Fear is the worst possible response to AI. Actions taken out of fear are rarely a good thing, especially when it comes to emerging technology. Empirically-driven scrutiny, on the other hand, is a savvy and necessary reaction to technologies like AI that introduce great benefits and harms. The difference is allowing emotions to drive policy rather than ongoing and rigorous evaluation.
A few reminders of tech policy gone wrong, due, at least in part, to fear, helps make this point clear. Fear is what has led the US to become a laggard in nuclear energy, while many of our allies and adversaries enjoy cheaper, more reliable energy. Fear is what explains opposition to autonomous vehicles in some communities, while human drivers are responsible for 120 deaths per day, as of 2022. Fear is what sustains delays in making drones more broadly available, even though many other countries are tackling issues like rural access to key medicine via drones.
Again, this is not to say that new technology should automatically be treated as trustworthy, nor that individuals may not have some emotional response when a new creation is introduced into the world. It’s human nature to be skeptical and perhaps even scared of the new and novel. But to allow those emotions to rob us of our agency and to dictate our policy is a step too far. Yet, that’s where much of AI policy seems headed.
State legislatures have rushed forward with AI bills that aim to put this technology back in the bottle and freeze the status quo in amber. Bans on AI therapy tools, limitations on AI companions, and related legislation are understandable when viewed from an emotional perspective. Following the social media era, it’s unsurprising that many of us feel disgust, anger, sadness, and unease by the idea of our kids again jumping on platforms of unknown capabilities and effects. Count me asking those who are worried about helping our kids (and adults) navigate the Intelligence Age. But those emotions should not excessively steer our policy response to AI. Through close scrutiny of AI, we can make sure that policy is not resulting in unintended consequences, such as denying children the use of AI tools that could actually improve their physical and mental health.
The path to this more deliberate policy approach starts with combating the source of AI fear.
Fear of AI is often a response to the bogus claim that it’s beyond the control of humans. The core aspects of developing and deploying AI are the product of decisions made by people just like you and me. What data is available for AI training is subject to choices made by human actors. Laws often prevent certain data from being disclosed and later used for AI training. Technical systems can prevent data from being scraped from the Internet. Norms and business incentives influence what data even gets created and how it is stored and shared.
How and when AI companies release models is a function of human decisions. The structure of the AI market and the demand for AI products are variables that we can all shape, at least directly, through our representatives and purchasing decisions.
Integration of AI tools into sensitive contexts, such as schools and hospitals, is wholly a matter of human choices. Leaders and stakeholders of those institutions are anything but powerless when it comes to AI tool adoption. These folks are free to budget a lot or a little toward what AI tools they purchase. They can dictate what training, if any, their staff needs to receive before using those tools. They can impose strict procurement standards for any AI tools that can be acquired.
It’s very true that each of us has varying degrees of influence on how AI is developed and deployed, but it’s a dangerous myth that we’ve lost agency at this important societal juncture.
This recognition of our agency is a license to collectively build the tech we want to see, not a mandate to stop its development. A society that acts out of fear defaults to prohibition, sacrificing tangible progress to avoid speculative harms. It chooses scarcity. A confident society, by contrast, establishes the conditions for responsible innovation to flourish, viewing risk not as something to be eliminated, but as something to be managed intelligently in the pursuit of a more abundant future.
The most effective way to foster this environment is not through a new thicket of prescriptive regulations, but through the clarification and modernization of our existing laws and reliance on healthy, competitive markets. Adaptive laws and robust competition have successfully governed centuries of technological change and can do so in the age of AI.
This approach creates powerful incentives for developers to prioritize safety and reliability, not to satisfy a bureaucratic checklist, but because it is the surest path to success in the marketplace. When innovators have a clear understanding of their responsibilities, and consumers are confident that their rights are protected, progress can accelerate. This is the true alternative to a policy of fear: a legal system and marketplace that enables dynamism, demands responsibility, and is squarely focused on unleashing the immense benefits of innovation.
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.