Age verification won’t save us
— the problem runs much deeper.
This was originally posted (succinctly to keep within word limit) on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/posts/bbosmith_age-verification-is-coming-for-chatbots-activity-7370671105109520384-y7gt/
TL;DR: Age verification misses the point. The real issue isn’t kids sneaking into restricted spaces — it’s the broken system that isolates us, fractures communities, and leaves people so disconnected that they seek substitutes in the first place.
I just posted this on Marc Watkins’ Substack: https://lnkd.in/gkdrxEcg
Marc raises important concerns about governments moving to require age verification for AI and chatbots, as a follow-on from similar efforts targeting pornography sites and social media platforms. On the surface, it sounds like a way to “protect young people,” but dig deeper and you see all the risks: loss of privacy, invasive monitoring, heavy-handed enforcement, and new barriers to access. More importantly, it doesn’t touch the root of the issue.
In my response:
https://marcwatkins.substack.com/p/age-verification-is-coming-for-chatbots/comment/153540738 I argued that age verification tackles the problem from the wrong end. The crisis isn’t simply about children sneaking into restricted spaces online — the crisis is the system we’ve built around them, one that isolates people, fractures communities, and leaves all of us disconnected from the instincts that sustained humanity for millions of years — the very disconnection that drives children toward those restricted spaces in the first place.
For the vast majority of our history, humans lived as hunter–gatherers: egalitarian, communal, and cooperative. People of all ages mixed freely. Children grew up alongside adults and elders, absorbing knowledge through storytelling, shared rituals, and daily tasks. There were no rigid boundaries between “childhood” and “adulthood” — life was interwoven. Nudity and sexuality were natural, part of life’s rhythms, not hidden away in shame or turned into commodities. That balance with nature and each other is what shaped us, hard-coded into our DNA. We can still see evidence of this today — for example, our modern addiction to sugary foods. Our ancestors gorged on sweetness whenever they found it because it provided precious calories and energy they needed to survive. What once helped us endure now drives unhealthy behaviours in a world of abundance.
Then came the agricultural revolution, about 12,000 years ago. People shifted from shared living to ownership and possession. The nuclear family replaced the tribe. Land was divided, hierarchies entrenched, possessions guarded. Education and social life became age-segregated. Intergenerational bonds frayed. Instead of learning by living, children were corralled into schools, separated from the full flow of life.
Fast forward to today: parents, conditioned by a media landscape addicted to fear and eyeballs, keep their children indoors, away from “predators.” The endless churn of sensational headlines has created a culture of fear. Children no longer roam freely, mix across ages, or build natural trust networks. They are locked inside, tethered to screens.
And into this vacuum, big tech rushed. It offered connection but delivered isolation. Social media, gaming, and now chatbots step in where communities used to stand — but they are built for profit, not for human flourishing. Their logic is endless growth: capture attention, monetize data, sell outrage and distraction. The result is a society that prizes money, power, and control above all else, leaving people alienated, unfulfilled, and increasingly broken.
Pornography is one of the starkest symptoms of this brokenness. It thrives in a system where intimacy and connection have been hollowed out, where people long for something deeper but are offered only a product. Markets flourish wherever needs are unmet.
Now AI is being layered into this same cycle. AI is ahead of where humanity itself is. In the form we’re building it today, it’s not about nurturing better futures — it’s about growth at any cost. We don’t need AI, nor almost anything else we’ve created, to build a better humanity or reach for the stars. What we need is balance, reciprocity, and connection. Yet AI is being deployed as another profit engine: a mirror of our broken system, built to extract more attention and sell us back fragments of the meaning we’ve lost.
So when governments roll out “solutions” like age verification — first for pornography, then for social media, and now for AI — we should be clear-eyed. This is the same pattern repeating: tackling symptoms while ignoring the cause. The problem isn’t access to restricted content — the problem is a society that leaves people, young and old, so disconnected and unfulfilled that they seek these substitutes in the first place.
If we want to fix this — and all the other problems that plague human society — we must go deeper. We must dismantle the broken system that is killing us, and rebuild societies that align with our DNA: communal care, egalitarianism, reciprocity, intergenerational bonds, reverence for nature. Until then, age verification — like so much of the tech we build — will remain a distraction.
AI is not a solution but a mirror of our broken system, and until we fix ourselves, it will only accelerate the damage.
#thesystemisbroken