It's time to regulate AI to protect meaning, not just safety

It’s time to regulate AI to protect meaning, not just safety.

We’ve spent so much time focused on AI safety, data privacy, and misinformation, that we’ve overlooked something even more fundamental:

We’re automating people out of their own lives, without any plan for what comes next.

Layoffs are normalized. Automation is celebrated. And humans?
We’re expected to “reskill” faster than the systems replacing us.

We’ve seen what meaninglessness does to people in fragile economies.
Now we’re scaling that same grief globally, just with prettier dashboards.

And the truth is: no one’s truly accountable.

• Not governments.
• Not businesses.
• Not the labs building the tools.

This is a shared responsibility:

• Governments: Because the social contract requires governments to look out for their people’s safety, and dignity.
• Businesses: Because replacing roles with AI cannot simply be called optimization alone, it’s also an act of displacement. Layoffs aren’t line items. They’re losses.
• AI companies: Because building the tool doesn’t absolve you from what the tool enables. You don’t need bad intent to cause harm at scale.

It’s no longer enough to regulate for performance. We need frameworks that protect meaning, belonging, and the right to feel needed.

Not every job will survive, but every person deserves to.
If we don’t build that safety net, we’re not scaling productivity - rather, we’re scaling despair.