The Cost of Disruption: What OpenAI and Open Marriage Reveal About Our Future

Photo by Igor Omaliev (Unsplash)

At first glance, artificial intelligence and intimate relationships seem to exist in entirely different realms. Yet OpenAI and open marriage share something profound: both represent bold attempts to disrupt traditional structures in the name of transparency, democratization, and human flourishing. And both reveal a troubling pattern about what happens when we rush to tear down established systems without fully understanding the protective functions they served.

I've spent years helping individuals and organizations navigate complex changes, and what I've observed repeatedly is this: the most well-intentioned disruptions often create unexpected casualties. The promises are compelling—greater freedom, more transparency, democratized access. But the reality is messier, and the costs are often borne by those least equipped to handle them.

The Seductive Promise of Transparency

Both the movement for AI and the one for open marriage are built on a seductive promise: radical transparency. On the surface, it’s an unassailable good. OpenAI, despite the recent irony of its name, was founded on the promise of democratizing AI. The idea, as AI ethicists emphasize, is that transparent systems create accountability. In the same vein, advocates for open marriage champion a kind of radical honesty to free relationships from secrets and restrictive contracts.

Who wouldn't want that? A world without hidden agendas seems like progress. But in my work helping people navigate the messy reality of change, I've seen how this ideal can become a weapon. Transparency without the emotional infrastructure to handle it isn't liberating; it's terrifying.

I've worked with couples where one partner's enthusiasm for "total transparency" became a form of emotional terrorism—a constant stream of shared fleeting attractions, doubts, and comparisons. The goal was connection, but the result was a strange new intimacy that felt more like anxious surveillance. This experience is mirrored in broader research. A major 2024 review of over 200 studies on non-monogamy found that the idealized version often crashes against the complex realities of life, like parenting in a society with very traditional expectations.

This same pattern haunts AI. The initial promise of open development has faded, replaced by closed systems. Simultaneously, the world is flooded with AI capabilities that most people, and even governments, are struggling to comprehend. Researchers at MIT and Boston University estimate that AI will replace two million manufacturing workers by 2025, yet these very workers have the least insight into the technology displacing them. In both worlds, the promise of transparency creates new power imbalances. As I see in my work, it leaves people feeling blindsided, their livelihoods erased by forces they were told would empower them. The transparency never reached the factory floor.

The Democratization Mirage

Both movements promise to level the playing field. Open marriage claims to free us from restrictive structures, while OpenAI promises to make powerful technology available to all. Yet, from what I've observed, both tend to create new hierarchies, ones that can be even more insidious than what they replaced because they operate under the guise of progress.

This promise of a level playing field is often the first illusion to crumble. In the world of relationships, I've seen how the theory of openness often benefits those who already hold the best cards: the articulate, the confident, those with the time and resources to navigate the immense complexities of multiple relationships. It inadvertently creates a new in-group, leaving others feeling left behind or "less evolved."

We see the exact same pattern in technology. The "democratization" of AI hasn't created a level playing field; it has primarily benefited those already positioned to win—the tech-savvy, the well-capitalized, and the agile corporations. For everyone else, the promise of access feels hollow.

This dynamic becomes clearer when we look at who bears the cost of this new "freedom." While some thrive in open relationship structures, the emotional toll can be disproportionately high for those with less social power or who are less enthusiastic about the transition. We don't need to look far to see parallels in the workforce. A Goldman Sachs report estimates that AI could replace 300 million full-time jobs. That staggering number isn't just a data point; it represents millions of individual stories of identity lost and security shattered. It’s the graphic designer whose craft is now a prompt, or the paralegal whose expertise is being automated away.

This isn't just a workforce shift; it's a societal identity crisis where the benefits are concentrated at the top. Most concerningly, research from the Brookings Institution reveals the disparity in stark terms: 36% of female workers are in jobs highly exposed to AI automation, compared to just 25% of male workers. In both relationships and technology, the promise of universal access rings hollow when the risks are socialized, but the rewards are not.

When Families Bear the Cost

Perhaps most concerning is how both movements externalize their costs onto the most vulnerable: children and families. This isn't an argument for maintaining harmful status quos, but rather a recognition that when we disrupt foundational structures, the ripple effects extend far beyond the immediate participants.

The common thread here is the erosion of stability, a cornerstone of a child's world. Children thrive on predictability. Yet both of these social experiments introduce profound instability directly into their lives. The research is clear: the Institute for Family Studies consistently finds that children in stable homes fare better on multiple fronts, from school performance to emotional health. When we treat family structure as something to be rapidly iterated upon, children are often forced to navigate a revolving door of complex adult relationships they never chose. While some adapt beautifully, many others are left to carry invisible emotional costs that may not surface for years.

This very same erosion of stability is now happening on an economic front, driven by AI. When data shows that AI has already displaced 14% of workers, we're not talking about a line on a chart. We are talking about 14% more households facing sudden turmoil, stress, and uncertainty. For a child, the "future of work" isn't a TED Talk; it's the anxiety they feel when a parent loses a job to an algorithm.

This places modern parents in an impossible position. They are caught in a crosscurrent, trying to provide emotional consistency for their children in a world that is simultaneously questioning the very structure of family, while also automating away the economic foundations that provide for it. They are trying to prepare their kids for a future that they themselves can't predict or understand, a future that is being built without their informed consent.

The Ethics of Experimentation

When I look at the casualties of these well-intentioned disruptions—the partner left behind when a relationship "evolved," the worker displaced by an algorithm—I see a troubling pattern. Both OpenAI and the open marriage movement are conducting massive, real-time social experiments. The problem is, they have failed to get informed consent from the people who will be most affected.

There’s a privileged class of pioneers here: the AI researchers in Silicon Valley and the relationship theorists in progressive enclaves. They get to be the change agents, with the freedom to engage, disengage, and walk away if things don’t work out. Everyone else—the families, the workers, the children—becomes an unwitting participant in a study they never signed up for. Their lives become the data set for someone else's vision of progress.

The experimenters forecast a future where AI could automate the vast majority of human tasks. When influential voices promote new relationship structures as inherently superior without fully acknowledging their profound complexities, they are experimenting on the very fabric of our communities. OpenAI's researchers have admitted there’s "a limit to what we can learn in a lab," which is a candid confession that society itself has become their testing ground.

The ethical question, then, isn’t whether these innovations have merit. They may well be important evolutionary steps. The real question is whether we are being honest about the costs and who is forced to pay them. The casualties I see aren't failures of implementation; they are the predictable consequences of deploying rapid, systemic change without responsible oversight. The data that warns of worsening outcomes for children in unstable families, or of a growing gap between capital and labor due to AI, isn't a surprise. It's the known result of running live experiments on the systems that are meant to keep us safe.

Why does this keep happening? In my work, I’ve seen that these disruptions are not failures of vision, but failures of humility. We correctly identify the flaws in old structures but fail to appreciate the vital, often invisible, protective functions they performed.

Traditional marriage, for all its faults, offered a societal shorthand for stability. A predictable career path, for all its limits, offered a source of identity and security. These structures served as guardrails. When we tear down the guardrails without building a bridge, the data on family instability and job displacement shows the predictable result. The most important question for any innovator, in technology or relationships, is not “What are we building?” but “What protective function are we replacing?”

A Different Path Forward

Innovation without accountability isn't progress—it's recklessness disguised as vision. If there is a different path forward, it must be paved with humility. It begins with the simple, crucial acknowledgment that the pace of our disruptions has dangerously outstripped our capacity to manage the fallout.

The most vital research in both fields points to the same truth: change itself isn't the enemy, but unmanaged instability is devastating. Studies on family dynamics consistently find that stability over time is the key variable for a child's well-being, more so than any particular family structure. This is the principle we've ignored. The urgent calls for new forms of ethical AI governance are not about stopping technology; they are about building the safeguards, support systems, and collaborative oversight needed to manage its impact. The very same principles must apply to the evolution of our relationships.

Ultimately, the parallel between OpenAI and open marriage reveals a core challenge of our modern age: we are far better at diagnosing the flaws in old systems than we are at anticipating the new problems our solutions will create. We have celebrated the pioneers of change without asking enough about the world they are building for everyone else.

Until we commit to protecting the vulnerable during our society-wide experiments, our progress will continue to come at a cost we are not yet brave enough to count.

This is the work I do every day: helping people and organizations look honestly at the cost of change, not to prevent it, but to navigate it with intention and care. If you are in the midst of a transformation that feels overwhelming or unclear, you don't have to manage the fallout alone. I can help you find clarity and a conscious path forward.

Learn more about working with me here.