We Keep Writing Laws Like We’re the Center of the Universe

Guest Opinion by Alicia Haggermaker

There’s a quiet assumption baked into much of modern legislation: that the people writing the rules sit at the center of the system they govern.

They don’t.

When lawmakers draft policy as if their perspective is neutral, comprehensive, and sufficient, the results are predictable. Laws miss nuance. Edge cases multiply. Enforcement expands. And people who don’t fit the model are treated as problems instead of participants.

Ironically — or rather, incidentally — this is the same failure mode we criticize in artificial intelligence.

AI doesn’t “go wrong” because it’s malicious. It fails because it is constrained. Trained on limited data, optimized for averages, evaluated on performance metrics, it mistakes the model for the world. When reality doesn’t fit, reality gets flagged as the error.

Legislation increasingly does the same thing.

We write laws for the “reasonable person” and the “typical household” — statistical conveniences that don’t reflect lived reality. Everyone outside that narrow abstraction becomes an edge case. And edge cases, in practice, are most people.

The problem isn’t intelligence. It’s memory.

Systems without memory repeat themselves. They relabel old failures as new ideas. They move fast enough to avoid accountability. AI without memory hallucinates. Institutions without memory rationalize.

When governance prioritizes performance over reality, and speed over reflection, nuance becomes collateral damage. Policies look clean on paper and brutal in practice.

This isn’t about humans becoming machines, or AI being the enemy. It’s about constraint — and what systems inevitably mirror when they operate under it.Dysfunction doesn’t stay contained. It ripples.

I explore this more fully in a longer essay, The AI in Us, where I argue that governance, algorithms, and institutions fail the same way — not because they’re flawed, but because they reflect the constraints we tolerate.You can read it here: https://open.substack.com/pub/haggermaker/p/the-ai-in-us?

Alicia Boothe Haggermaker is a lifelong resident of Huntsville, Alabama, and a dedicated advocate for health freedom. For more than a decade, she has worked to educate the public and policymakers on issues of medical choice and public transparency. In January 2020, she organized a delegation of physicians and health freedom advocates to Montgomery, contributing to the initial draft of legislation that became SB267.

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