Chris Anderson, former Wired magazine editor-in-chief and author of Makers: The New Industrial Revolution, describes what he calls the maker movement.
According to Anderson, modern technologies, such as 3D printing and open source design, are democratizing manufacturing. The same disruption that digital technologies brought to information goods like music, movies and publishing will soon make its way to the world of physical goods, he says.
Anderson tells the story of his grandfather, who designed the first automatic sprinkler system in the 60s, and how different such an invention story would be today. He also discusses his own firm, 3D Robotics, and policy challenges to emerging manufacturing technology.
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The precautionary principle generally states that new technologies should be restricted or heavily regulated until they are proven absolutely safe. In other words, out of an abundance of caution, the precautionary principle holds that it is “better to be safe than sorry,” regardless of the costs or consequences. The problem with that, as Kevin Kelly reminded us in his 2010 book, What Technology Wants, is that because “every good produces harm somewhere… by the strict logic of an absolute Precautionary Principle no technologies would be permitted.” The precautionary principle is, in essence, the arch-enemy of progress and innovation. Progress becomes impossible when experimentation and trade-offs are considered unacceptable.
I was reminded of that fact while reading this recent piece by Marc Scribner in the Washington Post, “Driverless Cars Are on the Way. Here’s How Not to Regulate Them.” Scribner highlights the efforts of the D.C. Council to regulate autonomous vehicles. A new bill introduced by Council member Mary Cheh (D-Ward 3) proposes several preemptive regulations before driverless autos would be allowed on the streets of Washington. Scribner summarizes the provisions of the bill and their impact: Continue reading →
Designer Dan Provost, co-founder of the indie hardware and software company Studio Neat, and co-author of It Will Be Exhilarating: Indie Capitalism and Design Entrepreneurship in the 21st Century, discusses how technological innovation helped him build his business. Provost explains how he and his co-founder Tom Gerhardt were able to rely on crowdfunding to finance their business. Avoiding loans or investors, he says, has allowed them to more freely experiment and innovate. Provost also credits 3D printing for his company’s success, saying their hardware designs–very popular tripod mounts for the iPhone and a stylus for the iPad–would not have been possible without the quick-prototyping technology.
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Christopher Steiner, author of Automate This: How Algorithms Came to Rule the World, discusses his new book. Steiner originally set about studying the prevalence of algorithms in Wall Street stock trading but soon found they were everywhere. Stock traders were the first to use algorithms as a substitute for human judgment to make trades automatically, allowing for much faster trading. But now algorithms are used to diagnose illnesses, interpret legal documents, analyze foreign policy, and write newspaper articles. Algorithms have even been used to look at how people form sentences to determine that person’s personality and mental state so that customer service agents can deal with upset customers better. Steiner discusses the benefits–and risks–of algorithmic automation and how it will change the world.
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A reporter recently interviewed me for a story and asked a terrific question: Why is it that business model disruption and creative destruction seem to have sped up in recent times? My guess — and excuse me if this seems too obvious — is that it must have something to do with the very nature of intangible, digital technologies of the new economy versus the tangible, analog technologies of the old economy. That is, in markets built largely upon binary code, the pace and nature of change becomes relentlessly hyper-Schumpeterian precisely because digital technologies and platforms are more easily disintermediated and leap-frogged than earlier tangible technologies and platforms were. And so we get creative destruction on steroids.
Consider, for example, what constituted a “social networking site” in the old days versus today. Our old social networking sites and services in the past were town squares, parks, school parking lots, shopping malls, as well as media like newspapers, magazines, and even the mail. When we socially networked in those environments, we were creatures of our fixed, “real-space” environments as well as their many natural constraints. Disrupting, replacing, or even replicating those environments, technologies, or platforms was a monumental undertaking precisely because of the enormous costs associated with doing so. Continue reading →
California is recognized as a world leader in Internet technologies and services. It is the home of companies, like Apple, Google, and Cisco, whose innovations are driving economic recovery in California and Internet innovation around the world. The success of these and many other California technology companies has been driven by the decentralized and largely unregulated Internet, which provides them with the ability to market their products and services globally.
California’s success is also its biggest threat. The economic growth, individual empowerment, and entrepreneurialism driven by Internet innovation in California have made it the envy of the world. As a result, local and international governments are increasingly proposing new regulations that would favor their own companies – and cripple California’s economy. A current example is the upcoming World Conference on International Telecommunications, which will consider proposals to impose price regulations on the Internet through an agency of the United Nations. Continue reading →
On Wednesday morning, the U.S. House of Representatives Energy & Commerce Subcommittee on Communications and Technology will hold a hearing on “The Future of Video.”
As we Tech Liberators have long argued on these pages (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7), government’s hands have been all over the video market since its inception, primarily in the form of the FCC’s rulemaking and enforcement enabled by the Communications Act. While the 1996 Telecommunications Act scrapped some obsolete video regulations, volumes of outdated rules remain law, and the FCC wields vast and largely unchecked authority to regulate video providers of all shapes and sizes. Wednesday’s hearing offers members an excellent opportunity to question each and every law that enables governmental intervention—and restricts liberty in—the television market.
It’s high time for Congress to free up America’s video marketplace and unleash the forces of innovation. Internet entrepreneurs should be free to experiment with novel approaches to creating, distributing, and monetizing video content without fear of FCC regulatory intervention. At the same time, established media businesses—including cable operators, satellite providers, telecom companies, broadcast networks and affiliates, and studios—should compete on a level playing field, free from both federal mandates and special regulatory treatment.
The Committee should closely examine the Communications and Copyright Acts, and rewrite or repeal outright provisions of law that inhibit a free video marketplace. Adam Thierer has chronicled many such laws. The Committee should, among other reforms, consider:
Here’s to the success of Sen. Jim DeMint, Rep. Steve Scalise, and other members of Congress who are working to achieve real reform and ensure that the future of video is bounded only by the dreams of entrepreneurs.
John Palfrey of the Berkmann Center at Harvard Law School, discusses his new book written with Urs Gasser, Interop: The Promise and Perils of Highly Interconnected Systems. Interoperability is a term used to describe the standardization and integration of technology. Palfrey discusses how the term can describe many relationships in the world and that it doesn’t have to be limited to technical systems. He also describes potential pitfalls of too much interoperability. Palfrey finds that greater levels of interoperability can lead to greater competition, collaboration, and the development of standards. It can also lead to giving less protection to privacy and security. The trick is to get to the right level of interoperability. If systems become too complex, then nobody can understand them and they can become unstable. Palfrey describes the current financial crises could be an example of this. Palfrey also describes the difficulty in finding the proper role of government in encouraging or discouraging interoperability.
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You won’t find the words ‘government’ or ‘regulation’ in [this post at EFF’s blog](https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/05/apples-crystal-prison-and-future-open-platforms) by Micah Lee and Peter Eckersley. They’re just appealing to Apple’s better angels to drop its closed ways. I’ve explained before why that’s [a rational thing to do](http://jerrybrito.org/post/23812306919/boycotting-apple-is-not-irrational). But will the EFF assure supporters like me that it will never endorse government enforcement of a “bill of rights” like the one Lee and Eckersley propose today?
What I like about EFF is that it is a pro-liberty group, but I hope I’m not wrong in assuming that they view liberty as I do: as [a negative concept](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_liberty). They never come out and say it, but it sure sounds like the authors believe that if Apple doesn’t come around to seeing the virtues of openness and provide an escape hatch, then maybe they should be forced to. I get that impression from passages like this:
>When technology and phone companies defend the restrictions that they are imposing on their customers, the most frequent defense they offer is that it’s actually in their customers’ interest to be deprived of liberty: “If we let people do what they want with their pocket computers, they will do stupid things with them. You will be safer and happier in our walled compound than you would be outside.”
Imposing on their customers? Seems to me like the vast majority of Apple’s customers are *choosing* these restrictions. It’s not Apple that thinks its customers are stupid, and is therefore “imposing” a locked phone on them, it’s Lee and Eckersley who seem to have a low regard for customers’ preferences and want to impose an open device on them.
We can of course debate [whether customers are being short-sighted](http://jerrybrito.org/post/23994473829/the-internets-philosopher-king) in the choice they’re making, whether the benefits of closed platforms [outweigh the costs](http://techliberation.com/2008/03/23/review-of-zittrains-future-of-the-internet/), and whether we have the best of [both](http://jerrybrito.org/post/23812308446/how-closed-is-apple-anyway) [worlds](http://jerrybrito.org/post/23812366268/turns-out-apples-walled-garden-susceptible-to-market) right now, but you can’t say that customers are being “deprived of their liberty.” What liberty are they being deprived of? Does the EFF believe there is a positive right to mobile computers that run arbitrary code?
I repeat my plea: Can EFF assure us that it will not support government regulation of computer manufacturers?
In the lead essay for the “Cato Unbound” symposium this month, I analyze recent political movements that have been aided by Internet-based communication by positing a set of questions,
Activists played important roles in bringing down dictators in the Arab world, stopping the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in Congress and electing Barack Obama—just to name a few examples. But how much did the Internet matter in making these watershed events possible? How effective is it likely to be in the future? And how would we measure whether activism “works” for society—not just the activists?
I respond to the concerns raised by Evgeny Morozov in his iconoclastic 2010 book, The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom (summarized in his short essay in TechFreedom’s free ebook The Next Digital Decade: Essays on the Future of the Internet). In general, I suggest that we simply do not yet understand the Internet’s effect on activism well enough to make strong normative judgments about it. But applying Public Choice theory can help us understand how developments in communication technologies are changing the relationship between an individual and the group in social movements. A few highlights:
- Social media lower organizational costs, especially of recruiting members, but also noticeability: “members’ ability to notice each other’s actions.” Even in 2003, there was little way to tell whether your friends actually followed through when you asked them to help join a cause. But today, it’s easy to encourage them to re-share material on Facebook or Twitter—and to “notice” whether they’ve done so.
- Social media allows members of large groups—think Twitter followers—to be continuously bombarded with propaganda about the worthiness of the cause creating social pressures not entirely unlike those that can be generated in a face-to face group.
- The Internet empowers large, dispersed groups (like dedicated Internet users) to organize against small but concentrated interests. As anyone who works in technology policy in Washington can attest, SOPA’s implosion made Congress more cautious—at least about Internet regulation, where fear of a digital activist backlash is greatest. 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.