Over at the American Institute for Economic Research blog, I recently posted two new essays discussing increasing threats to innovation and discussing how to counter them. The first is on “The Radicalization of Modern Tech Criticism,” and the second discusses, “How To Defend a Culture of Innovation During the Technopanic.”
“Technology critics have always been with us, and they have sometimes helped temper society’s occasional irrational exuberance about certain innovations,” I note in the opening of the first essay. The problem is that the “technology critics sometimes go much too far and overlook the importance of finding new and better ways of satisfying both basic and complex human needs and wants.” I continue on to highlight the growing “technopanic” rhetoric we sometimes hear today, including various claims that “it’s OK to be a Luddite” and push for a “degrowth movement” that would slow the wheels of progress. That would be a disaster for humanity because, as I note in concluding that first essay:
Through ongoing trial-and-error tool building, we discover new and better ways of satisfying human needs and wants to better our lives and the lives of those around us. Human flourishing is dependent upon our collective willingness to embrace and defend the creativity, risk-taking, and experimentation that produces the wisdom and growth that propel us forward. By contrast, today’s neo-Luddite tech critics suggest that we should just be content with the tools of the past and slow down the pace of technological innovation to supposedly save us from any number of dystopian futures they predict. If they succeed, it will leave us in a true dystopia that will foreclose the entrepreneurialism and innovation opportunities that are paramount to raising the standard of living for billions of people across the world.
In the second essay, I make an attempt to sketch out a more robust vision and set of principles to counter the tech critics. Continue reading →
In my first essay for the American Institute for Economic Research, I discuss what lessons the great prophet of innovation Joseph Schumpeter might have for us in the midst of today’s “techlash” and rising tide of techopanics. I argue that, “[i]f Schumpeter were alive today, he’d have two important lessons to teach us about the techlash and why we should be wary of misguided interventions into the Digital Economy.” Specifically:
We can summarize Schumpeter’s first lesson in two words: Change happens. But disruptive change only happens in the right policy environment. Which gets to the second great lesson that Schumpeter can still teach us today, and which can also be summarized in two words: Incentives matter. Entrepreneurs will continuously drive dynamic, disruptive change, but only if public policy allows it.
It was my great pleasure to recently join Paul Matzko and Will Duffield on the Building Tomorrow podcast to discuss some of the themes in my last book and my forthcoming one. During our 50-minute conversation, which you can listen to here, we discussed:
- the “pacing problem” and how it complicates technological governance efforts;
- the steady rise of “innovation arbitrage” and medical tourism across the globe;
- the continued growth of “evasive entrepreneurialism” (i.e., efforts to evade traditional laws & regs while innovating);
- new forms of “technological civil disobedience;”
- the rapid expansion of “soft law” governance mechanism as a response to these challenges; and,
- craft beer bootlegging tips! (Seriously, I move a lot of beer in the underground barter markets).
Bounce over to the Building Tomorrow site and give the show a listen. Fun chat.
Why should we really care about technological innovation? My Mercatus Center colleague James Broughel and I have just published a paper answering that question. In “Technological Innovation and Economic Growth: A Brief Report on the Evidence,” we summarize the extensive body of evidence that discusses the relationship between innovation, growth, and human prosperity. We note that while economists, political scientists, and historians don’t agree on much, there exists widespread consensus among them that there is a symbiotic relationship between the pace of innovation and the progress of civilization. Our 27-page paper documenting the academic evidence on this issue can be downloaded on SSRN or from the Mercatus website. Here’s the abstract:
Technological innovation is a fundamental driver of economic growth and human progress. Yet some critics want to deny the vast benefits that innovation has bestowed and continues to bestow on mankind. To inform policy discussions and address the technology critics’ concerns, this paper summarizes relevant literature documenting the impact of technological innovation on economic growth and, more broadly, on living standards and human well-being. The historical record is unambiguous regarding how ongoing innovation has improved the way we live; however, the short-term disruptive aspects of technological change are real and deserve attention as well. The paper concludes with an extended discussion about the relevance of these findings for shaping cultural attitudes toward technology and the role that public policy can play in fostering innovation, growth, and ongoing improvements in the quality of life of citizens.
-Coauthored with Mercatus MA Fellow Walter Stover
Imagine visiting Amazon’s website to buy a Kindle. The product description shows a price of $120. You purchase it, only for a co-worker to tell you he bought the same device for just $100. What happened? Amazon’s algorithm predicted that you would be more willing to pay for the same device. Amazon and other companies before it, such as Orbitz, have experimented with dynamic pricing models that feed personal data collected on users to machine learning algorithms to try and predict how much different individuals are willing to pay. Instead of a fixed price point, now users could see different prices according to the profile that the company has built up of them. This has led the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, among other researchers, to explore fears that AI, in combination with big datasets, will harm consumer welfare through company manipulation of consumers to increase their profits.
The promise of personalized shopping and the threat of consumer exploitation, however, first supposes that AI will be able to predict our future preferences. By gathering data on our past purchases, our almost-purchases, our search histories, and more, some fear that advanced AI will build a detailed profile that it can then use to estimate our future preference for a certain good under particular circumstances. This will escalate until companies are able to anticipate our preferences, and pressure us at exactly the right moments to ‘persuade’ us into buying something we ordinarily would not.
Such a scenario cannot come to pass. No matter how much data companies can gather from individuals, and no matter how sophisticated AI becomes, the data to predict our future choices do not exist in a complete or capturable way. Treating consumer preferences as discoverable through enough sophisticated search technology ignores a critical distinction between information and knowledge. Information is objective, searchable, and gatherable. When we talk about ‘data’, we are usually referring to information: particular observations of specific actions, conditions or choices that we can see in the world. An individual’s salary, geographic location, and purchases are data with an objective, concrete existence that a company can gather and include in their algorithms.
Continue reading →
Policy incentives matter and have a profound affect on the innovative capacity of a nation. If policymakers erect more obstacles to innovation, it will encourage entrepreneurs to look elsewhere when considering the most hospitable place to undertake their innovative activities. This is “global innovation arbitrage,” a topic we’ve discussed many times here in the past. I’ve defined it as, “the idea that innovators can, and will with increasingly regularity, move to those jurisdictions that provide a legal and regulatory environment more hospitable to entrepreneurial activity.” We see innovation arbitrage happening in high-tech fields as far-ranging as drones, driverless cars, and genetics,among others.
US policymakers might want to consider this danger before the nation loses its competitive advantage in various high-tech fields. Today’s most pressing example arrives in the form of potentially burdensome new export control regulations. In late 2018, the US Department of Commerce’s Bureau of Industry and Security announced a “Review of Controls for Certain Emerging Technologies,” which launched an inquiry about whether to greatly expand the list of technologies that would be subjected to America’s complex export control regulations. Most of the long list of technologies under consideration (such as artificial intelligence, robotics, 3D printing, and advanced computing technologies) were “dual-use” in nature, meaning that they have many peaceful applications.
Continue reading →
By Adam Thierer & Jennifer Huddleston Skees
“
He’s making a list and checking it twice. Gonna find out who’s naughty and nice
.”
With the Christmas season approaching, apparently it’s not just Santa who is making a list. The Trump Administration has just asked whether a long list of emerging technologies are naughty or nice — as in whether they should be heavily regulated or allowed to be developed and traded freely.
If they land on the naughty list, these technologies could be subjected to complex export control regulations, which would limit research and development efforts in many emerging tech fields and inadvertently undermine U.S. innovation and competitiveness. Worse yet, it isn’t even clear there would be any national security benefit associated with such restrictions.
From Light-Touch to a Long List
Generally speaking, the Trump Administration has adopted a “light-touch” approach to the regulation of emerging technology and relied on more flexible “soft law” approaches to high-tech policy matters. That’s what makes the move to impose restrictions on the trade and usage of these emerging technologies somewhat counter-intuitive. On November 19, the Department of Commerce’s Bureau of Industry and Security launched a “
Review of Controls for Certain Emerging Technologies
.” The notice seeks public comment on “criteria for identifying emerging technologies that are essential to U.S. national security, for example because they have potential conventional weapons, intelligence collection, weapons of mass destruction, or terrorist applications or could provide the United States with a qualitative military or intelligence advantage.” Continue reading →
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
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 →
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.