Red Lines Rising- Governing AI While We Still Can (Paperback)

RED LINES RISING The Abundance Trilogy, Book 3 Ravinder Bhalla MD — Board-Certified Child, Adolescent, and Adult Psychiatrist

In 2019, a logistics manager named Marcus walked into a psychiatrist's office unable to sleep, unable to work, unable to look for new employment. An AI had screened his job applications before any human saw them — flagging him not for his skills or his twenty-year record, but for patterns in his profile: his age, his industry, his career trajectory. The AI's decision was the decision. No appeal. No process. No accountability.

He asked: How is this legal?

The answer: it's legal because we haven't established that it shouldn't be. This book is about establishing it.

Red Lines Rising is a book about the boundaries that don't exist yet — and the decade we have left to establish them.

Drawing on forty years of psychiatric practice treating patients across the full arc of human development, Dr. Ravinder Bhalla argues that AI is the most sophisticated scarcity-manufacturing machine ever built — concentrating resources, dignity, and agency in fewer and fewer hands while making that concentration harder to challenge every year. The window to act is 2026 to 2035. After that, surveillance becomes total, shared reality fragments beyond repair, and autonomous systems deploy without accountability. The conditions enabling citizen action will have disappeared. Not gradually. Structurally.

Five red lines. Ten years. One choice.

• Dignity — No AI system may be used to punish without human accountability
• Agency — Citizens retain the right to privacy and the power to organize
• Genocide Prevention — AI early warning must exist; autonomous weapons must not
• Economic Participation — No one rendered economically superfluous without support
• Shared Reality — Algorithms may not fragment truth beyond democratic repair

Each red line is documented through real cases — the warehouse organizer terminated before legal protection attached, the Rohingya teacher whose genocide warnings were drowned out by Facebook's algorithm, the accountant displaced by AI with neither notice nor support. These are not hypotheticals. They are the world as it already exists, at the early stages of a trajectory that has ten years to be redirected.

The final section is not a lament. It is a manual — providing specific campaigns, legal tools, coalitions, and organizing strategies to force accountability before the window closes, drawing on the same historical pattern that produced every boundary concentrated power has ever accepted.

Published the same week the Pentagon threatened to strip AI's last guardrails. As this book went to press, Defense Secretary Hegseth gave Anthropic a Friday deadline: remove prohibitions on autonomous weapons and mass surveillance or lose a $200 million contract. Anthropic refused. The confrontation confirmed that the window this book describes is not a decade away.

It is now.

A board-certified child, adolescent, and adult psychiatrist who has spent two books arguing for human flourishing, turning to face the specific threat that could prevent it, is not an alarmist. He is a diagnostician. And the diagnosis is urgent.

The window is open. This book is about using it.

For readers of Zuboff's The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Harari's Homo Deus, and O'Neil's Weapons of Math Destruction — and for everyone who has ever asked: how is this legal?