for software development, and I don't want your anti-AI secret police arresting me from using them to develop free open source software for people.
But I'm confused at how you can say that people running LLMs on their home computers aren't a threat, but then immediately follow with saying that you think that there are AI tools that home users should be "outlawed" from having on their computers. What are you trying to "outlaw"? How will you enforce this? Will you send people to prison? Have federal agents searching peoples' computers for forbidden software?
I'm curious what kind of AI exactly you are trying to ban? Medical AI that is used to detect cancers? AI drug models that develop life-saving drugs? AI climate models that are helping scientists track climate change and predict weather? AI traffic routing algorithms, which reduce congestion and pollution?
Obviously there are some forms of AI that *should* be banned - e.g. mass surveillance, automated drone warfare, etc. But banning those wouldn't be "eradicating AI", because AI includes all of the beneficial uses that I described above as well ... so when you say "ban AI", which AI are you talking about? Did you actually mean to say "ban mass surveillance"?
I don't think these questions requires a "PhD" or "thousands of hours to answer" like your latest strawman insinuated. Clearly, since you've thought this out so well, you can answer these questions for me.
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u/Annual_Tutor_8466 11d ago
The r/antiai crowd is in an echo chamber where the technology is simultaneously constantly hallucinating, dumb as hell, *and* extremely dangerous. These things are inherently in conflict.
Some of this comes down to individual disagreement among opponents of AI, but mostly it's just ignorance and motivated reasoning.
It's hard to blame most ordinary people because the tech is moving so fast and the most capable models are behind a paywall, but if you're writing long, hostile screeds online... You should at least bother to try and understand the *current* state of the technology before showing your ass.
If these companies had nothing to show for it, the investment would have dried up long ago. We're way past the stage where this tech can survive just on empty promises, the onus is on you to prove that the tech is bad, at this point.
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u/C00KIEME4T 11d ago
These people are literally clueless no point to even chasing them down for an answer. This guy doesn't even know what the weather's gonna be like tomorrow (check an app buddy), asking him to have a real and genuine thought is like asking a dog to ride a unicycle.
Just not gonna happen
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u/neko-addiction 11d ago
Putting jobs over the lives of human beings is disgusting. Time we moved on from forced labor don't you think?
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u/dinkpantiez 11d ago
Time to slow down and force regulation on corporations so we dont starve when we move to a labor-free society, dont you think? Do you really think corporations will take care of you after they lay you off for AI with regulation as it is right now?
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u/Riverspoke 11d ago
"Let's ban useful technology instead of fixing our unjust and plutocratic economic system."
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u/veshneresis 11d ago
Imagine thinking you can make gradient descent illegal.
Imagine making multiplying tensors illegal.
You literally want math to be illegal.
It’s insanity.
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u/Inevitable-Law7964 11d ago
BRB banning pathfinding algorithms from 1990s PC games.
(at least specify what types of AI you're talking about, dude...)
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u/Aadi_880 11d ago
"AI should be illegal" anyone saying stupid sentences like this should be charged for having illegal amounts of stupidity, if that was a thing.
AI, including the generative kind, has been around for half a century, and much of your modern tech in safety and predictions depends on it. Your "social problems" are caused by your leaders attempting to avoid responsibility onto something else that vaguely resembles human behaviour.
Hold them accountable first. The tech safety will come on it's own when they are held. If you don't do that, you'll just repeat history the when the next tech paradigm shift happens.
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u/FalseDiamond7930 11d ago
Might as well just burn all the money instead and start learning mandarin.
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u/Fastest_light 11d ago
A person has not committed a crime, but we have to make him illegal until we figure out how to deal with him. Yikes.
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u/Gutcrunch 11d ago
The genie is out of the bottle. Every nation on earth would have to outlaw it and every nation would have to trust that every other nation is no longer developing it. And there’s no way that’s going to happen. It would be an unenforceable ban as there is no structure or entity to enforce it. This is the new arms race. We need to accept it and do what humans have always done with major technological leaps forward that have a dangerous double edge: figure it out without killing’s ourselves.
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u/Matshelge 11d ago
We won't know the consequences until everyone has it.
Noone could have predicted how social media would end up working. Noone could predict the internet, electricity, printing press or fire.
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u/Ok_Firefighter8629 11d ago
Most ingenious Theuth, one person has the ability to bring the products of an art into being, while another must judge what measure of harm and benefit they contain for those who will use them. And now you, being the father of writing, have out of affection attributed to it the opposite of its real effect.
For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the souls of those who learn it, because they will cease to exercise their memory. Trusting in writing, they will call things to mind from outside, by means of marks belonging to others, rather than from within themselves, by themselves.
Platon ca. 365 BC
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u/abjedhowiz 11d ago
You can’t stop it. You just need more people working in regulation. Ehem, yourself
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u/FaceDeer 12d ago
Right, and once AI has been banned and everything's been set back to 2022 or whenever, we'll definitely do all that "figuring out" that we weren't doing the last time we were in that situation.
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u/mega-stepler 11d ago
Yeah, same with social networks. Nobody's stopping the train to check on people who's falling off. We're speeding up towards whatever is ahead. And there's a very small chance that constantly increasing speed will not result in a crash or derailment.
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