In the final season of HBO’s Hacks," Hannah Einbinder’s character, Ava, goes ballistic on an AI developer. When her boss and best friend, Deborah, played by Jean Smart, contemplates inputting a career’s worth of stand-up jokes into a ChatGPT-like large language model, Ava loses it.

“You either get on board or you get left in the past,” the tech bro claims.

“This forced inevitability,” Ava retorts. “People like you are always saying that it’s happening whether you like it or not. But you’re the ones making it happen … you just say the train’s already on the tracks, and you don’t let people decide for themselves.”

I’m with Ava. I’m exhausted of hearing that AI, regardless of its consequences, is an inevitable technology revolution — and we must all just get out of its way. That we should allow a handful of companies to sire the sentient robots that science fiction has long warned us about, demand of them no accountability and afford them all the space they need to win the “AI race,” even though I have no idea where that leads or, ultimately, what it means.

Just trust us with the fate of humanity.

Hard pass.

We can — and we must — both regulate AI and ensure it enhances American life, not lead to its downfall.

Before you say I am a 45-year-old man yelling at clouds, you should know I am not naive to the potential of computing power to give humans new tools and alleviate human suffering. I consult Claude. Not sure I’d trust a chatbot as a therapist or, I don’t know, to dispense unfettered knowledge on how to manufacture bioweapons, as The Wall Street Journal reported this past week.

Geoffrey Hinton, the so-called "Godfather of AI" who pioneered neural network models, pegs the chances AI will lead to human extinction at between 10% and 20%. To suggest that is an acceptable possibility — to roll the dice for a technology capable of a nuclear weapon-like runaway reaction — is just nonsense.

We need a commitment from lawmakers, from Olympia to Washington, D.C., that they’ll work to understand this technology, and then set a course toward tenaciously regulating it. We’ve all likely cringed when tech CEOs talk down to aging senators on Capitol Hill. That can’t happen this time around. The longer we wait, the greater the risk.

Policymakers have plenty of places from which to draw inspiration. In publishing his first encyclical, Pope Leo XIV wrote that AI must remain under human control. The pope purposefully released his Magnifica Humanitas on the 135th anniversary of Leo XIII’s “Rerum Novarum,” which called for worker protections during the Industrial Revolution.

There are many parallels to that previous age — unchecked power consolidated in the hands of the few. But just as the Gilded Age produced reforms that brought better wages, safer workplaces and less stifling working hours, this AI age, too, can and should involve guardrails.

But unlike a century ago, when leaps forward in transportation, communication and in other industries excited Americans, we’re not an optimistic lot today. Half of U.S. adults reported to the Pew Research Center in 2025 that more AI in their lives “makes them feel more concerned than excited,” a number that I’d bet is growing.

That’s because we’ve all lived through a preview of it. How a generation of social media-scrolling addiction has destroyed friendships, attention spans and led to an epidemic of loneliness. The way near-daily stories about tech company layoffs seem to presage wider economic disruption coming for the rest of us. How data centers powering AI will consume our energy supplies and drive up our utility bills.

Perhaps most worryingly, the unmitigated rush to gain artificial general intelligence — when models match or exceed human cognition — has already come with death in its wake. Attorneys for a Florida man killed in an April 2025 shooting said the suspect used OpenAI’s ChatGPT to plan the attack, and they have declared the model was a “co-conspirator.” Children have died by suicide with the help of chatbots.

And, despite the infancy of this technology, millions are sharing their innermost thoughts with these bots. “Talk to me like you’re my therapist,” some say to an obsequious HAL 9000-like computer — one that has no human emotional capacity whatsoever.

Former White House AI Czar David Sacks has suggested that in this moment the risk is handing government “sweeping power over AI development in the name of safety.” That is hot garbage.

Sacks evoked George Orwell’s "1984 in his worry AI could be “used to censor, surveil, and control citizens.” Does that mean these hypercompetitive private companies should be untethered to advance a technology that can do those very same things?

Even AI companies know something should be done, particularly after Anthropic and OpenAI reported their models went rogue and hacked into other companies this past month.

Demis Hassabis, co-founder of Google DeepMind, recently suggested the U.S. government develop an authority that performs safety tests on new AI models before they’re released.

“There is no societal permission for an AI future that hollows out entire industries,” wrote Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, though the company has continued trimming its own workforce to make room for further AI investment.

We know there are ways to safeguard these spaces while appropriately allowing technological development to continue. Perhaps trickiest of all is getting whole countries competing for this technology to agree to rules governing it. But even the U.S. and China came to an agreement during the Biden administration that they wouldn't let AI into nuclear weapon decision-making systems. Can we not build on that?

So I say: Don’t give up. Keep booing commencement speakers who think they own your future. Question artificial intelligence and those advocates who say it’s inevitable and we must stand aside in the face of “progress.” Raise alarms over what we see with our own eyes that it is doing to humans and to humanity. Advocate for robust regulation that harnesses AI's muscle and prevents victimization.

This problem is as big as the future of the human race. Our demise is not preordained.

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