The use of the word "we" seems suspect in both of your paragraphs. These aren't things that "we" decide. The combined entity of humans+technology is fairly autonomous now. Legislation does nothing to stop it. Like the internet, humans+technology considers legislation damage and routes around it. Our sense of control in the face of this is an illusion.
"we can try to legislate against either but technology will probably overpower the legislation quickly"
Technology is here to serve us. What's with this attitude that we don't have the tools (laws) to control what our government and people are and aren't allowed to do? It's like the good ideas of small government and libertarianism have been warped mean that laws are no longer the solution to anything.
Ok, so the argument is that we know we went nuts regulating it to oblivion, and this is a fault in the technology and not ourselves - then you go to admit that it is a massive tactical and technological advantage we need?
Ok, strange flex but this about what I have come to expect from this “debate”.
You're right. And yes, we could use those laws, but we're also now at a time in history where the combined power and influence of "big tech" is greater (by far, I fear) than the will and character of Legislators (i.e. low-character politicians) to enact any such law to constrain/regulate them, at all.
I find myself doubting that "we all" would have been able to have such discussions or ever make these decisions ourselves. Silicon Valley and big tech spent the last few decades hijacking human psychology and employing dark patterns in technology that was supposed to be "democratizing" and "empowering" in order to maximize profit. Now we stand at this precipice, coupled with the RESTRICT Act, which I have no doubt will pass.
All's well that ends well, though. We simply don't have the resources to continue this "breakneck pace".
Although there are consumer protection laws that puts the onus on the company -- in America, where it is caveat venditor -- there is also the question of how much decision-making power we want to give to automation in general, and who is ultimately responsible.
Some things, like the decision to trigger a weapon in an act of war may be something societies want to have humans, and only humans make the ultimate call. That is, there is a desire for a human-in-the-loop.
On the other end of the spectrum are decisions we want to take out of the human hands because we think automation is more reliable and better for our society.
And then there are the unintended consequences. Looking back the past 10 years, it's arguable that the 'share' and 'retweet' features of social media that gives the power of virality to ordinary people have had a profound effect on our society and culture, both for good and for bad (and for many cases where we can't even agree on what's good or bad).
I argue that, while some of this is not novel to the law, I don't necessarily think that those precedents cover all of the changes tech has wrought to how we live and govern ourselves.
From my perspective this is a legislative issue and not a technology problem. The solution here is still to participate in democracy and preserve our rights.
How will putting the government on the defensive result in better lawmaking? That’s exactly the situation we are in now. Lawmakers are afraid of technology and make ill advised laws to try and control it.
Matt Levine (Bloomberg news letter) was good in this today: roughly speaking, if "we" as a society want to regulate Tech companies we can just pass laws to do it - stop relying on handfuls of poachers-turned-gamekeepers to extend their remits and just legislate properly
And if our legislators cannot do it, then that's is we the voters problem.
I guess the main difference between now and then is that we are starting to have an idea of what is going to be possible and already see “dark uses” of technology happening (e.g., surveillance in china) whereas beforehand we were clueless about those things.
I think that rejecting proactive legislation per se is a dangerous attitude. For example, see climate change. Proactive legislation could have made us avoid all of the discussions we are now working through during crunch time...
If we have reasonable evidence that there is a high likelihood of us creating worlds that we don’t want to live in, we should take reasonable action proactively to avoid those scenarios.
Thus, I agree with you that not all unprecedented technologies need to be proactively legislated but as soon as there is reasonable evidence for possible negative consequences we should start reasonable processes to avoid those consequences. There is no black or white situation here, we need to have evidence based discussions and work our way through this collectively.
I agree with you. Ultimately though, we can’t rely on Technology companies to make the right decisions. Businesses exist to make profits, if there aren’t regulations against doing this someone was ultimately going to come up with a way to do it. Even with regulations many corporations fail to be compliant.
I feel like we almost need a “Constitution for the Digital Age”, which would eg guarantee privacy rights.
Others siblings have good replies, but also, we regulate without physical danger all the damn time.
See airlines, traffic control, medical equipment, government services, but also we regulate ads, TV, financial services, crypto. I mean we regulate so many “tech” things for the benefit of society this is a losing argument to take. There’s plenty of room to argue the elsewhere but the idea that we don’t regulate tech if it’s not immediately a physical danger is crazy. Even global warming is a huge one, down to housing codes and cars etc. It’s a potential physical danger hundreds of years out, and we’re freaking out about it. Yet AI had the chance to really do much more damage within a much shorter time frame.
We also just regulate soft social stability things all over, be it nudity, noise, etc.
The laws are there, it's our lawmakers that have been failing us the past ~30 years as big tech has run roughshod over the entire fucking planet doing whatever it wants with extremely minimal consequences.
Humans are the only solution. Rational humans are never going to rely on technology alone for enforcement, governance, and/or oversight. If you have a problem with the humans currently making decisions, find better humans. Checks and balances.
Don't like the Big Tech corporate surveillance state? Write better laws regulating them. Don't like the people writing laws currently? Vote and run against them. Still not heard? There are yet more avenues for recourse.
The idea that technology is going to fix these problems holds no basis in reality.
Technology moves faster than legislation and so it dictates a lot of what the politicians have to make decisions about.
Any country, company, organisation who is not using technology and trying to catch up the to progress of it is loosing. Any country, company and organization who is trying to catch up is seeing itself needing less and less to do the same things.
Technological jobs are more or less the only jobs that pays really well and have some sort of a future and anyone who want to make money in todays economy have to use technology to scale their business even if it means undermining their own value.
The companies who are really transformative today and disrupting aren't just disrupting industries they are disrupting the legal system.
Bitcoin, Airbnb, Uber, self driving cars, drones all push the legal boundaries politicians are represented by special interest groups, these are at odds with the advantages tech brings to consumers.
AI in pushes the need for humans to relearn at an ever increasing speed sooner or later we can't re-educate ourselves fast enough.
Globalization is a byproduct of technology, we can't not have globalization if we want progress, countries who don't want progress aren't going to be able to compete with countries who do.
There are of course many other factors than just technology but it's my belief that today technology is at the core of any human progress. Without it we can't progress and and so we have no choice other than one that ultimately leads to our extinction. Technology is natural. It's part of evolution. If we don't adapt we perish.
Certain technologies are simply too abusable to be unrestricted. In fact, many technologies only exist to do things we consider wrong, so we outlaw them. Granted, many times these laws are not well enforced.
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