Policy driven by panic always looks decisive in the moment, but it ages badly. It creates rules that respond to fear rather than reality, and those rules harden into structures that outlast the fear that produced them. Once a society crosses a technological event horizon, the old frameworks stop working, and the instinct to “do something” becomes overwhelming. That instinct is understandable, but it is also dangerous. When lawmakers legislate the emotion of the moment instead of the nature of the technology, they create systems that are brittle, overreaching, and misaligned with how people actually use the tools.
The cultural fear around AI didn’t appear out of nowhere. It grew in the vacuum left by a lack of public understanding. People were handed a tool that could generate fluent language, mimic tone, and respond in real time, and they had no shared vocabulary for what that meant. Into that vacuum rushed every familiar human fear: loss of control, loss of identity, loss of agency, loss of meaning. When a society can’t interpret a new technology, it mythologizes it. And when myth becomes the dominant narrative, policy follows the myth instead of the machine.
Panic-driven policy tends to follow a predictable pattern. It starts with overbroad bans that criminalize legitimate use because nuance feels too risky. It continues with moratoriums that freeze innovation without addressing the underlying concerns. It expands into symbolic legislation—rules that signal safety but do nothing to create it. And it often ends with power consolidating in the hands of a few institutions that can navigate the regulatory maze while everyone else is pushed out. None of this makes AI safer. It only makes the culture more anxious and the landscape more uneven.
The danger is not that policymakers are malicious. It’s that they are overwhelmed. They are being asked to regulate a technology that is evolving faster than their mental models can update. They are being pressured by constituents who are afraid, by companies that are competing, and by media narratives that amplify the most dramatic possibilities. In that environment, fear becomes the default operating system of governance. And fear is a terrible architect.
The irony is that the real risks of AI are not the ones panic-driven policy tends to target. The public imagination gravitates toward sentience, autonomy, and existential threat. The actual risks are far more grounded: misuse, misalignment between incentives and outcomes, concentration of power, erosion of authorship, and the widening gap between those who understand the tools and those who don’t. These are human problems, not machine problems. They require human solutions, not technological containment.
Education is the only antidote because it dissolves the fog that panic thrives in. But education here doesn’t mean teaching people how transformers work or how to read research papers. It means giving people the cognitive and cultural literacy to understand what AI is and isn’t. It means helping them see that a model generating fluent language is not the same thing as a mind forming intentions. It means showing them how to evaluate claims, how to recognize hype, how to understand the limits of the tool, and how to maintain agency in a world where machines can now participate in the conversational layer of life.
When people understand the tool, they stop fearing it. When they stop fearing it, they stop demanding reactive policy. When they stop demanding reactive policy, lawmakers can finally build frameworks that are grounded, proportional, and durable. Education doesn’t eliminate risk, but it eliminates the distortions that make risk impossible to manage.
The ethical stakes are high because panic-driven policy doesn’t just shape the present—it shapes the future. It determines who gets access to the tools, who gets to innovate, who gets to participate, and who gets left behind. It determines whether AI becomes a public good or a private asset. It determines whether the culture adapts or fractures. And it determines whether the next generation inherits a landscape built on clarity or a landscape built on fear.
We are past the event horizon. There is no going back to a world where AI is optional or peripheral. The only way forward is through understanding. The only stabilizing force left is literacy. And the only sustainable form of governance is the kind that emerges from a population that knows what it is regulating, what it is using, and what it is afraid of.
The work now is not to contain the technology. It is to educate the culture. Because once people understand the tool, the panic evaporates, and the policy that follows can finally be worthy of the moment.
Scored with Copilot. Conducted by Leslie Lanagan.
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