Imagine it is 2028. A start-up in St. Louis trains an AI model that can spot pancreatic cancer six months earlier than the best radiologists, buying patients precious time that medicine has never been able to give them. But the model never leaves the lab. Why? Because a well-intentioned, technology-neutral state statute drafted in 2025 forces every “automated decision system” to undergo a one-size-fits-all bias audit, to be repeated annually, and to be performed only by outside experts who—three years in—still do not exist in sufficient numbers. While regulators scramble, the company’s venture funding dries up, the founders decamp to Singapore, and thousands of Americans are deprived of an innovation that would have saved their lives.
That grim vignette is fictional—so far. But it is the predictable destination of the seven “deadly sins” that already haunt our AI policy debates. Reactive politicians are at risk of passing laws that fly in the face of what qualifies as good policy for emerging technologies.
Policymakers rightly sense that AI is moving faster than the statutory machinery built for the age of the horse and buggy, not the supercomputer. The temptation is to act first and reflect later. Yet history tells us that bad tech laws ossify, spread, and strangle progress long after their drafters leave office. California’s flame-retardant fiasco—one state’s sofa rule turned nationwide toxin—is Exhibit A. As of 1975, the state’s Bureau of Home Furnishings and Thermal Insulation insisted on flame retardant being included in certain furniture. Companies across the country compiled; it was cheaper to design their products for California’s standards rather than segment their manufacturing processes. Turns out that the flame-retardant foam was highly toxic and highly prone to end up in the hands and mouths of kids. It’s unclear how many hundreds or thousands of kids have suffered severe health issues as a result. Yet, the law remained on the books for decades. If we repeat that regulatory playbook for AI, we will not merely ruin couches; we will foreclose entire classes of life-improving algorithms.
The best way to avoid missing out on a better future due to bad laws is to identify and call out bad policy habits as soon as possible. With that in mind, lawmarks should avoid all seven of these sins and take care to instead adopt more flexible and evidence-based provisions.
- Mistaking “Tech-Neutral” for “Future-Proof.”
Imagine a statute that lumps diagnostic AIs with chatbot toys. This broad definition will invite litigation and paralyze AI development. Antidote: regulate by context, not by buzzword. Write rules tailored to specific use cases—health care, hiring, criminal justice—so innovators in low-risk domains are not collateral damage. - Legislating Without an Expiration Date.
The first draft of a law regulating emerging tech should never be the last word. Antidote: bake in sunset clauses that force lawmakers to revisit, revise, or repeal once real-world data rolls in. - Skipping Retrospective Review.
Passing a law is easy; measuring whether it works is hard. Antidote: mandate evidence audits—independent studies delivered to the legislature on a fixed schedule, coupled with automatic triggers for amendment when objectives are missed. - Exporting One State’s Preferences to the Nation.
When a single market as large as California or New York sets rules for all AI training data, the other 48 states lose their voice. Antidote: respect constitutional lanes. States should focus on local deployment (police facial recognition, school tutoring tools) and leave interstate questions—model training, cross-border data flows—to Congress. - Building Regulatory Castles on Sand—No Capacity, No Credibility.
Agencies cannot police AI with a dozen lawyers and programmers on the verge of retirement. Antidote: appropriate real money and real talent before—or at least alongside—new mandates. Offer fellowships, competitive salaries, and partnerships with land-grant universities to create a pipeline of public-interest AI experts. - Letting the Usual Suspects Dominate the Microphone.
If the only people in the room are professors, Beltway lobbyists, and Bay-Area founders, policy will skew toward their priors. Antidote: institutionalize broader participation—labor unions, rural hospitals, start-ups from the Midwest—through citizen advisory panels and notice-and-comment processes that actively seek out non-elite voices. - Confusing Speed with Progress.
The greatest danger is not under-regulation; it is freezing innovation before we understand its upside. Antidote: adopt a research-first posture. Fund testbeds, regulatory sandboxes, and pilot programs that let society learn in controlled environments before slapping on handcuffs.
Taken together, these antidotes form a simple governing philosophy: regulate like a scientist, not like a fortune-teller. Start narrow. Measure relentlessly. Revise or repeal when evidence demands it. And always, always weigh the cost of forgone breakthroughs—lives un-saved, jobs un-created, problems unsolved—against the speculative harms that dominate headlines.
The payoff? A legal environment where responsible innovators can move fast and fix things, where regulators are nimble rather than reactive, and where the public enjoys both the fruits of AI and meaningful protection from its risks. We need not choose between innovation and accountability. We only need the discipline to avoid the seven sins—and the imagination to envision what humanity loses if we fail.
The final word? If my cancer-spotting start-up withers in a tangle of red tape, the obituaries will never say, “Killed by a visionary legislature.” They will simply say, “Cure delayed.” Our charge as lawyers and policymakers is to ensure that sentence never gets written. By exorcising the seven deadly sins of AI policy now, we can safeguard both the public and the next generation of world-changing ideas. The clock is ticking—let’s legislate with humility, measure with rigor, and keep the door open to the innovations we cannot yet imagine.
Kevin Frazier is an AI Innovation and Law Fellow at Texas Law and Author of the Appleseed AI substack.
A deep look at how "All in the Family" remains a striking mirror of American politics, class tensions, and cultural manipulation—proving its relevance decades later.
All in This American Family
There are a few shows that have aged as eerily well as All in the Family.
It’s not just that it’s still funny and has the feel not of a sit-com, but of unpretentious, working-class theatre. It’s that, decades later, it remains one of the clearest windows into the American psyche. Archie Bunker’s living room has been, as it were, a small stage on which the country has been working through the same contradictions, anxieties, and unresolved traumas that still shape our politics today. The manipulation of the working class, the pitting of neighbor against neighbor, the scapegoating of the vulnerable, the quiet cruelties baked into everyday life—all of it is still here with us. We like to reassure ourselves that we’ve progressed since the early 1970s, but watching the show now forces an unsettling recognition: The structural forces that shaped Archie’s world have barely budged. The same tactics of distraction and division deployed by elites back then are still deployed now, except more efficiently, more sleekly.
Archie himself is the perfect vessel for this continuity. He is bigoted, blustery, reactive, but he is also wounded, anxious, and constantly misled by forces above and beyond him. Norman Lear created Archie not as a monster to be hated (Lear’s genius was to make Archie lovable despite his loathsome stands), but as a man trapped by the political economy of his era: A union worker who feels his country slipping away, yet cannot see the hands that are actually moving it. His anger leaks sideways, onto immigrants, women, “hippies,” and anyone with less power than he has. The real villains—the wealthy, the connected, the manufacturers of grievance—remain safely and comfortably offscreen. That’s part of the show’s key insight: It reveals how elites thrive by making sure working people turn their frustrations against each other rather than upward.
Edith, often dismissed as naive or scatterbrained, functions as the show’s quiet moral center. Her compassion exposes the emotional void in Archie’s worldview and, in doing so, highlights the costs of the divisions that powerful interests cultivate. Meanwhile, Mike the “Meathead” represents a generation trying to break free from those divisions but often trapped in its own loud self-righteousness. Their clashes are not just family arguments but collisions between competing visions of America’s future. And those visions, tellingly, have yet to resolve themselves.
The political context of the show only sharpens its relevance. Premiering in 1971, All in the Family emerged during the Nixon years, when the “Silent Majority” strategy was weaponizing racial resentment, cultural panic, and working-class anxiety to cement power. Archie was a fictional embodiment of the very demographic Nixon sought to mobilize and manipulate. The show exposed, often bluntly, how economic insecurity was being rerouted into cultural hostility. Watching the show today, it’s impossible to miss how closely that logic mirrors the present, from right-wing media ecosystems to politicians who openly rely on stoking grievances rather than addressing root causes.
What makes the show unsettling today is that its satire feels less like a relic and more like a mirror. The demagogic impulses it spotlighted have simply found new platforms. The working-class anger it dramatized has been harvested by political operatives who, like their 1970s predecessors, depend on division to maintain power. The very cultural debates that fueled Archie’s tirades — about immigration, gender roles, race, and national identity—are still being used as tools to distract from wealth concentration and political manipulation.
If anything, the divisions are sharper now because the mechanisms of manipulation are more sophisticated, for much has been learned by The Machine. The same emotional raw material Lear mined for comedy is now algorithmically optimized for outrage. The same social fractures that played out around Archie’s kitchen table now play out on a scale he couldn’t have imagined. But the underlying dynamics haven’t changed at all.
That is why All in the Family feels so contemporary. The country Lear dissected never healed or meaningfully evolved: It simply changed wardrobe. The tensions, prejudices, and insecurities remain, not because individuals failed to grow but because the economic and political forces that thrive on division have only become more entrenched. Until we confront the political economy that kept Archie and Michael locked in an endless loop of circular bickering, the show will remain painfully relevant for another fifty years.
Ahmed Bouzid is the co-founder of The True Representation Movement.