People tell themselves they don’t need governance because they will never use AI. Wrong thinking. AI is here like gasoline is to a car.
You do not have to drive to be affected by gasoline. The truck that brought your groceries ran on it. The heating oil in your furnace came from the same refinery. The plastic container your medicine came in started as a petroleum product. The asphalt under your feet was laid by machines that burned it by the barrel. The fertilizer that grew your food was manufactured in a process that depends on it. Gasoline shaped your world long before you ever got a driver’s license. You were living inside its consequences whether you chose it or not.
You did not get a vote on whether gasoline became infrastructure. It just did. And once something becomes infrastructure, opting out is no longer a choice that protects you. You are already inside it.
AI is the same. And we are already inside it.
You do not have to use a chatbot for AI to be making decisions about you right now. The bank that approved or denied your loan is running AI models on your financial profile. The insurance company pricing your auto policy, your health policy, your homeowner’s policy, is using AI to assess your risk before a human being ever looks at your file. The hospital reading your scan may be running it through an AI diagnostic layer before a physician ever sees it. The hiring platform that received your resume may have scored it, ranked it, and filtered it out of consideration before any human recruiter opened a single file.
You did not opt in to any of that. You were not asked. There was no checkbox.
This is the fundamental error in the I don’t use it so I don’t need it argument. It treats AI like a consumer product. Like a streaming service or a social media account. Something you choose, something that affects you only if you engage with it, something you can simply decline and walk away from clean. That model might have made sense in 2018 when AI was still mostly a novelty living in tech company demos. It does not make sense in 2026.
AI is infrastructure now. It is running underneath systems that every person touches every single day. Healthcare. Banking. Insurance. Criminal justice. Employment screening. Housing applications. Credit scoring. Benefits eligibility. Tax processing. These are not optional categories in human life. You cannot opt out of needing medical care. You cannot decide to stop having a financial existence. You cannot choose to live outside the systems that are already running AI on the back end while you stand at the front counter filling out a form, thinking none of this applies to you.
It applies to you. It has been applying to you for years. You just have not been told.
Let me give you a concrete example of what that looks like when it goes wrong.
Researchers recently documented a cyberattack against nine Mexican government organizations. The attackers breached hundreds of servers and walked away with millions of confidential records. The mechanics of how they did it matter for this conversation. They used AI to map the target environment. They fed server data through AI systems for analysis and got back thousands of detailed reports. Then they fed those reports into another AI tool and let it write the exploitation scripts. Four hundred custom scripts. Generated automatically. Executed against live government infrastructure.
Roughly 75% of the commands in that attack were generated and executed by AI.
The people whose records were stolen did not use AI. They were not technology enthusiasts. They were not ChatGPT subscribers. They were citizens who filed their taxes, applied for permits, and interacted with their government the way citizens have always done. An AI-assisted attack reached into those systems and took their personal information anyway.
Their decision not to use AI protected them from absolutely nothing.
That is not an edge case. That is the world we are living in right now. The threat does not require your participation. The system does not ask whether you opted in before it affects you. The breach does not check whether you have an account before it takes your data.
Now extend that logic beyond cyberattacks.
The AI making decisions about whether you qualify for a mortgage does not care that you have never used an AI tool in your life. The model scoring your insurance risk does not pause to note your personal stance on artificial intelligence. The algorithm deciding whether your benefits application moves forward or gets flagged for review has no awareness of and no interest in your preferences about technology adoption.
These systems are making consequential decisions about real people’s lives every day. Housing. Healthcare access. Financial inclusion. Employment. Liberty, in the case of criminal justice applications. These are not small stakes. These are the systems that determine the quality of people’s lives and the opportunities available to them.
And most of the people being run through those systems have no idea it is happening. They think AI is something other people use. Something that lives in Silicon Valley and venture capital portfolios and science fiction movies. Something that has not arrived in their town yet.
It has arrived. It arrived quietly, through the back door of every institution they already depend on.
This is why governance matters to people who will never open an AI application in their lives. Governance is not a set of rules for AI users. Governance is a set of rules for AI systems operating in the world that everyone shares. Those are two completely different things. Only one of them requires you to be a user.
Think about traffic law. If you do not own a car and never intend to own one, you might think traffic law has nothing to do with you. But traffic law governs the cars that share the road with you when you cross the street. It governs the trucks that deliver goods to the store you shop at. It governs the ambulance that would come for you in an emergency. Traffic law protects non-drivers from cars. Not just drivers from each other.
AI governance is the same structure applied to a more complex problem. It is not there to regulate what you do with the technology. It is there to govern what the technology does in the world you live in. And that world is not segmented by who uses what app on their phone. It is one world. Shared. And the systems running through it increasingly run on AI.
The Faust Baseline framework exists because someone had to say this plainly and build it into something durable before the conversation got away from us entirely. The framework is not built for technologists. It is not built for AI enthusiasts or governance academics or policy professionals. It is built on the recognition that AI governance is a human problem. Not a tech problem. A human problem that touches every person who lives in a society with a functioning digital infrastructure.
That is not a niche audience. That is everyone.
The people who say they do not need to care about AI governance because they will never use AI are making the same mistake as someone who says they do not need to care about water quality regulations because they only drink bottled water. The regulations exist to protect the water table that feeds the wells that feed the municipal systems that fill the bottles. Pull the regulations, and eventually there is no clean water to bottle.
Pull the governance, and eventually there are no safe systems to depend on. Not for users. Not for anyone.
You are already inside this. You were inside it before you knew to ask the question.
The only real choice left is whether the systems operating around you are governed well or governed badly. Or not governed at all, which is where we are headed if enough people keep telling themselves this does not apply to them.
It applies. It has always applied.
You just have not been told yet. Now you have.
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