[first published at The Bridge on August 9, 2018]
What happens when technological innovation outpaces the ability of laws and regulations to keep up?
This phenomenon is known as “the pacing problem,” and it has profound ramifications for the governance of emerging technologies. Indeed, the pacing problem is becoming the great equalizer in debates over technological governance because it forces governments to rethink their approach to the regulation of many sectors and technologies.
The Innovation Cornucopia
Had Rip Van Winkle woken up his famous nap today, he’d be shocked by all the changes around him. At-home genetics tests, personal drones, driverless cars, lab-grown meats, and 3D-printed prosthetic limbs are just some of the amazing innovations that would boggle his mind. New devices and services are flying at us so rapidly that we sometimes forget that most did not even exist a short time ago. Continue reading →
FCC Chairman Ajit Pai recently delivered an excellent speech at the Resurgent Conference, Austin, TX. In it, he stressed the importance of adopting a permissionless innovation policy vision to ensure a bright future for technology, economic growth, and consumer welfare. The whole thing is worth your time, but the last two paragraphs make two essential points worth highlighting.
Pai correctly notes that we should reject the sort of knee-jerk hysteria or technopanic mentality that sometimes accompanies new technologies. Instead, we should have some patience and humility in the face of uncertainty and be open to new ideas and technologies creations.
“Here’s the bottom line,” Pai concludes:
Whenever a technological innovation creates uncertainty, some will always have the knee-jerk reaction to presume it’s bad. They’ll demand that we do whatever’s necessary to maintain the status quo. Strangle it with a study. Call for a commission. Bemoan those supposedly left behind. Stipulate absolute certainty. Regulate new services with the paradigms of old.
But we should resist that temptation. “Guilty until proven innocent” is not a recipe for innovation, and it doesn’t make consumers better off. History tells us that it is not preemptive regulation, but permissionless innovation made possible by competitive free markets that best guarantees consumer welfare. A future enabled by the next generation of technology can be bright, if only we choose to let the light in.
Read the whole thing here. Good stuff. I also appreciate him citing my work on the topic, which you can find in my last book and other publications.
Privacy is an essentially contested concept. It evades a clear definition and when it is defined, scholars do so inconsistently. So, what are we to do now with this fractured term? Ryan Hagemann suggests a bottom up approach. Instead of beginning from definitions, we should be building a folksonomy of privacy harms:
By recognizing those areas in which we have an interest in privacy, we can better formalize an understanding of when and how it should be prioritized in relation to other values. By differentiating the harms that can materialize when it is violated by government as opposed to private actors, we can more appropriately understand the costs and benefits in different situations.
Hagemann aims to route around definitional problems by exploring the spaces where our interests intersect with the concept of privacy, in our relations to government, to private firms, and to other people. It is a subtle but important shift in outlook that is worth exploring. Continue reading →
By Andrea O’Sullivan and Adam Thierer (First published at The Bridge on August 1, 2018.)
Technology is changing the ways that entrepreneurs interact with, and increasingly get away from, existing government regulations. The ongoing legal battles surrounding 3D-printed weapons provide yet another timely example.
For years, a consortium of techies called Defense Distributed has sought to secure more protections for gun owners by making the code allowing someone to print their own guns available online. Rather than taking their fight to Capitol Hill and spending billions of dollars lobbying in potentially fruitless pursuits of marginal legislative victories, Defense Distributed ties their fortunes to the mast of technological determinism and blurs the lines between regulated physical reality and the open world of cyberspace.
The federal government moved fast, with gun control advocates like Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and former Representative Steve Israel (D-NY) proposing legislation to criminalize Defense Distributed’s activities. They failed.
Plan B in the efforts to quash these acts of 3D-printing disobedience was to classify the Computer-aided design (CAD) files that Defense Distributed posted online as a kind of internationally-controlled munition. The US State Department engaged in a years-long legal brawl over whether or not Defense Distributed violated established International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR). The group pulled down the files while the issue was examined in court, but the code had long since been uploaded to sharing sites like The Pirate Bay. The files have also been available on the Internet Archive for many years. The CAD, if you will excuse the pun, is out of the bag.
In a surprising move, the Department of Justice suddenly moved to drop the suit and settle with Defense Distributed last month. It agreed to cover the group’s legal fees and cease its attempt to regulate code already easily accessible online. While no legal precedent was set, since this was merely a settlement, it is likely that the government realized that its case would be unwinnable.
Gun control advocates did not react well to this legal retreat. Continue reading →
Dan Wang has a new post titled “How Technology Grows (a restatement of definite optimism)” and it is characteristically good. For tech policy wonks and policymakers, put it in your queue. The essay clocks in at 7500 words, but there’s a lot to glean from the piece. Indeed, he puts into words a number of ideas I’ve been wanting to write about. To set the stage, he begins first by defining what we mean by technology:
Technology should be understood in three distinct forms: as processes embedded into tools (like pots, pans, and stoves); explicit instructions (like recipes); and as process knowledge, or what we can also refer to as tacit knowledge, know-how, and technical experience. Process knowledge is the kind of knowledge that’s hard to write down as an instruction. You can give someone a well-equipped kitchen and an extraordinarily detailed recipe, but unless he already has some cooking experience, we shouldn’t expect him to prepare a great dish.
As he rightly points out, the United States has, for various reasons, set aside the focus on process knowledge. Where this is especially evident comes in our manufacturing base:
When firms and factories go away, the accumulated process knowledge disappears as well. Industrial experience, scaling expertise, and all the things that come with learning-by-doing will decay. I visited Germany earlier this year to talk to people in industry. One point Germans kept bringing up was that the US has de-industrialized itself and scattered its production networks. While Germany responded to globalization by moving up the value chain, the US manufacturing base mostly responded by abandoning production.
The US is an outlier among rich countries when it comes to manufacturing exports. It needs improvement. Continue reading →
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