[last updated 4/3/2025 – Check my Medium page for latest posts]
This a running list of all the essays and reports I’ve already rolled out on the governance of artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and robotics. Why have I decided to spend so much time on this issue? Because this will become the most important technological revolution of our lifetimes. Every segment of the economy will be touched in some fashion by AI, ML, robotics, and the power of computational science. It should be equally clear that public policy will be radically transformed along the way.
Eventually, all policy will involve AI policy and computational considerations. As AI “eats the world,” it eats the world of public policy along with it. The stakes here are profound for individuals, economies, and nations. As a result, AI policy will be the most important technology policy fight of the next decade, and perhaps next quarter century. Those who are passionate about the freedom to innovate need to prepare to meet the challenge as proposals to regulate AI proliferate.
There are many socio-technical concerns surrounding algorithmic systems that deserve serious consideration and appropriate governance steps to ensure that these systems are beneficial to society. However,
there is an equally compelling public interest in ensuring that AI innovations are developed and made widely available to help improve human well-being across many dimensions. And that’s the case that I’ll be dedicating my life to making in coming years.
Here’s the list of what I’ve done so far. I will continue to update this as new material is released: Continue reading →
Profectus is an excellent new online magazine featuring essays and interviews on the intersection of academic literature, public policy, civilizational progress, and human flourishing. The Spring 2022 edition of the magazine features a “
Progress Roundtable” in which six different scholars were asked to contribute their thoughts on three general questions:
- What is progress?
- What are the most significant barriers holding back further progress?
- If those challenges can be overcome, what does the world look like in 50 years?
I was honored to be asked by Clay Routledge to contribute answers to those questions alongside others, including: Steven Pinker (Harvard University), Jason Crawford (Roots of Progress), Matt Clancy (Institute for Progress), Marian Tupy (HumanProgress.org), James Pethokoukis (AEI). I encourage you to jump over the roundtable and read all their excellent responses. I’ve included my answers down below:
Continue reading →
On December 13th, I will be participating in an Atlas Network panel on, “Big Tech, Free Speech, and Censorship: The Classical Liberal Approach.” In anticipation of that event, I have also just published a new op-ed for The Hill entitled, “Left and right take aim at Big Tech — and the First Amendment.” In this essay, I expand upon that op-ed and discuss the growing calls from both the Left and the Right for a variety of new content regulations. I then outline the classical liberal approach to concerns about free speech platforms more generally, which ultimately comes down to the proposition that innovation and competition are always superior to government regulation when it comes to content policy.
In the current debates, I am particularly concerned with calls by many conservatives for more comprehensive governmental controls on speech policies enforced by various private platforms, so I will zero in on those efforts in this essay. First, here’s what both the Left and the Right share in common in these debates: Many on both sides of the aisle desire more government control over the editorial decisions made by private platforms. They both advocate more political meddling with the way private firms make decisions about what types of content and communications are allowed on their platforms. In today’s hyper-partisan world,” I argue in my
Hill column, “tech platforms have become just another plaything to be dominated by politics and regulation. When the ends justify the means, principles that transcend the battles of the day — like property rights, free speech and editorial independence — become disposable. These are things we take for granted until they’ve been chipped away at and lost.”
Despite a shared objective for greater politicization of media markets, the Left and the Right part ways quickly when it comes to the underlying objectives of expanded government control. As I noted in my
Hill op-ed:
there is considerable confusion in the complaints both parties make about “Big Tech.” Democrats want tech companies doing more to limit content they claim is hate speech, misinformation, or that incites violence. Republicans want online operators to do less, because many conservatives believe tech platforms already take down too much of their content.
This makes life very lonely for free speech defenders and classical liberals. Usually in the past, we could count on the Left to be with us in some free speech battles (such as putting an end to “indecency” regulations for broadcast radio and television), while the Right would be with us on others (such as opposition to the “Fairness Doctrine,” or similar mandates). Today, however, it is more common for classical liberals to be fighting with both sides about free speech issues.
My focus is primarily on the Right because, with the rise of Donald Trump and “national conservatism,” there seems to be a lot of soul-searching going on among conservatives about their stance toward private media platforms, and the editorial rights of digital platforms in particular. Continue reading →
With many conservative policymakers and organizations taking a sudden pro-censorial turn and suggesting that government regulation of social media platforms is warranted, it’s a good time for them to re-read President Ronald Reagan’s 1987 veto of Fairness Doctrine legislation. Here’s the key line:
History has shown that the dangers of an overly timid or biased press cannot be averted through bureaucratic regulation, but only through the freedom and competition that the First Amendment sought to guarantee.
That wisdom is just as applicable today when some conservatives suggest that government intervention is needed to address what they regardless as “bias” or “unfair” treatment on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, or whatever else. Ignoring the fact that such meddling would likely violate property rights and freedom of contract — principles that most conservatives say they hold dear — efforts to empower the Federal Communications Commission, the Federal Trade Commission, or other regulators would be hugely misguided on First Amendment grounds.
President Reagan understood that there was a better way to approach these issues that was rooted in innovation and First Amendment protections. Here’s hoping that conservatives remember his sage advice. Read his entire veto message here.
Additional Reading:
[Cross-posted to Medium.]
The spread of “sanctuary cities”—local governments that resist federal laws or regulations in some fashion, and typically for strongly-held moral reasons—is one of the most interesting and controversial governance developments of recent decades. Unfortunately, the concept receives only a selective defense from people when it fits their narrow political objectives, such as sanctuary movements for immigration and gun rights.
But there is broader case to be made for sanctuaries in
many different contexts as a way to encourage experiments in alternative governance models and just let people live lives of their choosing. The concept faces many challenges in practice, however, and I remain skeptical that sanctuary cities will ever scale up and become a widespread governance phenomenon. There’s just too much for federal officials to lose and they likely will crush any particular sanctuary movement that gains serious steam.
Sanctuary Cities as Political Civil Disobedience
First, let’s think about what local officials are really doing when they declare themselves a sanctuary. (Because they can be formed by city, county, or state governments, I will just use “sanctuaries” as a shorthand throughout this essay.)
Academics use the term “rule departure” when referencing “deliberate failures, often for conscientious reasons, to discharge the duties of one’s office.” [Joel Feinberg, “Civil Disobedience in the Modern World,” in
Humanities in Society, Vol. 2, No. 1, 1979, p 37.] In this sense, sanctuary cities could be viewed as a type of collective civil disobedience by public officials because these governance arrangements are typically defended on moral grounds and represent an active form of resistance to policies imposed by higher-ups. Continue reading →
Over at the Mercatus Center’s Bridge blog, Chad Reese interviewed me about my forthcoming book and continuing research on “evasive entrepreneurialism” and the freedom to innovate. I provide a quick summary of the issues and concepts that I am exploring with my colleagues currently. Those issues include:
- free innovation
- evasive entrepreneurialism & social entrepreneurialism
- technological civil disobedience
- the freedom to tinker / freedom to try / freedom to innovate
- the right to earn a living
- “moonshots” / deep technologies / disruptive innovation / transformative tech
- innovation culture
- global innovation arbitrage
- the pacing problem & the Collingridge dilemma
- “soft law” solutions for technological governance
You can read the entire Q&A over at The Bridge, or I have pasted it down below.
Continue reading →
Thirteen years ago I penned an essay entitled, “Your Soapbox is My Soapbox!” It was condensed from a 2005 book I had released at the same time called Media Myths. My research and writing during that period and for fifteen years prior to that was focused on the dangers associated with calls by radical Left-leaning media scholars and policy activists for a veritable regulatory revolution in the way information and communication technology (ICT) platforms were operated. They pushed this revolution using noble-sounding rhetoric like “fairness in coverage,” “right of reply,” “integrity of public debate,” “preserving the public square,” and so on. Their advocacy efforts were also accompanied by calls for a host of new regulatory controls including a “Bill of Media Rights” to grant the public a litany of new affirmative rights over media and communications providers and platforms.
But no matter how much the so-called “media access” movement sought to sugarcoat their prescriptions, in the end, what those Left-leaning scholars and advocates were calling for was sweeping state control of media and communications technologies and platforms. In essence, they wanted to socialize private soapboxes and turn them into handmaidens of the state.
Here’s the way I began my old “soapbox” essay:
Imagine you built a platform in your backyard for the purpose of informing or entertaining your friends of neighbors. Now further imagine that you are actually fairly good at what you do and manage to attract and retain a large audience. Then one day, a few hecklers come to hear you speak on your platform. They shout about how it’s unfair that you have attracted so many people to hear you speak on your soapbox and they demand access to your platform for a certain amount of time each day. They rationalize this by arguing that it is THEIR rights as listeners that are really important, not YOUR rights as a speaker or the owner of the soapbox.
That sort of scenario could never happen in America, right? Sadly, it’s been the way media law has operated for several decades in this country. This twisted “media access” philosophy has been employed by federal lawmakers and numerous special interest groups to justify extensive and massively unjust regime of media regulation and speech redistributionism. And it’s still at work today.
That was 2005. What’s amazing today is that this same twisted attitude is still on display, but it is
conservatives who are now the ring-leaders of the push to socialize soapboxes! Continue reading →
[originally published on Plaintext on June 21, 2017.]
This summer, we celebrate the 20th anniversary of two developments that gave us the modern Internet as we know it. One was a court case that guaranteed online speech would flow freely, without government prior restraints or censorship threats. The other was an official White House framework for digital markets that ensured the free movement of goods and services online.
The result of these two vital policy decisions was an unprecedented explosion of speech freedoms and commercial opportunities that we continue to enjoy the benefits of twenty years later.
While it is easy to take all this for granted today, it is worth remembering that, in the long arc of human history, no technology or medium has more rapidly expanded the range of human liberties — both speech and commercial liberties — than the Internet and digital technologies. But things could have turned out much differently if not for the crucially important policy choices the United States made for the Internet two decades ago. Continue reading →
Adam Thierer, senior research fellow with the Technology Policy Program at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, discusses his latest book Permissionless Innovation: The Continuing Case for Comprehensive Technological Freedom. Thierer discusses which types of policies promote technological discoveries as well as those that stifle the freedom to innovate. He also takes a look at new technologies — such as driverless cars, drones, big data, smartphone apps, and Google Glass — and how the American public will adapt to them.
Download
Related Links
Few people have been more tireless in their defense of the notion of “permissionless innovation” than Wall Street Journal columnist L. Gordon Crovitz. In his weekly “Information Age” column for the Journal (which appears each Monday), Crovitz has consistently sounded the alarm regarding new threats to Internet freedom, technological freedom, and individual liberties. It was, therefore, a great honor for me to wake up Monday morning and read his latest post, “The End of the Permissionless Web,” which discussed my new book “Permissionless Innovation: The Continuing Case for Comprehensive Technological Freedom.”
“The first generation of the Internet did not go well for regulators,” Crovitz begins his column. “Despite early proposals to register websites and require government approval for business practices, the Internet in the U.S. developed largely without bureaucratic control and became an unstoppable engine of innovation and economic growth.” Unfortunately, he correctly notes:
Regulators don’t plan to make the same mistake with the next generation of innovations. Bureaucrats and prosecutors are moving in to undermine services that use the Internet in new ways to offer everything from getting a taxi to using self-driving cars to finding a place to stay.
This is exactly why I penned my little manifesto. As Crovitz continues on to note in his essay, new regulatory threats to both existing and emerging technologies are popping up on almost a daily basis. He highlights currently battles over Uber, Airbnb, 23andme, commercial drones, and more. And his previous columns have discussed many other efforts to “permission” innovation and force heavy-handed top-down regulatory schemes on fast-paced and rapidly-evolving sectors and technologies. Continue reading →
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.
Running List of My Research on AI, ML & Robotics Policy
by Adam Thierer on July 29, 2022 · 0 comments
[last updated 4/3/2025 – Check my Medium page for latest posts]
This a running list of all the essays and reports I’ve already rolled out on the governance of artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and robotics. Why have I decided to spend so much time on this issue? Because this will become the most important technological revolution of our lifetimes. Every segment of the economy will be touched in some fashion by AI, ML, robotics, and the power of computational science. It should be equally clear that public policy will be radically transformed along the way.
Eventually, all policy will involve AI policy and computational considerations. As AI “eats the world,” it eats the world of public policy along with it. The stakes here are profound for individuals, economies, and nations. As a result, AI policy will be the most important technology policy fight of the next decade, and perhaps next quarter century. Those who are passionate about the freedom to innovate need to prepare to meet the challenge as proposals to regulate AI proliferate.
There are many socio-technical concerns surrounding algorithmic systems that deserve serious consideration and appropriate governance steps to ensure that these systems are beneficial to society. However, there is an equally compelling public interest in ensuring that AI innovations are developed and made widely available to help improve human well-being across many dimensions. And that’s the case that I’ll be dedicating my life to making in coming years.
Here’s the list of what I’ve done so far. I will continue to update this as new material is released: Continue reading →