Reclaiming Social Engineering for Good

# Reclaiming Social Engineering for Good "Social engineering" originally meant deliberately shaping how people behave—something companies did for over a century to improve worker conditions and efficiency—but the term got hijacked by scammers and manipulative corporations, making it sound sinister. The real problem isn't the concept itself, but that it happens without oversight or consent, so we need better rules to stop the bad uses while allowing genuinely helpful applications. Understanding this distinction matters because AI makes large-scale behavior shaping more powerful than ever, and we need to decide which uses we'll allow.