Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology
Here’s a slide presentation on “The Future of Innovation Policy” that I presented to some student groups recently. It builds on themes discussed in my recent books, Permissionless Innovation: The Continuing Case for Comprehensive Technological Freedom, and Evasive Entrepreneurs and the Future of Governance: How Innovation Improves Economies and Governments. I specifically discuss the tension between permissionless innovation and the precautionary principle as competing policy defaults.
Gabrielle Bauer, a Toronto-based medical writer, has just published one of the most concise explanations of what’s wrong with the precautionary principle that I have ever read. The precautionary principle, you will recall, generally refers to public policies that limit or even prohibit trial-and-error experimentation and risk-taking. Innovations are restricted until their creators can prove that they will not cause any harms or disruptions. In an essay for The New Atlantis entitled, “Danger: Caution Ahead,” Bauer uses the world’s recent experiences with COVID lockdowns as the backdrop for how society can sometimes take extreme caution too far, and create more serious dangers in the process. “The phrase ‘abundance of caution’ captures the precautionary principle in a more literary way,” Bauer notes. Indeed, another way to look at it is through the prism of the old saying, “better to be safe than sorry.” The problem, she correctly observes, is that, “extreme caution comes at a cost.” This is exactly right and it points to the profound trade-offs associated with precautionary principle thinking in practice.
In my own writing about the problems associated with the precautionary principle (see list of essays at bottom), I often like to paraphrase an ancient nugget of wisdom from St. Thomas Aquinas, who once noted in his Summa Theologica that, if the highest aim of a captain were merely to preserve their ship, then they would simply keep it in port forever. Of course, that is not the only goal of a captain has. The safety of the vessel and the crew is essential, of course, but captains brave the high seas because there are good reasons to take such risks. Most obviously, it might be how they make their living. But historically, captains have also taken to the seas as pioneering explorers, researchers, or even just thrill-seekers.
This was equally true when humans first decided to take to the air in balloons, blimps, airplanes, and rockets. A strict application of the precautionary principle would have instead told us we should keep our feet on the ground. Better to be safe than sorry! Thankfully, many brave souls ignored that advice and took the heavens in the spirit of exploration and adventure. As Wilbur Wright once famously said, “If you are looking for perfect safety, you would do well to sit on a fence and watch the birds.” Needless to say, humans would have never mastered the skies if the Wright brothers (and many others) had not gotten off the fence and taken the risks they did. Continue reading →
Discourse magazine has just published my latest essay, “‘Japan Inc.’ and Other Tales of Industrial Policy Apocalypse.” It is a short history of the hysteria surrounding the growth of Japan in the 1980s and early 1990s and its various industrial policy efforts. I begin by noting that, “American pundits and policymakers are today raising a litany of complaints about Chinese industrial policies, trade practices, industrial espionage and military expansion. Some of these concerns have merit. In each case, however, it is easy to find identical fears that were raised about Japan a generation ago.” I then walk through many of the leading books, opeds, movies, and other things from that past era to show how that was the case.
“Hysteria” is not too strong a word to use in this case. Many pundits and politicians were panicking about the rise of Japan economically and more specifically about the way Japan’s Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI) was formulating industrial policy schemes for industrial sectors in which they hoped to make advances. This resulted in veritable “MITI mania” here in America. “U.S. officials and market analysts came to view MITI with a combination of reverence and revulsion, believing that it had concocted an industrial policy cocktail that was fueling Japan’s success at the expense of American companies and interests,” I note. Countless books and essays were being published with breathless titles and predictions. I go through dozens of them in my essay. Meanwhile, the debate in policy circles and Capitol Hill even took on an ugly racial tinge, with some lawmakers calling the the Japanese “leeches.” and suggesting the U.S. should have dropped more atomic bombs on Japan during World War II. At one point, several members of Congress gathered on the lawn of the U.S. Capitol in 1987 to smash Japanese electronics with sledgehammers. Continue reading →
“The world should think better about catastrophic and existential risks.” So says a new feature essay in The Economist. Indeed it should, and that includes existential risks associated with emerging technologies.
The primary focus of my research these days revolves around broad-based governance trends for emerging technologies. In particular, I have spent the last few years attempting to better understand how and why “soft law” techniques have been tapped to fill governance gaps. As I noted in this recent post compiling my recent writing on the topic;
soft law refers to informal, collaborative, and constantly evolving governance mechanisms that differ from hard law in that they lack the same degree of enforceability. Soft law builds upon and operates in the shadow of hard law. But soft law lacks the same degree of formality that hard law possess. Despite many shortcomings and criticisms, compared with hard law, soft law can be more rapidly and flexibly adapted to suit new circumstances and address complex technological governance challenges. This is why many regulatory agencies are tapping soft law methods to address shortcomings in the traditional hard law governance systems.
I argued in recent law review articles as well as my latest book, despite its imperfections, I believe that soft law has an important role to play in filling governance gaps that hard law struggles to address. But there are some instances where soft law simply will not cut it. Continue reading →
[Updated: March 2022]
I was speaking at a conference recently and discussing my life’s work, which for 30 years has been focused on the importance of innovation and intellectual battles over what we mean progress. I put together up a short list of some things I have written over the last few years on this topic and thought I would just re-post them here. I will try to keep this regularly updated, at least for a few years.
UNDERSTANDING THE CHALLENGE WE FACE:
HOW WE MUST RESPOND = “Rational Optimism” / Right to Earn a Living / Permissionless Innovation
There are few things more exciting to innovation policy geeks that than the week a new Matt Ridley book drops. Thankfully, that time is upon us once again. This week, Ridley’s latest book, How Innovation Works: And Why It Flourishes in Freedom, is being released. I can’t wait to dig in.
This weekend, the Wall Street Journal published an essay condensed from the book entitled, “Innovation Can’t Be Forced, but It Can Be Quashed.” Here are some of the highlights from Ridley’s piece:
Innovation relies upon freedom to experiment and try new things, which requires sensible regulation that is permissive, encouraging and quick to give decisions. By far the surest way to rediscover rapid economic growth when the pandemic is over will be to study the regulatory delays and hurdles that have now been hastily swept aside to help innovators in medical devices and therapies, and to see whether such reforms could be applied to other parts of the economy too.
…
Dealing with Covid-19 has forcibly reminded governments of the value of innovation. But if we are to get faster vaccines and treatments—and better still, more innovation across all fields in the future—then innovators need to be freed from the shackles that hold them back.
These are crucial point, and ones I discuss in the launch essay and the afterward of my new book, Evasive Entrepreneurs and the Future of Governance. Alas, as I pointed out in that launch essay and my last book on Permissionless Innovation, a great many barriers stand in the way of the freedom to experiment and try new things. As Ridley points out: Continue reading →
The COVID-19 pandemic has shown how important technology is for enabling social distancing measures while staying connected to friends, family, school, and work. But for some, including a number of celebrities, it has also heightened fears of emerging technologies that could further improve our connectivity. The latest technopanic should not make us fear technology that has added so much to our lives and that promises to help us even more.
Celebrities such as Keri Hilson, John Cusack, and Woody Harrelson have repeated concerns about 5G—from how it could be weakening our immune systems to even causing this pandemic. These claims about 5G have gotten serious enough that Google banned ads with misleading health information regarding 5G, and Twitter has stated it will remove tweets with 5G and health misinformation that could potentially cause harm in light of the COVID-19 pandemic. 5G is not causing the current pandemic, nor has it been linked to other health concerns. As the director of American Public Health Association Dr. Georges C. Benjamin has stated, “COVID-19 is caused by a virus that came through a natural animal source and has no relation to 5G, or any radiation linked to technology.” As the New York Times has pointed out, much of the non-COVID-19 5G health concerns originated from Russian propaganda news source RT or trace back to a single decades-old flawed study. In short, there is no evidence to support many of the outrageous health claims regarding 5G.
I’m making the opening chapter of my new book, Evasive Entrepreneurs and the Future of Governance: How Innovation Improves Economies and Governments, available here. Also here’s the launch essay and the event launch video, which discuss how the themes discussed throughout the book have become even more visible during the coronavirus crisis.
Also, here are some lists of 10 major themes from the book; 13 key terms found in the book, and 5 innovation policy scholars who inspired my thinking. Reminder: this book is a sequel to my previous book, Permissionless Innovation: The Continuing Case for Comprehensive Technological Freedom.
I hope you will consider buying Evasive Entrepreneurs after reading this opening chapter.
I really liked this new essay, “Innovation is thriving in the fight against Covid-19,” by Norman Lewis over at Spiked, a UK-based publication. In it, he makes several important points similar to themes discussed in my book launch essay last week (“Evasive Entrepreneurialism and Technological Civil Disobedience in the Midst of a Pandemic.”) Lewis begins by noting that:
There is nothing like a crisis to concentrate the mind. And the Covid-19 catastrophe has certainly done this. It has speeded up latent trends and posed new questions. The issue of our technologically informed capacity to solve problems is just one example.
He continues on to argue:
a crisis like Covid-19 will necessarily pose new urgent questions that could not have been anticipated. New initiatives will rise to meet these. Pre-existing skills, knowledge, technologies and attitudes will always be the starting point of new problem-solving quests. Where and how we focus attention will, in part, be based on prior cultural assumptions and existing technologies, and also on the novelty of the problem to be solved.
Lewis discusses how innovative minds are pushing back against archaic regulatory barriers, business models and government regulations. As he nicely summarizes:
Unimagined solutions are being pushed while a more open attitude towards experimentation, risk-taking and side-stepping onerous and costly regulation is starting to emerge. Human needs are breaking down yesterday’s precautionary approaches.
That last line really resonated with me because it’s a major theme that runs throughout my new book, “Evasive Entrepreneurs and the Future of Governance: How Innovation Improves Economies and Governments.” As I summarized in my book launch essay:
Eventually, people take notice of how regulators and their rules encumber entrepreneurial activities, and they act to evade them when public welfare is undermined. Working around the system becomes inevitable when the permission society becomes so completely dysfunctional and counterproductive.
This was happening before the coronavirus outbreak, but the crisis has supercharged this phenomenon. Evasive entrepreneurs are taking advantage of the growth of new devices and platforms that let citizens circumvent (or perhaps just ignore) public policies that limit innovative efforts. These can include common tools like smartphones, computers, and various new interactive platforms, as well as more specialized technologies like cryptocurrencies, private drones, immersive technologies (like virtual reality), 3D printers, the “Internet of Things,” and sharing economy platforms and services. But that list just scratches the surface and the public is increasingly using these new technological capabilities to assert themselves and push back against laws and regulations that defy common sense and hold back progress.
Lawmakers and regulators need to consider a balanced response to evasive entrepreneurialism that is rooted in the realization that technology creators and users are less likely to seek to evade laws and regulations when public policies are more in line with common sense. Yesterday’s heavy-handed approaches that are rooted in the Precautionary Principle will need to be reformed to make sure progress can happen.
Read my book to find out more!
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.
