Imagine an AI future where being banned means you are now economically useless | Hacker News Reader

Imagine an AI future where being banned means you are now economically useless

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100 pointsMrBuddyCasino80 comments

You don't have to imagine it, it's already happened when a teenage son talking to Gemini on the family iPad managed to get his entire family and all their business accounts banned from all Google services:

https://www.pcworld.com/article/3104521/teenagers-gemini-mis...

So all this time the China Social Credit Score meme was just a prophecy for the US.

No.

This article was about a family in the UK.

China social credit score is a government policy which comes with government punishments.

This incident is about Google enforcing contract terms on a Google account.

What we should learn from the story is that consolidation of all services into a single account with a single company means increased harm if any contract violations are enforced.

If you get banned from an airline for violating a company policy, your life isn't over. Flying is a little less easy or maybe a little more expensive / friction. But that's different from the government banning you from flying on any aircraft.

This is why I don’t ever voluntarily use my Google account for anything. Ever.

Well, other than YouTube. Because I can get banned from YouTube and then that’s all my account was ever used for. And maybe I would just sign up with a different account then.

I think this is the core learning of this issue: design your accounts such that if one of your accounts is banned, there is minimal blast damage.

In security / military, this concept is "resilience". Businesses call this "business continuity planning".

April fools?!

"According to Google, the situation described by that Reddit poster simply isn’t how account bans work. If one account violates Google’s TOS, that particular account may be eligible for a ban, but the ban doesn’t “stick” to the hardware, and just because other people logged in on the same device wouldn’t mean they automatically get banned, too."

Maybe not on purpose but this is known to be not how it works (amazing that being said on HackerNews): https://jackyan.com/blog/2026/04/family-loses-all-their-acco... https://www.androidauthority.com/google-account-bans-3654171...

How is this different being banned from smartphones, Microsoft accounts, Google accounts, the banking system or whatever?

Technology enables central control. That has been obvious for decades now. AI makes it a bit worse.

This is correct, even just google alone. Most people have their entire lives linked in some way or another to their email address. One ban and you're pretty screwed...

For this reason I try not to intermingle accounts. I won't touch good for email or other services because what happens if they decide using an ad blocker on youtube is bannable?

Owning your email accounts with your own domain is just a good idea given the state of things, even if you ultimately just deliver it into Gmail or whoever. It gives you the ability to spend an hour and have all your email appearing with someone else in the event that a companies algorithm goes haywire and cancels your accounts.

I route my own domain email to Gmail and do a regular Google takeout, but even the domain can be taken away if you're naughty.

You can choose a domain registrar that has customer support provided by humans.

You are still at the mercy of the legal system, but not unappealable AI decisions.

Well now the accounts are tracked with your real biometry which will be more and more common every month thanks to Persona.

And then, when they ban you, you will not be able to create a new account and continue. Every ban will be forever. Like getting on the no-fly list.

Had a plumber do a job in my apartment the other day and he came up with a pipe wrench. Assuming he was an owner operator it would be his to do with as he pleases. It's not going to charge him by the job and the company that made it certainly won't take it off him because they don't like the way he's using it. Yet this is the kind of future some are trying to build, where the tool is only available as a subscription from one of two companies, and where owning the tool makes you an enemy of the state.

This is already the reality if you want to run a business servicing some models of car and tractor.

Which is something that "right to repair" people have been fighting hard to change

With AWS Bedrock, and similar hosted solutions, you can’t be banned directly by the AI companies.

With local models, you can’t be banned.

While employed, you’re using corporate accounts and can’t be banned.

Uhm...enterprise accounts still have terms of service. Violations could get your employer's entire account banned.

It almost definitely won’t. I don’t think I can ever recall a corporate contract getting cancelled by a vendor because of a rogue employee.

They only ever get cancelled over money

So why doesn’t z.ai have a Claude enterprise account they use for unlimited distillation?

I got banned from AWS once :)

> While employed, you’re using corporate accounts and can’t be banned.

Google/openai/etc detect that you are using your corporate account from the same home where you use your banned account, corporate account get banned for trying to circumvent the ban.

Can you be sure this will never happen ?

It depends how much money you pay Google annually, because that determines your leverage and access with support.

In practice that may be true but you're still violating the TOS.

AI is the perfect tool of total permanent authorization control, and it seems inevitable at this point between the ample supply of authoritarian wannabes and the fundamentally compromised institutions that would resist them

This was looked at pretty thoroughly in the novella:

https://karmak.org/archive/2003/12/manna/manna1.htm

(time for it to be reposted and discussed again since the author's untimely demise? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42228759 )

A similar thing already exists today but in some ways it's worse because the economic harm can come from anyone with a grudge against you.

Introducing, Google Maps Review in 2026.

Anyone can say almost any type of slander about your business without even being a customer. If you report it to Google, the burden of proof is on you to show that they violated a policy.

How can you prove that a review came from a personal grudge vs a genuine review of the business? Sure you can say that you have no record of that reviewer, but how do you prove it? Google rejects nearly all such reports and appeals without giving any reason.

A Google Map "review" is more like a public messaging board where anyone can write whatever they want and as long as it appears loosely related to the business it'll be nearly impossible for the business owner to take down.

I think the best thing that business owners can do is take matters into their own hands by showing genuine reviews on their own site.

A bit amusing that this is also posted to a centralized social media platform that will also suspend your account for no reason without a functioning appeal process. Unless you're someone famous or well connected, it becomes impossible to restore your account with all these big tech platforms.

They'll turn off your lifesaving drone internet access as well.

Ahh, so like the smartphone present in many countries where if the US doesn't like you then it's almost impossible to have a normal economic life?

^^^

agreed, and it's a bit disappointing to frame the very real current problem with dependency on us tech with the framework of 'you won't get all the ai magic'

we have an example of the icc judge who has basically been removed from modern society because of ridiculous sanctions, and there was the threat to the UK for sanctions over the mere suggestion that they would be investigating musk and twitter for the actual csam content and deep fake content being produced

any place and anyone that depends on us tech companies or us payment processors are a single social media post from deranged american politicians away from being removed from modern society -- this is a real and present danger, and it's a bit pathetic to frame it as 'you won't get to enjoy the wonders of ai if you get banned'

It's no longer specific ICC judges, but the entire ICC. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_and_the_Internat...

> On 9 October 2026, the United States imposed new sanctions on the ICC. The sanctions bar the ICC from U.S. financial services, technology companies and transactions in U.S. dollars, and require U.S. businesses and individuals to wind down their businesses with the ICC in six months.

Perhaps this is where the question of "what is a human right?" becomes important. A human right is not where you are automatically entitled to the thing in question (e.g. food, water, education), but where no entity can prevent you from your pursuit of the thing. Whether the thing qualifies as a human right depends on whether a human can function in society without it. In the earliest, most basic societies, food and water qualified, but not necessarily education, clothing or even permanent housing. Fast forward to the twenty first century, I think now electricity, internet and access to the financial system qualifies. Perhaps in the future, access to machine learning models would qualify too.

I been part of many discussions on how access to the internet should become a fundamental human right, like access to clean water. Maybe at some point we will have a discussion like that about access to AI?

Amazing how this doesn’t consider a future where “AI” is non-obligatory.

Nothing is obligatory - you can always choose to starve.

Amazing how this considers people will still be needed to direct AIs for something.

We already live in a future where trying to get a job offline, not using cell phones, or doing business outside approved tech giants makes you a hermit in all but name.

Mandatory AI for society participation is just the next step.

I mean it's a goofy thought. In this future why would you have a personal account and not one provided by your corporate overlord anyway? Why are humans needed at all in this future? Its silly.

Well isn’t that the case already? You get banned from social media, and you lost your connection with friends or maybe your business, you get banned by dating apps and you are lonely, you get banned by streaming services and you lost your entertainment, you get banned by AI companies and now your work lost its intelligence, you get banned by your email company and your life is ruined by losing access to many things were relying on it, get banned by apple and all your hardware and cloud storage is inaccessible, list goes on. Things might get even more worse, with AI aggregators, a cross domain happens, a social media post can result in debanking you entirely in near future.

Not if you have your own TB of fast RAM.

That is the subtext of the linked post.

Besides compute, models can also require up-to-date web cache access for referencing information.

Seems impossible as humans will already be economically useless by default in said future.

> you’ll have to live in the world as it is instead of playing pretend in AI graphics land!

> you’ll be forced to love your wife for who she is and not her AI generated fake persona!

Seriously…?

Apparently this is some dystopia with or without the AI companies banning you from their services, yet somehow the big scary thing is not having open weight models.

The entire tech world needs to get a grip on reality, like the fact that this random Twitter fanfic gained any traction at all on this site is a massive indictment of the quality of discourse here.

I can run a local model on my 5080 that gets 1/8th of the way to where current evil overlord models are capable… are they going to figure out how to ban that too?

I assume so, yes. With enough lobbying and political pressure I’m sure hardware manufacturers would be willing to only allow vetted models to be loaded. Is it probable? Who the fuck knows what can happen with the current US admin

retroactively?

At the rate things are changing, retroactivity is moot.

It’s amazing what can be made legal or illegal.

> Who the fuck knows what can happen with the current US admin

The ratchet of authoritarianism has been turning steadily in the US (and the rest of the world) for at least the past 25 years, and a big part of why no coherent opposition to it managed to manifest is how it was turned into a partisan issue. Republicans and the apathetic centre tune out Democratic complaints about the authoritarianism of a Republican administration just as it happened when the party associations were reversed some 5 years ago, because a group resenting its outgroup wielding power is the most unsurprising dog-bites-man event.

At the same time, neither side is willing to criticise authoritarianism by their own, both because they do not want to "stab their soldiers in the back" in the culture war and because in practical terms more power to wield against the outgroup is too useful to forego. Would you still be happy to support a durable circumscription of the current US admin's ability to regulate local AI, if it also meant that no future Democratic administration could interfere with a cataclysmic AI-driven campaign of right-wing misinformation and propaganda that is threatening everything you hold dear?

Right but one side publicly directs the department of justice to investigate its political enemies and interfere in elections and the other side doesn't.

Lawfare has been an increasing problem for several administrations now. Like the parent poster says, each side is largely blind to their own abuses, but they're still abuses.

And then the other side uses it as justification to escalate further.

What sort of lawfare did the previous regime engage in? Are we at a point where former presidents are immune to prosecution for actual crimes?

> Are we at a point where former presidents are immune to prosecution for actual crimes?

Name the last time a president was prosecuted and you'll have your answer. Trumps lawsuit over presidential acts just forced into the open what was before a gentlemen's agreement about presidential power. Outside of office, I don't think any of the former presidents had a huge drive to commit anything above financial crimes and using their status.

Biden I can not think of anything scaling beyond putting his ego over country when he went for a second term. He clashed with the legal system but challenges in court is typical for the role. And even in that, he choose to comply (example loan repayment) over Trump who rushes to complete his goal before legal can step in (golf course, ballroom, etc).

Using the word lawfare reveals you are not unbiased.

This must be satire. There's no way you actually think that using the word "lawfare" exposes political bias.

I've mainly seen the word used in suspiciously bot-like GOP-propaganda comments on youtube videos

This is what American discourse has devolved to. "I saw the other side saying it!"

You're just proving my point without realizing it. I'm not even American, and have no horse in your race.

When that user writes "suspiciously bot-like GOP-propaganda", he means "normal American citizens who democratically blew my party out of the last popular election", FYI.

I truly hate party politics and just want politicians cooperating to make the country run as well as possible for as many people as possible. But Republicans reliably cut taxes for the rich, dramatically grow the national deficit, and start stupid wars.

Also, are literally running the most corrupt administration that ever existed, turning the US government into an actual authoritarian dictatorship

Yes, the Trump admin seems to be breaking laws and blatantly lying as a matter of principal.

When did the previous White House do either of those two things? Please be very specific.

We're doing an interesting study where we interview folks who were in a coma for 5~ years and only woke up recently.

Would you be interested to join?

When did the previous White House do either of those two things? Please be very specific.

Oh, dear. Well, I hope 882 pages is enough for one example. Somehow, I suspect it will not be, of course.

https://www.justice.gov/opa/media/1436006/dl

Allegations of misconduct by the DOJ - even if politically motivated - are not relevant to my comment.

Please tell me about the time the Biden White House publicly called on the DOJ to prosecute its political enemies or interfere in elections.

If that happened, it should not be hard to find a reference to a public statement or executive order.

This has nothing to do with what was mentioned.

The company that built your phone can disable it, making it physically useless. It is not hard to imagine the same tech shipping baked into GPUs.

If you can work work 1/8 as capably as the next guy, banning isn't necessary to make you economically useless.

Hahah economically useless defines a large majority of humans with this attitude.

Imagine a future where the AI can figure out what needs to be done on its own.

There's no need for banning to make people economically useless, it's the natural end state for AI.

This already happened to me. I was blocked by OpenAI from GitHub after I reported an issue and sought technical help. They prefer ignoring their bugs and blocking their users over acknowledging and addressing them.

open source is the only way to protect your freedom, your economic viability & your ability to tell these companies to fuck right off.

Open Source is economically viable???

And AI feeds on open source???

Am I missing the sarcasm or something? Or perhaps that an AI bot created this post.

Don't we do that to felons already? They violated the TOS of society, and are categorically banned from a significant portion of the job market.

Felons are afforded due process. If you've ever tried to get support from an AI company you are keenly aware that the experience is the opposite of due process.

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