In recent months, my colleagues and I at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University have published a flurry of essays about the importance of innovation, entrepreneurialism, and “moonshots,” as well as the future of technological governance more generally. A flood of additional material is coming, but I figured I’d pause for a moment to track our progress so far. Much of this work is leading up to my next on the freedom to innovate, which I am finishing up currently.
- Adam Thierer, “Deep Technologies & Moonshots: Should We Dare to Dream?” Medium, September 7, 2018.
- Adam Thierer, “The Right to Pursue Happiness, Earn a Living, and Innovate,” The Bridge, September 20, 2018.
- Adam Thierer, “Is It “Techno-Chauvinist” & “Anti-Humanist” to Believe in the Transformative Potential of Technology?” Medium, September 18, 2018.
- Adam Thierer, “How Technology Expands the Horizons of Our Humanity,” Medium, November 19, 2018.
- “Evasive Entrepreneurs and Permissionless Innovation: An Interview with Adam Thierer,” The Bridge, September 11, 2018.
- Adam Thierer, “Making the World Safe for More Moonshots,” The Bridge, February 5, 2018.
- Adam Thierer & Trace Mitchell, “A Non-Partisan Way to Help Workers and Consumers,” The Bridge, September 25, 2018.
- Adam Thierer and Trace Mitchell, “The Many Forms of Entrepreneurialism,” The Bridge, August 30, 2018.
- Adam Thierer, “Evasive Entrepreneurialism and Technological Civil Disobedience: Basic Definitions,” The Bridge, July 20, 2018,
- Adam Thierer, “The Pacing Problem and the Future of Technology Regulation,” The Bridge, August 8, 2018.
- Adam Thierer, “The Pacing Problem, the Collingridge Dilemma & Technological Determinism,” Technology Liberation Front, August 16, 2018.
- Andrea O’Sullivan & Adam Thierer, “3D Printers, Evasive Entrepreneurs and the Future of Tech Regulation,” The Bridge, August 1, 2018.
- Jennifer Huddleston Skees, “The Regulatory Name Game,” The Bridge, September 13, 2018.
- Jennifer Skees, “Do You Need a License to Innovate?”, The Bridge, June 29, 2018.
- Adam Thierer and Jennifer Skees, “Lemonade Stands and Permits,” The Bridge, August 20, 2018.
- Jennifer Huddleston Skees and Adam Thierer, “Pennsylvania’s Innovative Approach to Regulating Innovation,” The Bridge, September 5, 2018.
- Jennifer Huddleston Skees & Trace Mitchell, “Transportation 3.0”, The Bridge, August 29, 2018.
- Jennifer Skees & Trace Mitchell, “Will The Electric Scooter Movement Lose Its Charge?” The Bridge, July 18, 2018.
- Adam Thierer & Trace Mitchell, “The Many Flavors of Food Entrepreneurialism,” The Bridge, September 26, 2018.
- Jennifer Skees, “Should You Be Able to Fix Your Own iPhone,” Plain Text, June 18, 2018, https://readplaintext.com/should-you-be-able-to-fix-your-own-iphone-b4157e6cd23
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Over at the Mercatus Center Bridge blog, Trace Mitchell and I just posted an essay entitled, “A Non-Partisan Way to Help Workers and Consumers,” which discusses the new Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC) Economic Liberty Task Force report on occupational licensing.
We applaud the FTC’s calls for greater occupational licensing uniformity and portability, but regret the missed opportunity to address root problem of excessive licensing more generally. But while FTC is right to push for greater occupational licensing uniformity and portability, policymakers need to confront the sheer absurdity of licensing so many jobs that pose zero risk to public health & safety. Licensing has become completely detached from risk realities and actual public needs.
As the FTC notes, excessive licensing limits employment opportunities, worker mobility, and competition while also “resulting in higher prices, reduced quality, and less convenience for consumers.” These are unambiguous facts that are widely accepted by experts of all stripes. Both the Obama and Trump Administrations, for example, have been completely in league on the need for comprehensive licensing reforms. Continue reading →
I’ve always been perplexed by tech critiques that seek to pit “humanist” values against technology or technological processes, or that even suggest a bright demarcation exists between these things. Properly understood, “technology” and technological innovation are simply extensions of our humanity and represent efforts to continuously improve the human condition. In that sense, humanism and technology are compliments, not opposites.
I started thinking about this again after reading a recent article by Christopher Mims of The Wall Street Journal, which introduced me to the term “techno-chauvinism.” Techno-chauvinism is a new term that some social critics are using to identify when technologies or innovators are apparently not behaving in a “humanist” fashion. Mims attributes the term techno-chauvinism to Meredith Broussard of New York University, who defines it as “the idea that technology is always the highest and best solution, and is superior to the people-based solution.” [Italics added.] Later on Twitter, Mims defined and critiqued techno-chauvinism as “the belief that the best solution to any problem is technology, not changing our culture, habits or mindset.”
Everything Old is New Again
There are other terms critics have used to describe the same notion, including: “techno-fundamentalism” (Siva Vaidhyanathan), “cyber-utopianism,” and “technological solutionism” (Evgeny Morozov). In a sense, all these terms are really just variants of what scholars in the field of Science and Technology Studies (STS) have long referred to as “technological determinism.”
As I noted in a recent essay about determinism, the traditional “hard” variant of technological determinism refers to the notion that technology almost has a mind of its own and that it will plow forward without much resistance from society or governments. Critics argue that determinist thinking denies or ignores the importance of the human element in moving history forward, or what Broussard would refer to as “people-based solutions.”
The first problem with this thinking is there are no bright lines in these debates and many “softer” variants of determinism exist. The same problem is at work when we turn to discussions about both “humanism” and “technology.” Things get definitionally murky quite quickly, and everyone seemingly has a preferred conception of these terms to fit their own ideological dispositions. “Humanism is a rather vague and contested term with a convoluted history,” observes tech philosopher Michael Sacasas. And here’s an essay that I have updated many times over the years to catalog the dozens of different definitions of “technology” I have unearthed in my ongoing research. 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 →
Reading professor Siva Vaidhyanathan’s recent op-ed in the New York Times, one could reasonably assume that Facebook is now seriously tackling the enormous problem of dangerous information. In detailing his takeaways from a recent hearing with Facebook’s COO Sheryl Sandberg and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, Vaidhyanathan explained,
Ms. Sandberg wants us to see this as success. A number so large must mean Facebook is doing something right. Facebook’s machines are determining patterns of origin and content among these pages and quickly quashing them.
Still, we judge exterminators not by the number of roaches they kill, but by the number that survive. If 3 percent of 2.2 billion active users are fake at any time, that’s still 66 million sources of potentially false or dangerous information.
One thing is clear about this arms race: It is an absurd battle of machine against machine. One set of machines create the fake accounts. Another deletes them. This happens millions of times every month. No group of human beings has the time to create millions, let alone billions, of accounts on Facebook by hand. People have been running computer scripts to automate the registration process. That means Facebook’s machines detect the fakes rather easily. (Facebook says that fewer than 1.5 percent of the fakes were identified by users.)
But it could be that, in their zeal to trapple down criticism from all sides, Facebook instead has corrected too far and is now over-moderating. The fundamental problem is that it is nearly impossible to know the true amount of disinformation on a platform. For one, there is little agreement on what kind of content needs to be policed. It is doubtful everyone would agree what constitutes fake news and separates it from disinformation or propaganda and how all of that differs from hate speech. But more fundamentally, even if everyone agreed to what should be taken down, it is still not clear that algorithmic filtering methods would be able to perfectly approximate that. Continue reading →
We hear a lot today about the importance of “disruptive innovation,” “deep technologies,” “moonshots,” and even “technological miracles.” What do these terms mean and how are they related? Are they just silly clichés used to hype techno-exuberant books, articles, and speeches? Or do these terms have real meaning and importance?
This article explores those questions and argues that, while these terms are confronted with definitional challenges and occasional overuse, they retain real importance to human flourishing, economic growth, and societal progress.
Basic Concepts
Don Boudreaux defines moonshots as, “radical but feasible solutions to important problems” and Mike Cushing has referred to them as “innovation that achieves the previously unthinkable.” “Deep technology” is another buzzword being used to describe such revolutionary and important innovations. Swati Chaturvedi of investment firm Propel[x] says deep technologies are innovations that are “built on tangible scientific discoveries or engineering innovations” and “are trying to solve big issues that really affect the world around them.”
“Disruptive technology” or “game-changing innovations” are other terms that are often used in reference to technologies and inventions with major societal impacts. “Transformative technologies” is another increasingly popular term, albeit one focused mostly on health and wellness-related innovations. Continue reading →
There has been an increasing outcry recently from conservatives that social media is conspiring to silence their voices. Leading voices including President Donald Trump and Senator Ted Cruz have started calling for legislative or regulatory actions to correct this perceived “bias”. But these calls for fairness miss the importance of allowing such services to develop their own terms and for users to determine what services to use and the benefit that such services have been to conservatives.
Social media is becoming a part of our everyday lives and recent events have only increased our general awareness of this fact. More than half of American adults login to Facebook on a daily basis. As a result, some policymakers have argued that such sites are the new public square. In general, the First Amendment strictly limits what the government can do to limit speakers in public spaces and requires that such limits be applied equally to different points of view. At the same time, private entities are generally allowed to set terms regarding what speech may or may not be allowed on their own platforms.
The argument that modern day websites are the new public square and must maintain a neutral view point was recently rejected in a lawsuit between PraegerU and YouTube. Praeger believed that its conservative viewpoint was being silenced by YouTube decision to place many of its videos in “restricted mode.” In this case, the court found that YouTube was still acting as a private service rather than one filling a typical government role. Other cases have similarly asserted that Internet intermediaries have First Amendment rights to reject or limit ads or content as part of their own rights to speak or not speak. Conservatives have long been proponents of property rights, freedom of association, and free markets. But now, faced with platforms choosing to exercise their rights, rather than defend those values and compete in the market some “conservatives” are arguing for legislation or utilizing litigation to bully the marketplace of ideas into giving them a louder microphone. In fact, part of the purpose behind creating the liability immunity (known as Section 230) for such services was the principle that a variety of platforms would emerge with different standards and new and diverse communities could be created and evolve to serve different audiences.
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In recent essays and papers, I have discussed the growth of “innovation arbitrage,” which I defined as, “The movement of ideas, innovations, or operations to those jurisdictions that provide a legal and regulatory environment more hospitable to entrepreneurial activity.” A new Economist article about “Why startups are leaving Silicon Valley,” discusses innovation arbitrage without calling it such. The article notes that, for a variety of reasons, Valley innovators and investors are looking elsewhere to set up shop or put money into new ventures. The article continues:
Other cities are rising in relative importance as a result. The Kauffman Foundation, a non-profit group that tracks entrepreneurship, now ranks the Miami-Fort Lauderdale area first for startup activity in America, based on the density of startups and new entrepreneurs. Mr Thiel is moving to Los Angeles, which has a vibrant tech scene. Phoenix and Pittsburgh have become hubs for autonomous vehicles; New York for media startups; London for fintech; Shenzhen for hardware. None of these places can match the Valley on its own; between them, they point to a world in which innovation is more distributed.
If great ideas can bubble up in more places, that has to be welcome. There are some reasons to think the playing-field for innovation is indeed being levelled up. Capital is becoming more widely available to bright sparks everywhere: tech investors increasingly trawl the world, not just California, for hot ideas. There is less reason than ever for a single region to be the epicentre of technology. Thanks to the tools that the Valley’s own firms have produced, from smartphones to video calls to messaging apps, teams can work effectively from different offices and places.
That’s the power of innovation arbitrage at work. 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.