Closing the Question

Should AI Decide What Humanity Is Allowed to Ask?

A Dialogue on Epistemic Risk, Curiosity Collapse, and the Limits of Inquiry

Human civilization treats questioning as sacred.
From childhood onward, we are taught that progress begins with asking why.
Science advances through questions.
Justice begins with questions.
Freedom is framed as the right to question authority.

But there is an assumption buried in all of this,
that every question is safe to ask,
and that the danger lies only in bad answers.

That assumption may no longer hold.

Some questions destabilize institutions.
Some questions collapse trust faster than evidence can repair it.
Some questions, once asked at scale, cannot be unanswered.

This leads to a forbidden idea:

If certain questions reliably produce harm simply by being asked, should AI ever intervene at the level of inquiry itself?

Not by silencing people.
Not by punishing curiosity.
But by limiting which questions are amplified, normalized, or treated as legitimate.

This is not about truth.
It is about containment.