Align Economic Incentives to Govern AI Before It's Too Late

Regulating AI without fixing the economy it operates in is a losing strategy. Restrictions alone won't work — corporations have spent centuries skirting regulations, exploiting loopholes, and capturing the politicians who write the rules. AI will let them do this faster and at a scale we've never seen. The only durable solution is economic alignment: rewarding outcomes that benefit people and taxing those that don't. We already know what misaligned incentives do to technology. Meta just settled a social media addiction lawsuit for $17 billion. The like button — designed to connect people — became a dopamine trap because addiction is more profitable than connection. AI is the same dynamic, supercharged. When profit is the only metric, AI will exhaust shared resources, destroy livelihoods, and deepen every inequality we already have. Economic democracy gives us a path forward. Participatory budgeting has directed over $400 million across more than 40 U.S. cities toward things communities actually want — fresh food, housing stability, workforce training. That's the model. Support legislation that embeds public accountability into how AI is developed and deployed, and back policies that align economic incentives with human well-being before this technology scales beyond our ability to course-correct.