workers in relatively stable job positions may soon see their professional lives upended. To maintain such an unevenly distributed economy, everyone who isn’t at the very top has to share a tiny slice of the pie, so to speak. AI has the potential to make it so that virtually no one, save a select few, gets more than a taste of the pie, which could lead to massive social instability and upheaval. AI could very well make it so that the white-collar worker with multiple degrees, previously unencumbered by economic distress, will now feel more kinship with gig economy workers. Millions of people who never dreamed of facing the financial precarity of a gig economy worker due to their education or work background may well find themselves facing the same economic peril. Aside from the potential for wide-scale economic destruction it could bring, AI is also able to deceive, impersonate and misinform in far more potent ways than ever before. As a September 2025 article from the Northwestern Roberta Buffet Institute for Global Affairs details, AI’s ability to manipulate and deceive the public holds truly frightening implications: “The advance of artificial intelligence is a growing concern for the international community, governments, and the public, with significant implications for national security and cybersecurity. It also raises ethical questions related to surveillance and transparency. In a world with widespread misinformation, AI provides ever-more sophisticated means of convincing people of the veracity of false information. “Deepfakes — media content created by AI technologies that are generally meant to be deceptive — are a particularly significant and growing tool for misinformation and digital impersonation. Deepfakes are generated by machine-learning algorithms that can create realistic digital likenesses of individuals without permission. When execution is excellent, the result can be an extremely believable — but totally fabricated — text, video or audio clip of a person doing or saying something that they did not.” Deepfakes pose a range of potential issues, from national security concerns to personal financial risks. The need to regulate its potential hazards, along with AI’s other possible problems, is obvious. It seems incredibly short-sighted to enter the era of AI without any federal regulatory framework in place. Instead of encouraging sensible regulation, there has been talk in Congress of preventing states from regulating AI altogether. The federal government should be working with states to develop common-sense regulations and safeguards, which hasn’t been happening at all. Frighteningly, the United States is quickly becoming so reliant on the development of this technology that it has created a “too big to fail” mindset around AI. However, we’ve created a double-edged sword no one seems eager to think about. If AI fails, the economy appears poised to collapse along with it; if AI succeeds, it may be wildly destructive. 7
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