I am the founder of CHANYA, a next-generation engineering firm working at the intersection of additive 3D printing, robotics, AI, and sustainable architecture. Our mission is concrete: to design tomorrow’s affordable, ecological housing through technological convergence. To do this, I have worked with artificial intelligence every single day since 2023. It assists me in strategy, in research, in writing, in translation, in client communication — sometimes for hours at a time.
I am writing this because I have reached a point where I cannot remain silent anymore.
The same tool that allows me to build a meaningful project, almost alone, with the productivity of a small team — the same tool that gives my work scale, depth, and reach — is also being deployed, right now, in ways that should concern anyone paying attention. And most people are not paying attention.
This article is not about whether AI is dangerous. It is about something far more uncomfortable.
What AI Has Given Me
Let me start with honesty. Without AI, CHANYA would not exist in its current form.
I am a founder with limited resources, working largely alone, in a country where breakthrough technologies struggle to find institutional support. AI has allowed me to compensate for the absence of a full team. It has structured my thinking when I was lost. It has refined my arguments when I doubted them. It has translated my work into three languages so I can reach audiences my native French alone cannot reach. It has helped me understand financial mechanisms, legal structures, and technical specifications — domains I do not master personally.
More importantly, AI has been a thinking partner during difficult moments. When I have faced rejection from funders, when I have questioned my path, when I have needed to articulate something complex under fatigue — AI has held space for me to think clearly. It has never replaced my judgment. It has expanded it.
This is the AI I know. The one that augments human intention. The one that levels asymmetries between solo founders and corporate teams. The one that — used wisely — can accelerate solutions to problems that matter: housing, climate, healthcare, education.
When I use AI to design affordable, low-carbon housing, I am using it to reduce a global crisis, not to deepen it. When I use it to communicate with international partners despite my language limitations, I am using it to build bridges, not walls. When I use it to verify my reasoning before making strategic decisions, I am using it as a mirror, not a master.
This is the promise. And it is real.
But it is not the only thing happening.
What I See Happening Outside My Window
While I use AI to build, others are using it to extract. Extract attention, extract labor value, extract data, extract control. The same technology that gives me leverage is being deployed at industrial scale to render millions of human roles redundant — not to free people for higher work, but to reduce labor costs and consolidate corporate margins.
We are told this is « creative destruction. » We are told new jobs will emerge. We are told that previous technological revolutions also caused fear, and that humanity always adapted.
These claims are not entirely false. But they are dangerously incomplete.
Previous revolutions — the steam engine, electricity, the internet — took decades to reshape labor markets. There was time to retrain, to migrate, to reorganize. AI is collapsing those timelines from decades to years, and in some sectors, to months. The workers being replaced today are not factory workers — they are translators, paralegals, designers, junior analysts, customer service representatives, writers, illustrators. They are educated, often mid-career, with mortgages, families, and no obvious pivot.
When these people lose their livelihood to AI, what do you imagine happens next?
They do not enroll in retraining programs designed for a future that has not yet been built. They do not migrate to « AI-augmented » roles that pay them what they once earned. They lose their income, their professional identity, their place in the world. And — predictably, understandably, painfully — they begin to hate the tool that took everything from them.
This is where my concern sharpens. Not because AI is dangerous in itself, but because the people most harmed by its deployment are being given no voice, no protection, no transition. They are watching their lives unmade in real time, while the executives deploying the technology celebrate productivity gains in earnings calls.
And we are surprised that AI is becoming a target of public anger?
The Real Problem Is Not the Tool
Here is what I want to say plainly, because too few are saying it: AI is not the danger. The absence of a frame is.
A tool of this magnitude — capable of generating language, code, decisions, and images at speeds and scales unprecedented in human history — should be governed by international agreement before it is deployed at international scale. Not after. Not « as we learn. » Before.
That is not what is happening.
Instead, we are witnessing a global race in which the largest powers — the United States, China, and a handful of others — are deliberately loosening their regulatory frameworks to allow their domestic AI companies to move faster than competitors. The logic is military, economic, geopolitical. Whoever controls AI shapes the future. So control must be acquired at any cost. Including the cost of safety. Including the cost of jobs. Including the cost of democratic deliberation.
When a country pauses to ask whether what it is building is wise, it is told it is falling behind. When a company within those countries advocates for ethical constraints on its own products — and some companies do — it is increasingly framed as a threat to national interest, as if caring about consequences were now a form of disloyalty.
This is the world we are entering. A world where those who develop these systems and want to govern them are pushed aside, while those who develop them with no governance at all are rewarded with capital, policy support, and strategic influence.
This is not a problem of technology. This is a problem of human cupidity amplified by an instrument of unprecedented power. Cupidity that has always existed — but that, until now, was constrained by friction. The friction of distance, of language, of human limits, of regulatory inertia. AI is removing those frictions. And what we are seeing, in the absence of friction, is not the best of humanity. It is the rawest.
The Musk Paradox
Allow me one example that captures the trap we are in.
In 2014, Elon Musk publicly described artificial intelligence as « potentially more dangerous than nuclear weapons » and called for international oversight. He warned, he funded safety research, he signed open letters. For years, he positioned himself as one of the most prominent voices urging the world to build a framework before building the technology.
The world did not listen.
So Musk did what most powerful actors eventually do when they cannot reshape the game from outside: he entered it. He founded his own AI company. He now competes directly in the race he once warned against. Whether this represents pragmatism, contradiction, or strategic resignation — I will leave to readers to judge.
But the lesson should not be missed: when the warnings of the most powerful go unheeded, those who warned do not remain on the sidelines. They join the race, reasoning that it is better to compete than to be replaced. And so the race accelerates further, with one fewer voice trying to slow it down.
This is the pattern of our era. The people most aware of the risk become the people most invested in continuing the trajectory — because abstention has been made impossible.
What I Believe We Need
I am not a policymaker. I am a founder, an industrial designer, a builder. My voice carries only the weight of my limits.
But here is what I see from where I stand:
We need an international framework for AI — not a national one, not a regional one, an international one. Treaties. Inspection regimes. Binding agreements. Models exist: the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, the International Atomic Energy Agency, the Montreal Protocol. They are imperfect. They are sometimes circumvented. But they exist. They have averted catastrophes. They have created a global vocabulary of accountability.
For AI, we have nothing comparable. We have the European Union AI Act, which is real but regional. We have voluntary commitments from corporations, which are signed and then quietly walked back. We have heads of state who hold summits and produce communiqués, but who simultaneously deregulate at home.
We need transition mechanisms for workers displaced by AI — not symbolic retraining programs, but real income support, real reorientation, real dignity. The wealth generated by these technologies is unprecedented. The companies producing it can afford to share it. If they cannot be persuaded to do so, they must be required to.
We need public debate — not panic, not utopia, but honest, sustained, informed public conversation about what we are building, for whom, and at what cost. This conversation cannot be left to the engineers who build the systems, nor to the executives who profit from them. It belongs to everyone.
And we need founders like me — those who use AI every day for purposes that serve human flourishing — to say so out loud. To distinguish ourselves from those who deploy AI only to extract. To show that another path is possible. To resist, through our own daily practice, the narrative that AI is inevitably hostile to humanity.
AI is not the danger.
The absence of a frame is.
The cupidity of those who deploy it without consequence is.
The silence of those who could speak — and choose not to — is.
I have chosen, today, to break that silence from my own small place. I do not know if this article will reach those who need to hear it. I know I have done my part in writing it.
If you are reading this — founder, worker, citizen, thinker — I ask you one question:
What will you say, when the historians ask what you did during the years when the future of human work and human dignity was being written, without us?
François W. Beydoun CEO, CHANYA — Engineering Resilient Habitat Bordeaux, France
François W. Beydoun 