Regulate Later, Suffer Now: Why the "Competitive" AI Narrative is Broken

A few bright spots first

Last week I travelled to Málaga to speak at DES Málaga, the leading international B2B event on AI and exponential technologies. I love travelling to technology fairs around the world to understand the different perspectives and visions of the technology that exist out there. This one didn’t disappoint.

I genuinely enjoyed some of the talks and speakers I encountered over the three days. David Rodríguez, CEO and founder of Fundación Pegasus, gave a charismatic talk titled “Lo mío no es normal, pero lo tuyo tampoco” (mine isn’t normal, but neither is yours) about how not being normal can be your superpower. Elisa García and Marta Tolosa gave a presentation on how bias shows up in companies, specifically in hiring, and sparked a genuinely interesting debate when they asked the audience whether, given the algorithm’s known problems, we should fix it or simply stop using it altogether. Almost everyone in the room said stop using it.

 

Then came Albert Rivera

And then came the interview with Albert Rivera, one of the conference highlights.

Rivera was the leader of a Spanish political party called Ciudadanos, representing liberal politics. The party grew rapidly after 2015, as the country’s traditional two-party system began to fracture, and at one point became the fourth strongest party in Spain. Before their dramatic collapse, when they were reduced to ten seats in Congress, Rivera resigned as leader and moved into the private sector. He now advises companies on future trends and the state of the world.

What he said blew my mind. Not in a good way.

I knew a more corporate vision of this technology existed. I had just never witnessed it this directly, and I had never seen anyone believe in it quite this much.

 

 

Competitive for what, exactly?

Some of his views, I think, capture everything currently wrong with the technology world. The neoliberal vision of progress at any cost, for the sole purpose of enriching an already privileged few. Rivera called Europe a “pagafantas” (Spanish slang for someone naive enough to pay for everyone else without ever getting anything back) because, in his view, the EU’s approach to AI development isn’t working. We aren’t being competitive enough. In his own words, the right path is to prioritise competitiveness first and regulate later, once the problems show up.

And my question to him, and to anyone who shares his thinking, is: for what?

Why introduce a technology we already know is flawed, whose limitations are well documented, when the conversation around AI has shifted from “AI can replace humans” to “we need humans at the centre of this because it isn’t perfect and it makes mistakes”? Why rush to adopt it at any cost, fix the damage later, and call that competitiveness? Competitive for what, exactly? So you and the companies you advise can make more money?

I spent the entire interview laughing. I couldn’t help it. You know that moment when you’ve swallowed certain messages your whole life, and then one day you wake up and realise just how much manipulation was baked into them, and you simply stop swallowing it? This was that, in real time. One piece of pure capitalist rhetoric after another. I don’t buy it anymore. I hope you don’t either.

The hypocrisy nobody named

What I also found striking was that someone so opposed to any regulation from the European Union later said, in the same breath, that he believes this technology is good for us. That it will give us back our time, because AI will take on our work. But, he added, we obviously need some kind of contract between people and governments to manage that transition.

So forgive me, but I thought regulation was the problem. I thought it killed competitiveness. And now you want governments to step in and regulate the fact that millions of people are about to lose their jobs because of the very technology you pushed us to adopt without restraint?

Am I the only one who sees the hypocrisy here?

I’ll close this train of thought with the last thing he said: that platforms aren’t responsible for our disappearing critical thinking, and that it’s on each of us individually to do everything possible not to lose that skill.

Ha. Ha. Ha. Anything else?

It was, as I said, a genuinely interesting trip.

The “AI for Good” problem

The other thing that surprised me was just how many experts and companies now specialise in “ethical AI,” or what they like to call “AI for Good.” Governance and equality in AI is my specialism and my research, so I was genuinely excited to find others working in the same space, hoping to exchange ideas. It didn’t take long to realise that wasn’t quite what was happening.

Most of the conversations gravitated toward how companies should embrace “AI for Good” for their own benefit; treating humans as another resource to manage, rather than as the reason the technology’s negative impacts need reviewing and fixing in the first place. Organisations set up as foundations, offering tax advantages to companies that adopt the “AI for Good” label, which, when you look closely, is really just another way of saying: I’ll help you look compliant with the EU AI Act.

Maybe I’m naive. Maybe I’m not.

Maybe I’m too naive. Maybe believing that AI can genuinely benefit humanity, as long as it’s properly regulated and these structural problems get fixed, is just the vision of a dreamer. Maybe the neoliberal version of this story wins in the end.

Or maybe, as more people start rejecting this technology and resisting its adoption, the neoliberal narrative will have to change to convince us at all. Or maybe we start doing this properly, and stop measuring everything by how much it inflates our own pockets.

Not everything is about money.

Some things go beyond that.