The Designer's Obligation

In the AI Story

The obligation has three dimensions: informational, temporal, and numerical. The informational asymmetry is that the designer understands the engagement mechanisms while the user experiences the engagement without seeing its architecture. The temporal asymmetry is that design decisions persist — one choice made by a few people affects millions of users for years. The numerical asymmetry is that the affected population had no voice in the decision and has no mechanism to modify its effects.

The technology industry has largely escaped the regulatory framework that governs other domains where these asymmetries exist. The pharmaceutical industry operates under strict requirements for effect studies, documentation, disclosure, and regulatory oversight. The construction industry operates under building codes, professional licensing, and liability frameworks. The technology industry has operated, for most of its history, under almost none of these constraints — producing tools that affect billions of minds with no obligation to study effects, document harms, or submit to regulatory authority.

Raskin's framework argues that this exemption is an anomaly in the landscape of consumer protection, and the anomaly is becoming increasingly difficult to justify as the effects of engagement-optimized tools accumulate. The obligation he calls for would include: design standards for cognitive health analogous to product safety standards for physical products; transparency requirements for optimization objectives; regulatory institutions with the technical expertise and operational speed to evaluate AI designs and require modifications when designs produce cognitive effects exceeding specified thresholds.

The obligation is not discharged by publishing a terms-of-service document no user reads, or by offering an opt-out buried in a settings menu. It is discharged by building the protections into the design itself — the reflection prompts, the natural stopping points, the cognitive health metrics, the calibrated challenge — so that the user's well-being does not depend on the user's understanding of mechanisms operating below conscious awareness. The New Mexico courtroom in which Raskin testified against Meta in January 2026 is the book's closing image of what discharge of the obligation looks like when it is finally imposed.

Origin

The obligation framework draws on a lineage of consumer-protection argument running through Ralph Nader's Unsafe at Any Speed (1965), the regulatory apparatus built around pharmaceuticals after the thalidomide crisis, and the structural-engineering liability framework that followed nineteenth-century bridge collapses. Its application to digital and AI design has been developed by Raskin and Harris through the Center for Humane Technology's policy work from 2018 onward.

Key Ideas

Specialized knowledge creates obligation. The asymmetry between designer understanding and user experience generates duties the user cannot discharge herself.

Three asymmetries. Informational, temporal, and numerical — each requiring distinct institutional response.

Built into design. The obligation is discharged not through disclosure but through design that incorporates protections the user cannot implement herself.

Regulatory anomaly. Technology's exemption from the frameworks governing comparable domains is increasingly difficult to justify as effects accumulate.