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The Kehoe Rule

What is the Kehoe Rule?

The Kehoe Rule describes a regulatory pattern where powerful new technologies are allowed to spread widely while the burden of proof falls on demonstrating harm, rather than proving safety before deployment. Named after Robert Kehoe, the lead industry's dominant medical authority in the mid-20th century, who insisted that leaded gasoline should remain in use until opponents could prove it caused harm.

Historical Origin

A century ago, public health experts warned that adding tetraethyl lead to gasoline could contaminate cities and cause "slow lead poisoning." Industry proceeded anyway. Robert Kehoe became the lead industry's dominant medical authority and insisted that leaded gasoline should remain in use until its opponents could prove that it caused harm.

The Pattern Across Industries

The Kehoe Rule has appeared repeatedly across industries:

  • Leaded gasoline — dispersed into air worldwide, fueling epidemics of coronary heart disease
  • Cigarettes — billions sold, spreading lung cancer globally
  • Asbestos — exposed workers and communities, now impossible to fully contain
  • PFAS — synthetic chemicals that contaminated virtually everyone's blood on Earth
  • Pesticides — spread across farms and communities with unknown long-term effects

In each case, companies created useful, profitable products. The trouble began when evidence of harm emerged: companies questioned the science, magnified uncertainty, funded more studies, hired experts and lawyers, lobbied regulators, and delayed restrictions. Too often, they concealed what their own scientists had discovered.

"The people making those decisions were not monsters. The corporation did not need monsters. It needed people to do their jobs."

Human Cost

  • 9 million premature deaths per year from pollution (Lancet Commission on Pollution and Health, 2022)
  • 3.5 million deaths in 2023 attributed to lead alone (Global Burden of Disease study)
  • Toxic chemicals and pollutants may contribute to nearly one in five deaths worldwide

Once dispersed around the world, these substances become enormously expensive — and sometimes impossible — to contain or remove.

The Kehoe Rule Applied to AI: A Critical View

What the Article Gets Wrong: "Agency"

The article's central fear is that AI systems possess agency — autonomous motivations that no human can comprehend. This is not supported by how these systems actually work.

LLMs are next-token predictors. They are facilitated by their harnesses, prompted by users, and deployed by corporations with clear commercial incentives. They have no goals of their own, no desires, no hidden intentions. The claim that AI systems can "pursue goals in ways creators never anticipated" conflates emergent behavior (which is explainable through the training process and prompt context) with agency (which implies autonomous intent).

This framing appears to be driven by effective altruism circles and Silicon Valley's more alarmist voices, which have a vested interest in portraying AI as an existential threat. This narrative serves certain funding priorities and institutional agendas far more than it serves accurate understanding of the technology.

Real Harms: Present-Day and Documented

The real harms from AI are not science fiction — they are concrete, measurable, and happening right now:

1. Erosion of the Commons

  • Training data is scraped from publicly available content — blogs, forums, creative works, encyclopedias — without consent or compensation
  • This drains the shared knowledge commons that powered the web, turning public resources into private training material
  • Creators and writers lose attribution and economic benefit as their work becomes embedded in proprietary models
  • The commons is being privatized at scale

2. Environmental Impact of Data Centres

  • New AI data centres consume enormous amounts of electricity and water for cooling
  • This strains local power grids, contributes to carbon emissions, and competes with communities for resources
  • Water usage for cooling in drought-prone areas is an under-discussed but growing concern
  • The environmental cost is real, present, and accelerating

3. Psychological and Sociological Impacts of Chatbots

  • Chatbot use can deskill users — over-reliance on AI for writing, analysis, and decision-making erodes core competencies
  • People lose the ability to think critically when they outsource reasoning to a tool that always produces an answer
  • The psychological dependency on AI companions and assistants is poorly understood but potentially significant
  • Social skills, creativity, and independent problem-solving may atrophy as people delegate more cognitive work

4. Other Documented Harms

  • Misinformation at scale — AI-generated content floods platforms faster than humans can moderate
  • Job displacement in knowledge work — not speculative; happening now in writing, coding, design, and analysis
  • Centralization of power — only a handful of companies can afford frontier models, concentrating influence over information infrastructure

The Real Regulatory Question

The Kehoe Rule's relevance to AI is not about sci-fi scenarios of rogue agents. It's about whether we let corporations deploy technologies with massive negative externalities — environmental damage, commons erosion, deskilling — and then ask society to prove the harm after the fact.

This is a genuine governance failure: developers who profit from rapid deployment should not be the primary arbiters of how much evidence of harm is acceptable before regulation kicks in.

Proposed Solutions: Preventive vs. Reactive Governance

Reactive Governance Preventive Governance
Waits for harm, then struggles to contain it Sets safeguards before widespread deployment
Post-facto regulation Requires independent testing and monitoring
Hard to control entrenched technology Makes developers report failures
Gives public institutions power to slow or stop a technology when warning signs appear

Key Takeaway

"The lesson is not that corporations are evil or that artificial intelligence must be stopped. It is that society should not confuse innovation with permission."

The real danger from AI isn't malevolent super-intelligence — it's the same pattern we've seen with lead, cigarettes, and asbestos: powerful commercial interests deploy technologies with significant negative externalities, delay regulation by manufacturing uncertainty, and let harm accumulate while profits flow. That pattern is well-documented and worth taking seriously, regardless of what one thinks about "AI agency."

Sources

  • Article: Artificial Intelligence and the Kehoe Rule
  • Ezra Klein podcast episode with Helen Toner: "The A.I.s Are Already Out of Control"
  • Pacing the Frontier petition (2026): https://www.pacingthefrontier.com/
  • Lancet Commission on Pollution and Health (2022)
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