1. What is progress studies and why is it so needed today?

In a sense, Progress Studies is nothing new. Progress studies goes back at least to the days of Adam Smith and plenty of important scholars have been thinking about it ever since. Those scholars and policy advocates have long been engaged in trying to figure out what’s the secret sauce that powers economic growth and human prosperity. It’s just that we didn’t call that Progress Studies in the old days.

The reason Progress Studies is important is because technological innovation has been shown to be the fundamental driver in improvements in human well-being over time.  When we can move the needle on progress, it helps individuals extend and improve their lives, incomes, and happiness. By extension, progress helps us live lives of our choosing. As Hans Rosling brilliantly argued, the goal of expanding innovation opportunities and raising incomes “is not just bigger piles of money” or more leisure time. “The ultimate goal is to have the freedom to do what we want.”

2. What don’t policymakers get about progress?

Policymakers often fail to appreciate the connection between innovation policy defaults and actual real-world innovation outcomes. Here is the biggest no-duh statement ever uttered: If you discourage innovation by default, you’ll get a lot less of it. In other words, incentives matters if you hope to create a positive innovation culture. Innovation culture refers to the various social and political attitudes, policies and entrepreneurial activities that, taken together, influence the innovative capacity of a particular region.

Thus, when policymakers make the Precautionary Principle the legal default for innovative activities, it means that government has put a red light in front of entrepreneurs and treated them and their innovations as guilty until proven innocent.  That’s a sure-fire recipe for stagnation.

The better approach is to make Permissionless Innovation our policy default and treat entrepreneurs and innovations as innocent until proven guilty. When our policy defaults offer entrepreneurs more green lights instead of red ones, it encourages more experimentation with new and better ways of doing things. In turn, this spurs business formation, job creation, new industries and products, and broad-based economic growth.

But policymakers consistently ignore this fundamental reality about the connection between policy and progress.

3. Can you think of any states or governments that are doing a good job of putting the insights of progress studies into practice?

This summer, I co-authored an essay about, “How Arizona Is Getting Innovation Culture Right,” and highlighted the many important reforms undertaken over the past eight years by Gov. Doug Ducey and the Arizona Legislature. Arizona has advanced several reforms that have helped the state get its innovation culture right both broadly and narrowly. Broadly speaking, the state took steps to minimize red tape burdens and streamline permitting process and occupational licensing mandates. They also promoted “right to earn a living” and “right to try” initiatives to broaden worker and patient opportunities.

In terms of more targeted reforms, Arizona took steps to clear the way for greater broadband rollout and encouraged experimentation with commercial drones and driverless cars. The state also helped pioneer the use of “regulatory sandboxes,” which grant innovators a temporary safe space free of excessive regulatory burdens so they can experiment with new products and services.

And then there’s the city of Miami. At the JMI event, Miami Mayor Francis Suarez delivered a keynote address and he identified 3 keys to attracting talent and building opportunity: (1) Keep taxes low, (2) keep people safe, and (3) focus on innovation. He’s following that script and making Miami a hotbed of entrepreneurial opportunity.

Mayor Suarez spoke of how he is embracing emerging technologies like blockchain to compete with the traditional geographic Goliaths of tech, like San Francisco and New York. There’s been a massive inflow of companies and investors as a result. The city has become #1 in tech job growth and the inflow of tech entrepreneurs. “It turns out that if you welcome people… they come,” he said. “They want to migrate to places that are on the cutting edge of technology” and find “pathways to prosperity.”

Miami and Arizona offer great models that other cities and states could follow if they hope to improve their own innovation culture.

4. What is the difference between progress studies and industrial organization, or industrial policy, or “government planning, but for innovation”?

Many policymakers foolishly believe there exists a precise technocratic cocktail that can immediately unlock innovation through highly targeted interventions and spending initiatives. In reality, achieving consistent growth and prosperity requires more than Big Government gimmicks. It’s a long game.

Many politicians and pundits are often fond of using machine-like metaphors and insisting that they have the ability to “fine-tune” innovative outcomes or “dial-in” economic development according to a precise formula. This is how we end up trillions in debt without much to show for it. Most recently, we’ve witnessed an “orgy of spending” on industrial policy schemes at the federal level.

The better metaphor for thinking about a nation’s innovation culture might be a plant or garden. Two of the great Progress Studies thinkers are F. A. Hayek and Joel Mokyr. Hayek once suggested that policymakers should aim to “cultivate a growth by providing the appropriate environment, in the manner in which the gardener does this for his plants.”  And Mokyr has argued that technological innovation and economic progress must be viewed as “a fragile and vulnerable plant, whose flourishing is not only dependent on the appropriate surroundings and climate, but whose life is almost always short. It is highly sensitive to the social and economic environment and can easily be arrested by relatively small external changes.”

Thus, the technocratic industrial policy mindset is always looking for “sexy” initiatives that capture a lot of short-term media attention, but typically fail to produce meaningful innovations or lasting growth. What’s more important to long-term prosperity is that policymakers get the “boring” stuff right.

The building blocks of the “boring” general approach economic development is a mix of broadly applicable tax, spending, regulatory and legal rules that help create a stable innovation ecosystem. Again, it’s like Mayor Suarez’s 3-prong approach of low taxes, safe communities, and a welcoming embrace of entrepreneurialism. That’s the secret sauce that fuels long-term progress and a sustainable prosperity.

5. Is there a disconnect between the theories of progress and the practice – in other words, is it a problem of governance forms?

Indeed, I already mentioned the difference between the Precautionary Principle and Permissionless Innovation and it’s always interesting to me how my scholars ignore the importance of these governance forms when thinking about how to advance progress. There exists an unfortunate tendency among many to either ignore or repeat the mistakes of the past. Having made significant economic and societal gains thanks to past technological progress, many pundits and policymakers come to take much of it for granted. Thus, Progress Studies requires a process of constant re-education to remind each new generation of what helped raise our living standards so dramatically over the past two centuries.

The dramatic growth in incomes, life expectancy, and human welfare were not the product of sheer luck but of important policy choices. The freedom to think, to innovate, and to trade are the three freedoms that gave us our modern riches. If our governance forms limit those foundational freedoms, our current welfare and future prosperity will suffer. This is the great lesson of Progress Studies.

Additional Reading from Adam Thierer on Progress Studies

• “Where is ‘Progress Studies’ Going?” Progress Studies, April 23, 2022.
• “Is There a Science of Progress?” AIER, August 8, 2019.
• “A Case for Innovation and Optimism,” Discourse, March 2, 2022 (A conversation between Adam Thierer and Jason Crawford of Roots of Progress).
• “Samuel Florman & the Continuing Battle over Technological Progress,” Medium, April 6, 2022.
• “How to Get the Future We Were Promised,” Discourse, January 18, 2022.
• “Defending Innovation Against Attacks from All Sides,” Discourse, November 9, 2021.
• “How Technology Expands the Horizons of Our Humanity,” Medium, November 19, 2018.
• “Is It ‘Techno-Chauvinist’ & ‘Anti-Humanist’ to Believe in the Transformative Potential of Technology?” Medium, September 18, 2018.
• “Deep Technologies & Moonshots: Should We Dare to Dream?” Medium, September 7, 2018.
• Permissionless Innovation: The Continuing Case for Comprehensive Technological Freedom, 2nd ed. (Arlington, VA: Mercatus Center at George Mason University, 2016).
• “Muddling Through: How We Learn to Cope with Technological Change,” Medium, June 30, 2014.

1. What is progress?
2. What are the most significant barriers holding back further progress?
3. If those challenges can be overcome, what does the world look like in 50 years?

I was honored to be asked by Clay Routledge to contribute answers to those questions alongside others, including: Steven Pinker (Harvard University), Jason Crawford (Roots of Progress), Matt Clancy (Institute for Progress), Marian Tupy (Human​Progress​.org), James Pethokoukis (AEI). I encourage you to jump over the roundtable and read all their excellent responses. I’ve included my answers down below:

What is progress?

Progress is the advancement of human health, happiness, and general well-being. Measures of well-being can be challenging, however, so we should consider a broad range of metrics, including: life expectancy, infant mortality, poverty measures, energy production/consumption, GDP, productivity, agricultural yields/nourishment, and access to various important goods, services, and conveniences. While each of these metrics may have limitations, taken together, they stand for something meaningful that represents a rough proxy for progress.

But we should always remember what progress means at a deeper level for every individual. Innovation and economic growth are important because they allow us to live lives of our own choosing and enjoy the fruits of a prosperous, pluralistic society.  Progress “is not just bigger piles of money,” as Hans Rosling once noted. “The ultimate goal is to have the freedom to do what we want.”  Accordingly, we should aim to broaden the range of opportunities available to all people to help them flourish.

What are the most significant barriers holding back further progress?

The most significant threat to continued progress is the risk of stagnation accompanying efforts to protect the status quo. As Virginia Postrel taught us in her wonderful book The Future & Its Enemies, we should reject stasis-minded thinking and instead shoot for a world of dynamism, which cherishes and protects the freedom to think and act differently.

Progress hinges upon the growth of knowledge. Knowledge comes from experience, and the most important experiences involve trial-and-error learning. Public attitudes and policies that restrict people and ideas from intermingling freely are a recipe for intellectual, social, and economic stagnation. Accordingly, when we consider public policies toward progress, we should first seek to identify and remove legal and regulatory impediments that limit risk-taking, entrepreneurialism, and technological innovation. As science writer Matt Ridley provocatively puts it, to unlock more growth and prosperity, we must first remove obstacles to “ideas having sex.”

The free movement of people and capital is essential to this process. Openness to immigration is the easiest way for a nation to expand its potential for innovation and growth. But domestic labor skills and mobility are equally important. For entrepreneurs and workers, we need to reframe the battle for progress as “the freedom to innovate” and “the right to earn a living.”

Unfortunately, many barriers exist to advancing those goals, like occupational licensing rules and permitting processes, cronyist industrial protectionist schemes, inefficient tax schemes, and many other layers of regulatory red tape. Reforming or eliminating such rules is crucial for broadening opportunities.

Finally, we need to address cultural barriers to progress. Technology and entrepreneurs often get a bad rap in the media and popular culture. Fear and pessimism dominate their narratives. We must do a better job communicating the benefits of openness to change and give people more reasons to be optimistic about a dynamic future.

If those challenges can be overcome, what does the world look like in 50 years?

I agree with Yogi Berra that “It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.” Nonetheless, history shows we can achieve remarkable things when we get the prerequisites for progress right and let people tap into their inherent inquisitiveness and inventiveness. Moving the needle on innovation and growth even just a little will yield compounding returns to future generations. But we should dare to dream bigger and think what progress means for each person today and in the future.

A pro-progress agenda will help us lead longer lives and significantly expand our capabilities because that is what people have always desired most. Accordingly, I believe the most significant advance of the next 50 years will be a radical increase in life expectancy and dramatic improvements in our physical and mental capabilities while we are alive.

Today’s tech critics often claim that technological innovation somehow undermines our humanity. They couldn’t be more wrong. There are few things more human than acts of invention. When we take steps to address practical human needs and wants, we enrich our lives and the lives of countless others. The future will be wonderful, so long as we are free to make it so.

[This is a draft of a section of a forthcoming study on “A Flexible Governance Framework for Artificial Intelligence,” which I hope to complete shortly. I welcome feedback. I have also cross-posted this essay at Medium.]

Debates about how to embed ethics and best practices into AI product design is where the question of public policy defaults becomes important. To the extent AI design becomes the subject of legal or regulatory decision-making, a choice must be made between two general approaches: the precautionary principle or the proactionary principle.[1] While there are many hybrid governance approaches in between these two poles, the crucial issue is whether the initial legal default for AI technologies will be set closer to the red light of the precautionary principle (i.e., permissioned innovation) or to the green light of the proactionary principle (i.e., (permissionless innovation). Each governance default will be discussed.

The Problem with the Precautionary Principle as the Policy Default for AI

The precautionary principle holds that innovations are to be curtailed or potentially even disallowed until the creators of those new technologies can prove that they will not cause any theoretical harms. The classic formulation of the precautionary principle can be found in the “Wingspan Statement,” which was formulated at an academic conference that took place at the Wingspread Conference Center in Wisconsin in 1998. It read: “Where an activity raises threats of harm to the environment or human health, precautionary measures should be taken even if some cause and effect relationships are not fully established scientifically.”[2] There have been many reformulations of the precautionary principle over time but, as legal scholar Cass Sunstein has noted, “in all of them, the animating idea is that regulators should take steps to protect against potential harms, even if causal chains are unclear and even if we do not know that those harms will come to fruition.”[3] Put simply, under almost all varieties of the precautionary principle, innovation is treated as “guilty until proven innocent.”^[4] We can also think of this as permissioned innovation.

The logic animating the precautionary principle reflects a well-intentioned desire to play it safe in the face of uncertainty. The problem lies in the way this instinct gets translated into law and regulation. Making the precautionary principle the public policy default for any given technology or sector has a strong bearing on how much innovation we can expect to flow from it. When trial-and-error experimentation is preemptively forbidden or discouraged by law, it can limit many of the positive outcomes that typically accompany efforts by people to be creative and entrepreneurial. This can, in turn, give rise to different risks for society in terms of forgone innovation, growth, and corresponding opportunities to improve human welfare in meaningful ways.

St. Thomas Aquinas once observed that if the sole goal of a captain were to preserve their ship, the captain would keep it in port forever. But that clearly is not the captain’s highest goal. Aquinas was making a simple but powerful point: There can be no reward without some effort and even some risk-taking. Ship captains brave the high seas because they are in search of a greater good, such as recognition, adventure, or income. Keeping ships in port forever would preserve their vessels, but at what cost?

Similarly, consider the wise words of Wilbur Wright, who pioneered human flight. Few people better understood the profound risks associated with entrepreneurial activities. After all, Wilbur and his brother were trying to figure out how to literally lift humans off the Earth. The dangers were real, but worth taking. “If you are looking for perfect safety,” Wright said, “you would do well to sit on a fence and watch the birds.” Humans would have never taken to the skies if the Wright brothers had not gotten off the fence and taken the risks they did. Risk-taking drives innovation and, over the long-haul, improves our well-being.^[5] Nothing ventured, nothing gained.

These lessons can be applied to public policy by considering what would happen if, in the name of safety, public officials told captains to never leave port or told aspiring pilots to never leave the ground. The opportunity cost of inaction can be hard to quantify, but it should be clear that if we organized our entire society around a rigid application of the precautionary principle, progress and prosperity would suffer.

Heavy-handed preemptive restraints on creative acts can have deleterious effects because they raise barriers to entry, increase compliance costs, and create more risk and uncertainty for entrepreneurs and investors. Thus, it is the unseen costs—primarily in the form of forgone innovation opportunities—that makes the precautionary principle so problematic as a policy default. This is why scientist Martin Rees speaks of “the hidden cost of saying no” that is associated with the precautionary principle.[6]

The precise way the precautionary principle leads to this result is that it derails the so-called learning curve by limiting opportunities to learn from trial-and-error experimentation with new and better ways of doing things.[7] The learning curve refers to the way that individuals, organizations, or industries are able to learn from their mistakes, improve their designs, enhance productivity, lower costs, and then offer superior products based on the resulting knowledge.[8] In his recent book, Where Is My Flying Car?, J. Storrs Hall documents how, over the last half century, “regulation clobbered the learning curve” for many important technologies in the U.S., especially nuclear, nanotech, and advanced aviation.[9] Hall shows how society was denied many important innovations due to endless foot-dragging or outright opposition to change from special interests, anti-innovation activists, and over-zealous bureaucrats.

In many cases, innovators don’t even know what they are up against because, as many scholars have noted, “the precautionary principle, in all of its forms, is fraught with vagueness and ambiguity.”[10] It creates confusion and fear about the wisdom of taking action in the face of uncertainty. Worst case thinking paralyzes regulators who aim to “play it safe” at all costs. The result is an endless snafu of red tape as layer upon layer of mandates build up and block progress. The result is what many scholars now decry as a culture of “vetocracy,” which describes the many veto points within modern political systems that hold back innovation, development and economic opportunity.[11] This endless accumulation of potential veto points in the policy process in the form of mandates and restrictions can greatly curtail innovation opportunities. “Like sediment in a harbor, law has steadily accumulated, mainly since the 1960s, until most productive activity requires slogging through a legal swamp,” says Philip K. Howard, chair of Common Good.[12] “Too much law,” he argues, “can have similar effects as too little law,” because:

People slow down, they become defensive, they don’t initiate projects because they are surrounded by legal risks and bureaucratic hurdles. They tiptoe through the day looking over their shoulders rather than driving forward on the power of their instincts. Instead of trial and error, they focus on avoiding error.[13]

This is exactly why it is important that policymakers not get too caught up in attempts to preemptively resolve every potential hypothetical worst case scenarios associated with AI technologies. The problem with that approach was succinctly summarized by the political scientist Aaron Wildavsky when he noted, “If you can do nothing without knowing first how it will turn out, you cannot do anything at all.”^[14] Or, as I have stated in a book on this topic, “living in constant fear of worst-case scenarios—and premising public policy on them—means that best-case scenarios will never come about.”[15]

This does not mean society should dismiss all concerns about the risks surrounding AI. Some technological risks do necessitate a degree of precautionary policy, but proportionality is crucial, notes Gabrielle Bauer, a Toronto-based medical writer. “Used too liberally,” she argues, “the precautionary principle can keep us stuck in a state of extreme risk-aversion, leading to cumbersome policies that weigh down our lives. To get to the good parts of life, we need to accept some risk.”[16] It is not enough to simply hypothesize that certain AI innovations might entail some risk. The critics need to prove it using risk analysis techniques that properly weigh both the potential costs and benefits.^[17] Moreover, when conducting such analyses, the full range of trade-offs associated with preemptive regulation must be evaluated. Again, where precautionary constraints might deny society life-enriching devices or services, those costs must be acknowledged.

Generally speaking, the most extreme precautionary controls should only be imposed when the potential harms in question are highly probable, tangible, immediate, irreversible, catastrophic, or directly threatening to life and limb in some fashion.^[18] In the context of AI and ML systems, it may be the case that such a test is satisfied already for law enforcement use of certain algorithmic profiling techniques. And that test is satisfied for so-called “killer robots,” or autonomous military technology.[19] These are often described as “existential risks.” The precautionary principle is the right default in these cases because it is abundantly clear how unrestricted use would have catastrophic consequences. For similar reasons, governments have long imposed comprehensive restrictions on certain types of weapons.[20] And although nuclear and chemical technologies have many important applications, their use must also be limited to some degree even outside of militaristic applications because they can pose grave danger if misused.

But the vast majority of AI-enabled technologies are not like this. Most innovations should not be treated the same a hand grenade or a ticking time bomb. In reality, most algorithmic failures will be more mundane and difficult to foresee in advance. By their very nature, algorithms are constantly evolving because programs and systems are being endlessly tweaked by designers to improve them. In his books on the evolution of engineering and systems design, Henry Petroski has noted that “the shortcomings of things are what drive their evolution.”[21] The normal state of things is “ubiquitous imperfection,” he notes, and it is precisely that reality that drives efforts to continuously innovate and iterate.[22]

Regulations rooted in the precautionary principle hope to preemptively find and address product imperfections before any harm comes from them. In reality, and as explained more below, it is only through ongoing experimentation that we find both the nature of failures and the knowledge to know how to correct them. As Petroski observes, “the history of engineering in general, may be told in its failures as well as in its triumphs. Success may be grand, but disappointment can often teach us more.”^[23] This is particularly true for complex algorithmic systems, where rapid-fire innovation and incessant iteration are the norm.

Importantly, the problem with precautionary regulation for AI is not just that it might be over-inclusive in seeking to regulate hypothetical problems that never develop. Precautionary regulation can also be under-inclusive by missing problematic behavior or harms that no one anticipated before the fact. Only experience and experimentation reveal certain problems.

In sum, we should not presume that there is a clear preemptive regulatory solution to every problem some people raise about AI, nor should we presume we can even accurately identify all such problems that might come about in the future. Moreover, some risks will never be eliminated entirely, meaning that risk mitigation is the wiser approach. This is why a more flexible bottom-up governance strategy focused on responsiveness and resiliency makes more sense than heavy-handed, top-down strategies that would only avoid risks by making future innovations extremely difficult if not impossible.

The “Proactionary Principle” is the Better Default for AI Policy

The previous section made it clear why the precautionary principle should generally not be used as our policy default if we hope to encourage the development of AI applications and services. What we need is a policy approach that:

• objectively evaluates the concerns raised about AI systems and applications;
• considers whether more flexible governance approaches might be available to address them; and,
• does so without resorting to the precautionary principle as a first-order response.

The proactionary principle is the better general policy default for AI because it satisfies these three objectives.[24] Philosopher Max More defines the proactionary principle as the idea that policymakers should, “[p]rotect the freedom to innovate and progress while thinking and planning intelligently for collateral effects.”^[25] There are different names for this same concept, including the innovation principle, which Daniel Castro and Michael McLaughlin of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation say represents the belief that “the vast majority of new innovations are beneficial and pose little risk, so government should encourage them.”^[26] Permissionless innovation is another name for the same idea. Permissionless innovation refers to the idea that experimentation with new technologies and business models should generally be permitted by default.^[27]

What binds these concepts together is the belief that innovation should generally be treated as innocent until proven guilty. There will be risks and failures, of course, but the permissionless innovation mindset views them as important learning experiences. These experiences are chances for individuals, organizations, and all of society to make constant improvements through incessant experimentation with new and better ways of doing things.[28] As Virginia Postrel argued in her 1998 book, The Future and Its Enemies, progress demands “a decentralized, evolutionary process” and mindset in which mistakes are not viewed as permanent disasters but instead as “the correctable by-products of experimentation.”^[29] “No one wants to learn by mistakes,” Petroski once noted, “but we cannot learn enough from successes to go beyond the state of the art.”^[30] Instead we must realize, as other scholars have observed, that “[s]uccess is the culmination of many failures”^[31] and understand “failure as the natural consequence of risk and complexity.”^[32]

This is why the default for public policy for AI innovation should, whenever possible, be more green lights than red ones to allow for the maximum amount of trial-and-error experimentation, which encourages ongoing learning.[33] “Experimentation matters,” observes Stefan H. Thomke of the Harvard Business School, “because it fuels the discovery and creation of knowledge and thereby leads to the development and improvement of products, processes, systems, and organizations.”^[34]

Obviously, risks and mistakes are “the very things regulators inherently want to avoid,”^[35] but “if innovators fear they will be punished for every mistake,” Daniel Castro and Alan McQuinn argue, “then they will be much less assertive in trying to develop the next new thing.”^[36] And for all the reasons already stated, that would represent the end of progress because it would foreclose the learning process that allows society to discover new, better, and safer ways of doing things. Technology author Kevin Kelly puts it this way:

technologies must be evaluated in action, by action. We test them in labs, we try them out in prototypes, we use them in pilot programs, we adapt our expectations, we monitor their alterations, we redefine their aims as they are modified, we retest them given actual behavior, we re-direct them to new jobs when we are not happy with their outcomes.[37]

In other words, the proactionary principle appreciates the benefits that flow from learning by doing. The goal is to continuously assess and prioritize risks from natural and human-made systems alike, and then formulate and reformulate our toolkit of possible responses to those risks using the most practical and effective solutions available. This should make it clear that the proactionary approach is not synonymous with anarchy. Various laws, government bodies, and especially the courts play an important role in protecting rights, health, and order. But policies need to be formulated such that innovators and innovation are given the benefit of the doubt and risks are analyzed and addressed in a more flexible fashion.

Some of the most effective ways to address potential AI risks already exist in the form of “soft law” and decentralized governance solution. These will be discussed at greater length below. But existing legal remedies include various common law solutions (torts, class actions, contract law, etc), recall authority possessed by many regulatory agencies, and various consumer protection policies. Ex post remedies are generally superior to ex ante prior restraints if we hope to maximize innovation opportunities. Ex ante regulatory defaults are too often set closer to the red light of the precautionary principle and then enforced through volumes of convoluted red tape.

This is what the World Economic Forum has referred to as a “regulate-and-forget” system of governance,[38] or what others call a “build-and-freeze model” or regulation.[39] In such technological governance regimes, older rules are almost never revisited, even after new social, economic, and technical realities render them obsolete or ineffective.[40] A 2017 survey of U.S. Code of Regulations by Deloitte consultants revealed that 68 percent of federal regulations have never been updated and that 17 percent have only been updated once.^[41] Public policies for complex and fast-moving technologies like AI cannot be set in stone and forgotten like that if America hopes to remain on the cutting edge of this sector.

Advocates of the proactionary principle look to counter this problem not by eliminating all laws or agencies, but by bringing them in line with flexible governance principles rooted in more decentralized approaches to policy concerns.[42] As many regulatory advocates suggest, it is important to embed or “bake in” various ethical best practices into AI systems to ensure that they benefit humanity. But this, too, is a process of ongoing learning and there are many ways to accomplish such goals without derailing important technological advances. What is often referred to as “value alignment” or “ethically-aligned design” is challenged by the fact that humans regularly disagree profoundly about many moral issues.[43] “Before we can put our values into machines, we have to figure out how to make our values clear and consistent,” says Harvard University psychologist Joshua D. Greene.[44]

The “Three Laws of Robotics” famously formulated decades ago by Isaac Asimov in his science fiction stories continue to be widely discussed today as a guide to embedding ethics into machines.[45] They read:

1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws.

What is usually forgotten about these principles, as AI expert Melanie Mitchell reminds us, is the way Asimov, “often focused on the unintended consequences of programming ethical rules into robots,” and how he made it clear that, if applied too literally, “such a set of rules would inevitably fail.”[46]

This is why flexibility and humility are essential virtues when thinking about AI policy. The optimal governance regime for AI can be shaped by responsible innovation practices and embed important ethical principles by design without immediately defaulting to a rigid application of the precautionary principle.[47] In other words, an innovation policy regime rooted in the proactionary principle can also be infused with the same values that animate a precautionary principle-based system.[48] The difference is that the proactionary principle-based approach will look to achieve these goals in a more flexible fashion using a variety of experimental governance approaches and ex post legal enforcement options, while also encouraging still more innovation to solve problems past innovations may have caused.

To reiterate, not every AI risk is foreseeable, and many risks and harms are more amorphous or uncertain. In this sense, the wisest governance approach for AI was recently outlined by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in its initial draft AI Risk Management Framework, which is a multistakeholder effort “to describe how the risks from AI-based systems differ from other domains and to encourage and equip many different stakeholders in AI to address those risks purposefully.”[49] NIST notes that the goal of the Framework is:

to be responsive to new risks as they emerge rather than enumerating all known risks in advance. This flexibility is particularly important where impacts are not easily foreseeable, and applications are evolving rapidly. While AI benefits and some AI risks are well-known, the AI community is only beginning to understand and classify incidents and scenarios that result in harm.[50]

This is a sensible framework for how to address AI risks because it makes it clear that it will be difficult to preemptively identify and address all potential AI risks. At the same time, there will be a continuing need to advance AI innovation while addressing AI-related harms. The key to striking that balance will be decentralized governance approaches and soft law techniques described below.

[Note: The subsequent sections of the study will detail how decentralized governance approaches and soft law techniques already are helping to address concerns about AI risks.]

Endnotes:

[1]     Adam Thierer, Permissionless Innovation: The Continuing Case for Comprehensive Technological Freedom, 2nd ed. (Arlington, VA: Mercatus Center at George Mason University, 2016): 1-6, 23-38; Adam Thierer, Evasive Entrepreneurs & the Future of Governance (Washington, DC: Cato Institute, 2020): 48-54.

[2]     “Wingspread Statement on the Precautionary Principle,” January 1998, https://www.gdrc.org/u-gov/precaution-3.html.

[3]     Cass R. Sunstein, Laws of Fear: Beyond the Precautionary Principle (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005). (“The Precautionary Principle takes many forms. But in all of them, the animating idea is that regulators should take steps to protect against potential harms, even if causal chains are unclear and even if we do not know that those harms will come to fruition.”)

[4]     Henk van den Belt, “Debating the Precautionary Principle: ‘Guilty until Proven Innocent’ or ‘Innocent until Proven Guilty’?” Plant Physiology 132 (2003): 1124.

[5]     H.W. Lewis, Technological Risk (New York: WW. Norton & Co., 1990): x. (“The history of the human race would be dreary indeed if none of our forebears had ever been willing to accept risk in return for potential achievement.”)

[6]     Martin Rees, On the Future: Prospects for Humanity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018): 136.

[7]     Adam Thierer, “Failing Better: What We Learn by Confronting Risk and Uncertainty,” in Sherzod Abdukadirov (ed.), Nudge Theory in Action: Behavioral Design in Policy and Markets (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016): 65-94.

[8]     Adam Thierer, “How to Get the Future We Were Promised,” Discourse, January 18, 2022, https://www.discoursemagazine.com/culture-and-society/2022/01/18/how-to-get-the-future-we-were-promised.

[9]     J. Storrs Hall, Where Is My Flying Car? (San Francisco: Stripe Press, 2021)

[10]    Derek Turner and Lauren Hartzell Nichols, “The Lack of Clarity in the Precautionary Principle,” Environmental Values, Vol 13, No. 4 (2004): 449.

[11]    William Rinehart, “Vetocracy, the Costs of Vetos and Inaction,” Center for Growth & Opportunity at Utah State University, March 24, 2022, https://www.thecgo.org/benchmark/vetocracy-the-costs-of-vetos-and-inaction; Adam Thierer, “Red Tape Reform is the Key to Building Again,” The Hill, April 28, 2022, https://thehill.com/opinion/finance/3470334-red-tape-reform-is-the-key-to-building-again.

[12]    Philip K. Howard, “Radically Simplify Law,” Cato Institute, Cato Online Forum, http://www.cato.org/publications/cato-online-forum/radically-simplify-law.

[13]    Ibid.

^[14]    Aaron Wildavsky, Searching for Safety (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1989): 38.

[15]    Thierer, Permissionless Innovation, at 2.

[16]    Gabrielle Bauer, “Danger: Caution Ahead,” The New Atlantis, February 4, 2022, https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/danger-caution-ahead.

[17]    Richard B. Belzer, “Risk Assessment, Safety Assessment, and the Estimation of Regulatory Benefits” (Mercatus Working Paper, Mercatus Center at George Mason University, Arlington, VA, 2012), 5, http://mercatus.org/publication/risk-assessment-safety-assessment-and-estimation-regulatory-benefits; John D. Graham and Jonathan Baert Wiener, eds. Risk vs. Risk: Tradeoffs in Protecting Health and the Environment, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995).

[18]    Thierer, Permissionless Innovation, at 33-8.

[19]    Adam Satariano, Nick Cumming-Bruce and Rick Gladstone, “Killer Robots Aren’t Science Fiction. A Push to Ban Them Is Growing,” New York Times, December 17, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/17/world/robot-drone-ban.html.

[20]    Adam Thierer, “Soft Law: The Reconciliation of Permissionless & Responsible Innovation,” in Adam Thierer, Evasive Entrepreneurs & the Future of Governance (Washington, DC: Cato Institute, 2020): 183-240, https://www.mercatus.org/publications/technology-and-innovation/soft-law-reconciliation-permissionless-responsible-innovation.

[21]    Henry Petroski, The Evolution of Useful Things (New York: Vintage Books, 1994): 34.

[22]    Ibid., 27,

[23]    Henry Petroski, To Engineer is Human: The Role of Failure in Successful Design (New York: Vintage, 1992): 9.

[24]    James Lawson, These Are the Droids You’re Looking For: An Optimistic Vision for Artificial Intelligence, Automation and the Future of Work (London: Adam Smith Institute, 2020): 86, https://www.adamsmith.org/research/these-are-the-droids-youre-looking-for.

[25]    Max More, “The Proactionary Principle (March 2008),” Max More’s Strategic Philosophy, March 28, 2008, http://strategicphilosophy.blogspot.com/2008/03/proactionary-principle-march-2008.html.

[26]    Daniel Castro & Michael McLaughlin, “Ten Ways the Precautionary Principle Undermines Progress in Artificial Intelligence,” Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, February 4, 2019, https://itif.org/publications/2019/02/04/ten-ways-precautionary-principle-undermines-progress-artificial-intelligence.

[27]    Thierer, Permissionless Innovation.

[28]    Thierer, “Failing Better.”

[29]    Virginia Postrel, The Future and Its Enemies (New York: The Free Press, 1998): xiv.

[30]    Henry Petroski, To Engineer is Human: The Role of Failure in Successful Design (New York: Vintage, 1992): 62.

[31]    Kevin Ashton, How to Fly a Horse: The Secret History of Creation, Invention, and Discovery (New York: Doubleday, 2015): 67.

[32]    Megan McArdle, The Up Side of Down: Why Failing Well is the Key to Success (New York: Viking, 2014), 214.

[33]    F. A. Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty (London: Routledge, 1960, 1990): 81. (“Humiliating to human pride as it may be, we must recognize that the advance and even preservation of civilization are dependent upon a maximum of opportunity for accidents to happen.”)

[34]    Stefan H. Thomke, Experimentation Matters: Unlocking the Potential of New Technologies for Innovation (Harvard Business Review Press, 2003), 1.

[35]    Daniel Castro and Alan McQuinn, “How and When Regulators Should Intervene,” Information Technology and Innovation Foundation Reports, (February 2015): 2 http://www.itif.org/publications/how-and-when-regulators-should-intervene.

[36]    Ibid.

[37]    Kevin Kelly, “The Pro-Actionary Principle,” The Technium, November 11, 2008, https://kk.org/thetechnium/the-pro-actiona.

[38]    World Economic Forum, Agile Regulation for the Fourth Industrial Revolution (Geneva: Switzerland: 2020): 4, https://www.weforum.org/projects/agile-regulation-for-the-fourth-industrial-revolution.

[39]    Jordan Reimschisel and Adam Thierer, “’Build & Freeze’ Regulation Versus Iterative Innovation,” Plain Text, November 1, 2017, https://readplaintext.com/build-freeze-regulation-versus-iterative-innovation-8d5a8802e5da.

[40]    Adam Thierer, “Spring Cleaning for the Regulatory State,” AIER, May 23, 2019, https://www.aier.org/article/spring-cleaning-for-the-regulatory-state.

[41]    Daniel Byler, Beth Flores & Jason Lewris, “Using Advanced Analytics to Drive Regulatory Reform: Understanding Presidential Orders on Regulation Reform,” Deloitte, 2017, https://www2.deloitte.com/us/en/pages/public-sector/articles/advanced-analytics-federal-regulatory-reform.html.

[42]    Adam Thierer, Governing Emerging Technology in an Age of Policy Fragmentation and Disequilibrium, American Enterprise Institute (April 2022), https://platforms.aei.org/can-the-knowledge-gap-between-regulators-and-innovators-be-narrowed.

[43]    Brian Christian, The Alignment Problem: Machine Learning and Human Values (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2020).

[44]    Joshua D. Greene, “Our Driverless Dilemma,” Science (June 2016): 1515.

[45]    Susan Leigh Anderson, “Asimov’s ‘Three Laws of Robotics’ and Machine Metaethics,” AI and Society, Vol. 22, No. 4, (2008): 477-493.

[46]    Melanie Mitchell, Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019): 126 [Kindle edition.]

[47]    Thomas A. Hemphill, “The Innovation Governance Dilemma: Alternatives to the Precautionary Principle,” Technology in Society, Vol. 63 (2020): 6, https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/teinso/v63y2020ics0160791x2030751x.html.

[48]    Adam Thierer, “Are ‘Permissionless Innovation’ and ‘Responsible Innovation’ Compatible?” Technology Liberation Front, July 12, 2017, https://techliberation.com/2017/07/12/are-permissionless-innovation-and-responsible-innovation-compatible.

[49]    The National Institute of Standards and Technology, “AI Risk Management Framework: Initial Draft,” (March 17, 2022): 1, https://www.nist.gov/itl/ai-risk-management-framework.

[50]    Ibid., at 5.

It is my honor to have the lead paper in this new series. My 19-page essay is entitled, Governing Emerging Technology in an Age of Policy Fragmentation and Disequilibrium, and it represents my effort to concisely tie together all my writing over the past 30 years on governance trends for the Internet and related technologies. The key takeaways from my essay are:

• Traditional governance mechanisms are being strained by modern technological and political realities. Newer technologies, especially digital ones, are developing at an ever-faster rate and building on top of each other, blurring lines between sectors.
• Congress has failed to keep up with the quickening pace of technological change. It also continues to delegate most of its constitutional authority to agencies to deal with most policy concerns. But agencies are overwhelmed too. This situation is unlikely to change, creating a governance gap.
• Decentralized governance techniques are filling the gap. Soft law—informal, iterative, experimental, and collaborative solutions—represents the new normal for technological governance. This is particularly true for information sectors, including social media platforms, for which the First Amendment acts as a major constraint on formal regulation anyway.
• No one-size-fits-all tool can address the many governance issues related to fast-paced science and technology developments; therefore, decentralized governance mechanisms may be better suited to address newer policy concerns.

My arguments will frustrate many people of varying political dispositions because I adopt a highly pragmatic approach to technological governance. No matter what your preferred ideal state of affairs looks like in terms of technological governance, you’re bound to be disappointed by the way high-tech policy is unfolding today. Many people desire bright-letter hard law that has government(s) establishing comprehensive, precautionary regulation of various tech sectors. Others prefer a clearly defined but more light-touch policy regime for emerging technology. Alas, neither of these preferred hard law dispositions describe the world we live in today, nor will either of them likely govern the future. My essay outlines a variety of reasons why such hard law approaches are breaking down today, including general legislative dysfunctionalism, the endless delegation of power from Congress to regulatory agencies or the states, and the the intensifying “pacing problem” (i.e., the fact that technological change is happening at a must faster rate than policy change).

In light of this, I argue:

it is smart to think practically about alternative governance frameworks when traditional hard-law approaches prove slow or ineffective in addressing governance needs. It is also wise to consider alternative governance frameworks that might address the occasional downsides of disruptive technologies without completely foreclosing ongoing innovation opportunities the way many hard-law solutions would.

I also show that, whether anyone cares to admit it or not, we already live in a world of multiplying “soft law” mechanisms and decentralized governance approaches. I use the example of how these new governance trends are unfolding for autonomous vehicles, but note how we see decentralized governance approaches being utilized in many other sectors. This is equally true across the Atlantic where the United Kingdom is increasingly experimenting with new governance approached for emerging technologies.

What counts as “soft law” or “decentralized governance” is an open-ended and ever-changing topic of discussion. But I note that it, at a minimum, it includes: multi-stakeholder processes, experimental “sandboxes,” industry best practices or codes of conduct, technical standards, private certifications, agency workshops and guidance documents, informal negotiations, and education and awareness building efforts. I unpack these ideas in the essay in more detail.

For social media, soft law approaches are the current governance norm, even as hard law regulatory proposals continue to multiply rapidly. But I note that despite all that pressure for more formal regulatory governance of social media platforms, the First Amendment presents a formidable barrier to most of those proposals. Thus, soft law will continue to be the dominant governance approach here. I also conclude by predicting that that soft law will become the dominant approach for artificial intelligence, too, even as regulatory proposals multiply there as well.

I’ll have more to say about my paper and other papers in the AEI series in coming weeks and month. For now, I encourage you to jump over to the website AEI has set up for the series and take a look at my new paper.

Additional Reading :

• Ryan Hagemann, Jennifer Huddleston Skees, and Adam Thierer, “Soft Law for Hard Problems: The Governance of Emerging Technologies in an Uncertain Future,” Colorado Technology Law Journal 17 (2018): 37–130, https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3118539.
• Adam Thierer, “Soft Law in U.S. ICT Sectors: Four Case Studies,” Jurimetrics 61, no. 1 (Fall 2020): 79–119, https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3777490.
• Adam Thierer, “Congress as a Non-Actor in Tech Policy,” Medium, February 4, 2020, https://medium.com/@AdamThierer/congress-as-a-non-actor-in-tech-policy-5f3153313e11.
• Adam Thierer, “The Pacing Problem and the Future of Technology Regulation,” Bridge, August 8, 2018, https://www.mercatus.org/bridge/commentary/pacing-problem-and-future-technology-regulation.
• Adam Thierer, “Artificial Intelligence Governance in the Obama–Trump Years,” IEEE Transactions on Technology and Society, Vol, 2, Issue 4, (2021), https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4013880.
• Adam Thierer, “Left and Right Take Aim at Big Tech—and the First Amendment,” Hill, December 8, 2021, https://thehill.com/opinion/technology/584874-left-and-right-take-aim-at-big-tech-and-the-first-amendment.
• Adam Thierer, “The Classical Liberal Approach to Digital Media Free Speech Issues,” Technology Liberation Front, December 8, 2021, https://techliberation.com/2021/12/08/the-classical-liberal-approach-to-digital-media-free-speech-issues.
• Adam Thierer, “The Great Deplatforming of 2021,” Discourse, January 14, 2021, https://www.discoursemagazine.com/politics/2021/01/14/the-great-deplatforming-of-2021.

As I note in my latest regular column for The Hill, it seems like everyone these days is talking about the importance of America “building again.” For example, take a look at this compendium of essays I put together where scholars and pundits have been making the case for “building again” in various ways and contexts. It would seem that the phrase is on everyone’s lips. “These calls include many priorities,” I note, “but what unifies them is the belief that the nation needs to develop new innovations and industries to improve worker opportunities, economic growth and U.S. global competitive standing.”

What I fear, however, is that “building again” has become more of a convenient catch line than anything else. It seems like few people are willing to spell out exactly what it will take to get that started. My new column suggests that the most important place to start is “to cut back the thicket of red tape and stifling bureaucratic procedures that limit the productiveness of the American workforce.” I cite recent reports and data documenting the enormous burden that regulatory accumulation imposes on American innovators and workers. I then discuss how to get reforms started at all levels of government to get the problem under control and help us start building again in earnest. Jump over to The Hill to read the entire essay.

Chances are you’ve never heard of him, however. As prolific as he was, Florman did not command as much attention as the endless parade of tech critics whose apocalyptic predictions grabbed all the headlines. An engineer by training, Florman became concerned about the growing criticism of his profession throughout the 1960s and 70s. He pushed back against that impulse in a series of books over the next two decades, including most notably: The Existential Pleasures of Engineering (1976), Blaming Technology: The Irrational Search for Scapegoats (1981), and The Civilized Engineer (1987). He was also a prolific essayist, penning hundreds of articles for a wide variety of journals, magazines, and newspapers beginning in 1959. He was also a regular columnist for MIT Technology Review for sixteen years.

Florman’s primary mission in his books and many of those essays was to defend the engineering profession against attacks emanating from various corners. More broadly, as he noted in a short autobiography on his personal website, Florman was interested in discussing, “the relationship of technology to the general culture.”

Florman could be considered a “rational optimist,” to borrow Matt Ridley’s notable term [1] for those of us who believe, as I have summarized elsewhere, that there is a symbiotic relationship between innovation, economic growth, pluralism, and human betterment.[2] Rational optimists are highly pragmatic and base their optimism on facts and historical analysis, not on dogmatism or blind faith in any particular viewpoint, ideology, or gut feeling. But they are unified in the belief that technological change is a crucial component of moving the needle on progress and prosperity.

Florman’s unique contribution to advancing rational optimism came in the way he itemized the various claims made by tech critics and then powerfully debunked each one of them. He was providing other rational optimists with a blueprint for how defend technological innovation against its many critics and criticisms. As he argued in The Civilized Engineer, we need to “broaden our conception of engineering to include all technological creativity.”^[3] And then we need to defend it with vigor.

In 1982, the American Society of Mechanical Engineers appropriately awarded Florman the distinguished Ralph Coats Roe Medal for his “outstanding contribution toward a better public understanding and appreciation of the engineer’s worth to contemporary society.” Carl Sagan had won the award the previous year. Alas, Forman never attained the same degree of notoriety as Sagan. That is a shame because Florman was as much a philosopher and a historian as he was an engineer, and his robust thinking on technology and society deserves far greater attention. More generally, his plain-spoken style and straight-forward defense of technological progress continues to be a model for how to counter today’s techno-pessimists.

This essay highlights some of the most important themes and arguments found in Florman’s writing and explains its continuing relevance to the ongoing battles over technology and progress.

What Motivates The “Antitechnologists”?

Florman was interested in answering questions about what motivates both engineers as well as their critics. He dug deep into psychology and history to figure out what makes these people tick. Who are engineers, and why do they do what they do? That was his primary question, and we will turn to his answers momentarily. But he also wanted to know what drove the technology critics to oppose innovation so vociferously.

Florman’s most important contribution to the history of ideas lies in his 6-part explanation of “the main themes that run through the works of the antitechnologists.”^[4] Florman used the term “antitechnologists” to describe the many different critics of engineering and innovation. He recognized that the term wasn’t perfect and that some people he labelled as such would object to it. Nevertheless, because they offer no umbrella label for their movement or way of thinking, Florman noted that opposition to, or general discomfort with, technology was what motivated these critics. Hence, the label “antitechnologists.”

Florman surveyed a wide swath of technological critics from many different disciplines—philosophy, sociology, law, and other fields. He condensed their main criticisms into six general points:

• Technology is a “thing” or a force that has escaped from human control and is spoiling our lives.
• Technology forces man to do work that is tedious and degrading.
• Technology forces man to consume things that he does not really desire.
• Technology creates an elite class of technocrats, and so disenfranchises the masses.
• Technology cripples man by cutting him off from the natural world in which he evolved.
• Technology provides man with technical diversions which destroy his existential sense of his own being.^[5]

No one else before this had ever crafted such a taxonomy of complaints from tech critics, and no one has done it better since Florman did so in 1976. In fact, it is astonishing how well Florman’s list continues to identify what motivates modern technology critics. New technologies have come and gone, but these same concerns tend to be brought up again and again. Florman’s books addressed and debunked each of these concerns in powerful fashion.

The Relentless Pessimism & Elitism of the Antitechnologists

Florman identified the way a persistent pessimism unifies antitechnologists. “Our intellectual journals are full of gloomy tracts that depict a society debased by technology,” he noted.^[6] What motivated such gloom and doom? “It is fear. They are terrified by the scene unfolding before their eyes.”^[7] He elaborated:

“The antitechnologists are frightened; they counsel halt and retreat. They tell the people that Satan (technology) is leading them astray, but the people have heard that story before. They will not stand still for vague promises of a psychic contentment that is to follow in the wake of voluntary temperance.”^[8]

The antitechnologist’s worldview isn’t just relentlessly pessimistic but also highly elitist and paternalistic, Florman argued. He referred to it as “Platonic snobbery.”^[9] The economist and political scientist Thomas Sowell would later call that snobbish attitude, “the vision of the anointed.”[10] Like Sowell, Florman was angered at the way critics stared down their noses at average folk and disregarded their values and choices:

“The antitechnologists have every right to be gloomy, and have a bounden duty to express their doubts about the direction our lives are taking. But their persistent disregard of the average person’s sentiments is a crucial weakness in their argument—particularly when they then ask us to consider the ‘real’ satisfactions that they claim ordinary people experienced in other cultures of other times.”^[11]

Florman noted that critics commonly complain about “too many people wanting too many things,” but he noted that, “[t]his is not caused by technology; it is a consequence of the type of creature that man is.”^[12] One can moralize all they want about supposed over-consumption or “conspicuous consumption,” but in the end, most of us strive to better our lives in various ways—including by working to attain things that may be out of our reach or even superfluous in the eyes of others.

For many antitechnologists and other social critics, only the noble search for truth and wisdom will suffice. Basically, everybody should just get back to studying philosophy, sociology, and other soft sciences. Modern tech critics, Forman said, fashion themselves as the intellectual descendants of Greek philosophers who believed that, “[t]he ideal of the new Athenian citizen was to care for his body in the gymnasium, reason his way to Truth in the academy, gossip in the agora, and debate in the senate. Technology was not deemed worthy of a free man’s time.”^[13]

“It is not surprising to find philosophers recommending the study of philosophy as a way of life,” Florman noted amusingly.^[14] But that does not mean all of us want (or even need) to devote our lives to such things. Nonetheless, critics often sneer at the choices made by the rest of us—especially when they involve the fruits of science and technology. “The most effective weapon in the arsenal of the antitechnologists is self-righteousness,” he noted,^[15] and, “[a]s seen by the antitechnologists, engineers and scientists are half-men whose analysis and manipulation of the world deprives them of the emotional experiences that are the essence of the good life.”^[16]

Indeed, it is not uncommon (both in the past and today) to see tech critics self-anoint themselves “humanists” and then suggest that anyone who thinks differently from them (namely, those who are pro-innovation) are the equivalent of anti-humanistic. I wrote about this in my 2018 essay, “Is It ‘Techno-Chauvinist’ & ‘Anti-Humanist’ to Believe in the Transformative Potential of Technology?” I argued that, “[p]roperly 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.”

But the critics remain fundamentally hostile to that notion and they often suggest that there is something suspicious about those who believe, along with Florman, that there is a symbiotic relationship between innovation, economic growth, pluralism, and human betterment. We rational optimists, the critics suggest, are simply too focused on crass, materialistic measures of happiness and human flourishing.

Florman observed this when noting how much grief he and fellow engineers and scientists got when engaging with critics. “Anyone who has attempted to defend technology against the reproaches of an avowed humanist soon discovers that beneath all the layers of reasoning—political, environmental, aesthetic, or moral—lies a deep-seated disdain for ‘the scientific view.’”^[17]

Everywhere you look in the world of Science & Technology Studies (STS) today, you find this attitude at work. In fact, the field is perhaps better labelled Anti-Science & Technology Studies, or at least Science & Technology Skeptical Studies. For most STSers, the burden of proof lies squarely on scientists, engineers, and innovators who must prove to some (often undefined) higher authorities that their ideas and inventions will bring worth to society (however the critics measure worth and value, which is often very unclear). Until then, just go slow, the critics say. Better yet, consult your local philosophy department for a proper course of action!

The critics will retort that they are just looking out for society’s best interests and trying to counter that selfish, materialist side of humanity. Florman countered by noting how, “most people are in search of the good life—not ‘the goods life’ as [Lewis] Mumford puts it, although some goods are entailed—and most human desires are for good things in moderate amounts.”^[18] Trying to better our lives through the creation and acquisition of new and better goods and services is just a natural and quite healthy human instinct to help us attain some ever-changing definition of whatever each of us considers “the good life.” “Something other than technology is responsible for people wanting to live in a house on a grassy plot beyond walking distance to job, market, neighbor, and school,” Florman responded.^[19] We all want to “get ahead” and improve our lot in life. That’s not because technology forces the urge upon us. Rather, that urge comes quite naturally as part of a desire to improve our lot in life.

The Power of Nostalgia

I have spent a fair amount of time in my own writing documenting the central role that nostalgia plays in motivating technological criticism.[20] Florman’s books repeatedly highlighted this reality. “The antitechnologists romanticize the work of earlier times in an attempt to make it seem more appealing than work in a technological age,” he noted. “But their idyllic descriptions of peasant life do not ring true.”^[21]

The funny thing is, it is hard to pin down the critics regarding exactly when the “golden era” or “good ‘ol days” were. But if there is one thing that they all agree on, it’s that those days have long passed us by. In a 2019 essay on “Four Flavors of Doom: A Taxonomy of Contemporary Pessimism,” philosopher Maarten Boudry noted:

“In the good old days, everything was better. Where once the world was whole and beautiful, now everything has gone to ruin. Different nostalgic thinkers locate their favorite Golden Age in different historical periods. Some yearn for a past that they were lucky enough to experience in their youth, while others locate utopia at a point farther back in time…”

Not all nostalgia is bad. Clay Routledge has written eloquently about how “nostalgia serves important psychological functions,” and can sometimes possess a positive character that strengthens individuals and society. But the nostalgia found in the works of tech critics is usually a different thing altogether. It is rooted in misery about the present and dread of the future—all because technology has apparently stolen away or destroyed all that was supposedly great about the past. Florman noted how, “the current pessimism about technology is a renewed manifestation of pastoralism,” that is typically rooted in historical revisionism about bygone eras.^[22] Many critics engage in what rhetoricians call “appeals to nature” and wax poetic about the joys of life for Pre-Technological Man, who apparently enjoyed an idyllic life free of the annoying intrusions created by modern contrivances.

Such “good ol days” romanticism is largely untethered from reality. “For most of recorded history humanity lived on the brink of starvation,” Wall Street Journal columnist Greg Ip noted in a column in early 2019. Even a cursory review of history offers voluminous, unambiguous proof that the old days were, in reality, eras of abject misery. Widespread poverty, mass hunger, poor hygiene, disease, short lifespans, and so on were the norm. What lifted humanity up and improved our lot as a species is that we learned how to apply knowledge to tasks in a better way through incessant trial-and-error experimentation. Recent books by Hans Rosling,^[23] Steven Pinker,^[24] and many others^[25] have thoroughly documented these improvements to human well-being over time.

The critics are unmoved by such evidence, preferring to just jump around in time and cherry-pick moments when they feel life was better than it is now. “Fond as they are of tribal and peasant life, the antitechnologists become positively euphoric over the Middle Ages,” Florman quipped.^[26] Why? Mostly because the Middle Ages lacked the technological advances of modern times, which the critics loathe. But facts are pesky things, and as Florman insisted, “it is fair to go on to ask whether or not life was ‘better’ in these earlier cultures than it is in our own.”^[27] “We all are moved to reverie by talk of an arcadian golden age,” he noted. “But when we awaken from this reverie, we realize that the antitechnologists have diverted us with half-truths and distortions.”^[28]

The critics’ reverence for the old days would be humorous if it wasn’t rooted in an arrogant and dangerous belief that society can be somehow reshaped to resemble whatever preferred past the critics desire. “Recognizing that we cannot return to earlier times, the antitechnologists nevertheless would have us attempt to recapture the satisfactions of these vanished cultures,” Florman noted. “In order to do this, what is required is nothing less than a change in the nature of man.”^[29] That is, the critics will insist that, “something must be done” (namely be forced from above via some grand design) to remake humans and discourage their inner homo faber desire to be an incessant tool-builder. But this is madness, Florman argued in one of the best passages from his work:

“we are beginning to realize that for mankind there will never be a time to rest at the top of the mountain. There will be no new arcadian age. There will always be new burdens, new problems, new failures, new beginnings. And the glory of man is to respond to his harsh fate with zest and ever-renewed effort.”^[30]

If the critics had their way, however, that zest would be dampened and those efforts restrained in the name of recapturing some mythical lost age. This sort of “rosy retrospection bias” is all the more shocking coming, as it does, from learned people who should know a lot more about the actual history of our species and the long struggle to escape utter despair and destitution. Alas, as the great Scottish philosopher David Hume observed in a 1777 essay, “The humour of blaming the present, and admiring the past, is strongly rooted in human nature, and has an influence even on persons endued with the profoundest judgment and most extensive learning.”^[31]

Why Invent? Homo Faber is our Nature

While taking on the critics and debunking their misplaced nostalgia about the past, Florman mounted a defense of engineers and innovators by noting that the need to tinker and create is in our blood. He began by noting how “the nature of engineering has been misconceived”^[32] because, in a sense, we are all engineers and innovators to some degree.

Florman’s thinking was very much in line with Benjamin Franklin, who once noted, “man is a tool-making animal.” “Both genetically and culturally the engineering instinct has been nurtured within us,” Florman argued, and this instinct “was as old as the human race.”^[33] “To be human is to be technological. When we are being technological we are being human—we are expressing the age-old desire of the tribe to survive and prosper.”^[34] In fact, he claimed, it was no exaggeration to say that humans, “are driven to technological creativity because of instincts hardly less basic than hunger and sex.”^[35] Had our past situation been as rosy as the critics sometimes suggest, perhaps we would have never bothered to fashion tools to escape those eras! It was precisely because humans wanted to improve their lives and the lives of their loved ones that we started crafting more and better tools. Flint and firewood were never going to suffice.

But our engineering instincts do not end with basic needs. “Engineering responds to impulses that go beyond mere survival: a craving for variety and new possibilities, a feeling for proportion—for beauty—that we share with the artist,” Florman argued.^[36] In essence, engineering and innovation respond to both basic human needs and higher ones at every stage of “Maslow’s pyramid,” which describes a five-level hierarchy of human needs. This same theme is developed in Arthur Diamond’s recent book, Openness to Creative Destruction: Sustaining Innovative Dynamism. As Diamond argues, one of the most unheralded features of technological innovation is that, “by providing goods that are especially useful in pursuing a life plan full of challenging, worthwhile creative projects,” it allows each of us the pursue different conceptions of what we consider a good life.[37] But we are only able to do so by first satisfying our basic physiological needs, which innovation also handles for us.

Florman was frustrated that critics failed to understand this point and equally concerned that engineers and innovators had been cast as uncaring gadget-worshipers who did not see beauty and truth in higher arts and other more worldly goals and human values. That’s hogwash, he argued:

“What an ironic turn of events! For if ever there was a group dedicated to—obsessed with—morality, conscience, and social responsibility, it has been the engineering profession. Practically every description of the practice of engineering has stressed the concept of service to humanity.^[38] [. . .] Even in an age of global affluence, the main existential pleasure of the engineer will always be to contribute to the well-being of his fellow man.”^[39]

Engineers and innovators do not always set out with some grandiose design to change the world, although some aspire to do so. Rather, the “existential pleasures of engineering” that Florman described in the title of his most notable book comes about by solving practical day-to-day problems:

“The engineer does not find existential pleasure by seeking it frontally. It comes to him gratuitously, seeping into him unawares. He does not arise in the morning and say, ‘Today I shall find happiness.’ Quite the contrary. He arises and says, ‘Today I will do the work that needs to be done, the work for which I have been trained, the work which I want to do because in doing it I feel challenged and alive.’ Then happiness arrives mysteriously as a byproduct of his effort.”^[40]

And this pleasure of getting practical work done is something that engineers and innovators enjoy collectively by coming together and using specialized skills in new and unique combinations. “[T]echnological progress depends upon a variety of skills and knowledge that are far beyond the capacity of any one individual,” he insisted. “High civilization requires a high degree of specialization, and it was toward high civilization that the human journey appears always to have been directed.”^[41] Adam Smith could not have said it any better.

“Muddling Through”: Why Trial-and-Error is the Key to Progress

My favorite insights from Florman’s work relate to the way humans have repeatedly faced up to adversity and found ways to “muddle through.” This was the focus of an old essay of mine— “Muddling Through: How We Learn to Cope with Technological Change”—which argued that humans are a remarkably resilient species and that we regularly find creative ways to deal with major changes through constant trial-and-error experimentation and the learning that results from it.[42]

Florman made this same point far more eloquently long ago:

“We have been attempting to muddle along, acknowledging that we are selfish and foolish, and proceeding by means of trial and error. We call ourselves pragmatists. Mistakes are made, of course. Also, tastes change, so that what seemed desirable to one generation appears disagreeable to the next. But our overriding concern has been to make sure that matters of taste do not become matters of dogma, for that is the way toward violent conflict and tyranny. Trial and error, however, is exactly what the antitechnologists cannot abide.^[43]

It is the error part of trial-and-error that is so vital to societal learning. “Even the most cautious engineer recognizes that risk is inherent in what he or she does,” Florman noted. “Over the long haul the improbable becomes the inevitable, and accidents will happen. The unanticipated will occur.”[44] But “[s]ometimes the only way to gain knowledge is by experiencing failure,” he correctly observed[45] “To be willing to learn through failure—failure that cannot be hidden—requires tenacity and courage.”[46]

I’ve argued that this represents the central dividing line between innovation supporters and technology critics. The critics are so focused on risk-adverse, precautionary principle-based thinking that they simply cannot tolerate the idea that society can learn more through trial-and-error than through preemptive planning. They imagine it is possible to override that process and predetermine the proper course of action to create a safer, more stable society. In this mindset, failure is to be avoided at all costs through prescriptions and prohibitions. Innovation is to be treated as guilty until proven innocent in the hope of eliminating the error (or risk / failure) associated with trial-and-error experiments. To reiterate, this logic misses the fact that the entire point of trial-and-error is to learn from our mistakes and “fail better” next time, until we’ve solved the problem at hand entirely.[47]

Florman noted that, “sensible people have agreed that there is no free lunch; there are only difficult choices, options, and trade-offs.”[48] In other words, precautionary controls come at a cost. “All we can do is do the best we can, plan where we can, agree where we can, and compromise where we must,” he said.^[49] But, again, the antitechnologists absolutely cannot accept this worldview. They are fundamentally hostile to it because they either believe that a precautionary approach will do a better job improving public welfare, or they believe that trial-and-error fails to safeguard any number of other values or institutions that they regard as sacrosanct. This shuts down the learning process from which wisdom is generated. As the old adage goes, “nothing ventured, nothing gained.” There can be no reward without some risk, and there can be no human advances without unless we are free to learn from the error portion of trial-and-error.

The Costs of Precautionary Regulation

Florman did not spend much time in his writing mulling over the finer points of public policy, but he did express skepticism about our collective ability to define and enforce “the public interest” in various contexts. A great many regulatory regimes—and their underlying statutes—rest on the notion of “protecting the public interest.” It is impossible to be against that notion, but it is often equally impossible to define what it even means.[50]

This leads to what Florman called, “the search for virtues that nobody can define”[51] “As engineers we are agreed that the public interest is very important; but it is folly to think that we can agree on what the public interest is. We cannot even agree on the scientific facts!”^[52] This is especially true today in debates over what constitutes “responsible innovation” or “ethical innovation.”[53] What Florman noted about such conversations three decades ago is equally true today:

“Whenever engineering ethics is on the agenda, emotions come quickly to a boil. […] “It is oh so easy to mouth clichés, for example to pledge to protect the public interest, as the various codes of engineering ethics do. But such a pledge is only a beginning and hardly that. The real questions remain: What is the public interest, and how is it to be served?”[54]

That reality makes it extremely difficult to formulate consensus regarding public polices for emerging technologies. And it makes it particularly difficult to define and enforce a “precautionary principle” for emerging technologies that will somehow strike the Goldilocks balance of getting things just right. This was the focus of my 2016 book Permissionless Innovation, which argued that the precautionary principle should be the last resort when contemplating innovation policy. Experimentation with new technologies and business models should generally be permitted by default because, “living in constant fear of worst-case scenarios—and premising public policy on them—means that best-case scenarios will never come about,” I argued. The precautionary principle should only be tapped when the harms alleged to be associated with a new technology are highly probable, tangible, immediate, irreversible, catastrophic, or directly threatening to life and limb in some fashion.

For his part, Florman did not want to get his defense of engineering mixed up with politics and regulatory considerations. Engineers and technologists, he noted, come in many flavors and supported many different causes. Generally speaking, they tend to be quite pragmatic and shun strong ideological leanings and political pronouncements.

Of course, at some point, there is no avoiding this fight; one must comment on how to strike the right balance when politics enter the picture and threatens to stifle technological creativity. Florman’s perspectives on regulatory policy were somewhat jumbled, however. On one hand, he expressed concern about excessive and misguided regulations, but he also saw government playing an important role both in supporting various types of engineering projects and regulating certain technological developments:

“The regulatory impulse, running wild, wreaks havoc, first of all by stifling creative and productive forces that are vital to national survival. But it does harm also—and perhaps more ominously—by fomenting a counter-revolution among outraged industrialists, the intensity of which threatens to sweep away many of the very regulations we most need.”^[55]

In his 1987 book, The Civilized Engineer, Florman even expressed surprise and regret about growing pushback against regulation during the Reagan years. He also expressed skepticism about “the deceptive allure” of benefit-cost analysis, which was on the rise at the time, saying that the “attempt to apply mathematical consistency to the regulatory process was deplorably simplistic.”^[56] I have always been a big believer in the importance of benefit-cost analysis (BCA), so I was surprised to read of Florman’s skepticism of it. But he was writing in the early days of BCA and it was not entirely clear how well it work in practice. Four decades on, BCA has become far more rigorous, academically respected, and well-established throughout government. It has widespread and bipartisan support as a policy evaluation tool.

Florman adamantly opposed any sort of “technocracy”—or administration of government by technically-skilled elites. He thought it was silly that so many tech critics believe that such a thing already existed. “The myth of the technocratic elite is an expression of fear, like a fairy tale about ogres,” he argued. “It springs from an understandable apprehension, but since it has no basis in reality, it has no place in serious discourse.”^[57] Nor did he believe that there was any real chance a technocracy would ever take hold. “No matter how complex technology becomes, and no matter how important it turns out to be in human affairs, we are not likely to see authority vested in a class of technocrats.”^[58]

Florman hoped for wiser administration of law and regulations that affected engineering endeavors and innovation more generally. Like so many others, he did not necessarily want more law, just better law. One cannot fault that instinct, but Florman was not really interested in fleshing out the finer details of policy about how to accomplish that objective. He preferred instead to use history as a rough guide for policy. From the fall of the Roman Empire to the decline of Britain’s economic might in more recent times, Florman observed the ways in which societal and governmental attitudes toward innovation influenced the relative growth of science, technology, and national economies. In essence, he was explaining how “innovation culture” and “innovation arbitrage” had been realities for far longer than most people realize.[59]

“Where the entrepreneurial spirit cannot be rewarded, and where non-productive workers cannot be discharged, stagnation will set in,” Florman concluded.[60] This is very much in line with the thinking of economic historians like Joel Mokyr[61] and Deirdre McCloskey,[62] who have identified how attitudes toward creativity and entrepreneurialism affect the aggregate innovative capacity of nations, and thus their competitive advantage and relative prosperity in the world.

Debunking Determinism, Anxiety & Alienation Concerns

One of the ironies of modern technological criticism is the way many critics can’t seem to get their story straight when it comes to “technological determinism” versus social determinism. In the extreme view, technological determinism is the idea that technology drives history and almost has a will of its own. It is like an autonomous force that is practically unstoppable. By contrast, social determinism means that society (individuals, institutions, etc.) guide and control the development of technology.

In the field of Science and Technology Studies, technological determinism is a very hot matter. Academic and social critics are fond of painting innovation advocates as rigid tech determinists who are little better than uncaring anti-humanistic gadget-worshipers. The critics have employed a variety of other creative labels to describe tech determinism, including: “techno-fundamentalism,” “technological solutionism,” and even “techno-chauvinism.”

Engineers and other innovators often get hit with such labels and accused of being rigid technological determinists who just want to see tech plow over people and politics. But this was, and remains, a ridiculous argument. Sure, there will always be some wild-eyed futurists and extropian extremists who make preposterous claims about how “there is no stopping technology.” “Even now the salvation-through-technology doctrine has some adherents whose absurdities have helped to inspire the antitechnological movement, Florman said.”^[63] But that hardly represents the majority of innovation supporters, who well understand that society and politics play a crucial role in shaping the future course of technological development.

As Florman noted, we can dismiss extreme deterministic perspectives for a rather simple reason: technologies fail all the time! “If promising technologies can suffer fatal blows from unexpected circumstances,” Florman correctly argued, then “[t]his means that we are still—however precariously—in control of our own destiny.”[64] He believed that, “technology is not an independent force, much less a thing, but merely one of the types of activities in which people engage.”^[65] The rigid view of tech determinism can be dismissed, he said, because “it can be shown that technology is still very much under society’s control, that it is in fact an expression of our very human desires, fancies, and fears.”^[66]

But what is amazing about this debate is that some of the most rigid technological determinists are the technology critics themselves! Recall how Florman began his 6-part taxonomy of common complaints from tech critics. “A primary characteristic of the antitechnologists,” Florman argued, “is the way in which they refer to ‘technology’ as a thing, or at least a force, as if it had an existence of its own” and which “has escaped from human control and is spoiling our lives.”[67]

He noted that many of the leading tech critics of the post-war era often spoke in remarkably deterministic ways. “The idea that a man of the masses has no thoughts of his own, but is something on the order of a programmed machine, owes part of its popularity with the antitechnologists to the influential writings of Herbert Marcuse,” he believed.^[68] But then such thinking accelerated and gained greater favor with the popularity of critics like French philosopher Jacques Ellul, American historian Lewis Mumford, and American cultural critic Neil Postman.

Their books painted a dismal portrait of a future in which humans were subjugated to the evils of “technique” (Ellul), “technics” (Mumford), or “technopoly” (Postman).  The narrative of their works read like dystopian science fiction. Essentially, there was no escaping the iron grip that technology had on us. Postman claimed, for example, that technology was destined to destroy “the vital sources of our humanity” and lead to “a culture without a moral foundation” by undermining “certain mental processes and social relations that make human life worth living.”

Which gets us to commonly heard concerns about how technology leads to “anxiety” and “alienation.” “Having established the view of technology as an evil force, the antitechnologists then proceed to depict the average citizen as a helpless slave, driven by this force to perform work he detests,” Florman notes.^[69] “Anxiety and alienation are the watchwords of the day, as if material comforts made life worse, rather than better.”^[70]

These concerns about anxiety, alienation, and “dehumanization” are omnipresent in the work of modern tech critics, and they are also tied up with traditional worries about “conspicuous consumption.” It’s all part of the “false consciousness” narrative they also peddle, which basically views humans as too ignorant to look out for their own good. In this worldview, people are sheep being led to the slaughter by conniving capitalists and tech innovators, who are just trying to sell them things they don’t really need.

Florman pointed out how preposterous this line of thinking is when he noted how critics seem to always forget that, “a basic human impulse precedes and underlies each technological development”:^[71]

“Very often this impulse, or desire, is directly responsible for the new invention. But even when this is not the case, even when the invention is not a response to any particular consumer demand, the impulse is alive and at the ready, sniffing about like a mouse in a maze, seeking its fulfillment. We may regret having some of these impulses. We certainly regret giving expression to some of them. But this hardly gives us the right to blame our misfortunes on a devil external to ourselves.”^[72]

Consider the automobile, for example. Industrial era critics often focused on it and lambasted the way they thought industrialists pushed auto culture and technologies on the masses. Did we really need all those cars? All those colors? All those options? Did we really even need cars? The critics wanted us to believe that all these things were just imposed upon us. We were being force-fed options we really didn’t even need or want. “Choice” in this worldview is just a fiction; a front for the nefarious ends of our corporate overlords.

Florman demolished this reasoning throughout his books. “However much we deplore the growth of our automobile culture, clearly it has been created by people making choices, not by a runaway technology,” he argued.^[73] Consumer demand and choice is not some fiction fabricated and forced upon us, as the antitechnologists suggest. We make decisions. “Those who would blame all of life’s problems on an amorphous technology, inevitably reject the concept of individual responsibility,” Florman retorted. “This is not humanism. It is a perversion of the humanistic impulse.”^[74]

A modern tweak on the conspicuous consumption and false consciousness arguments is found in the work of leading tech critics like Evgeny Morozov, who pens attention-grabbing screeds decrying what he regards as “the folly of technological solutionism.” Morozov bluntly states that “our enemy is the romantic and revolutionary problem solver who resides within” of us, but most specifically within the engineers and technologists.[75]

But would the world really be better place it tinkerers didn’t try to scratch that itch?[76] In 2021, the Wall Street Journal profiled JoeBen Bevirt, an engineer and serial entrepreneur who has been working to bring flying cars from sci-fi to reality. Channeling Florman’s defense of the existential pleasures associated with engineering, Bevirt spoke passionately about the way innovators can help “move our species forward” through their constant tinkering to find solutions to hard problems. “That’s kind of the ethos of who we are,” he said. “We see problems, we’re engineers, we work to try to fix them.”[77]

When tech critics like Morozov decry “solutionism,” they are essentially saying that innovators like Bevirt need to just shut up and sit down. Don’t try to improve the world through tinkering; just settle for the status quo, the critics basically state. That’s the kiss of death for human progress, however, because it is only through incessant experimentation with the new and different approaches to hard problems that we can advance human well-being. “Solutionism” isn’t about just creating some shiny new toy; it’s about expanding the universe of potentially life-enriching and life-saving technologies available to humanity.

Conclusion

This review of Samuel Florman’s work may seem comprehensive, but it only scratches the surface of his wide-ranging writing. Florman was troubled that engineering lacked support or at least understanding. Perhaps that was because, he reasoned, that “[t]here is no single truth that embodies the practice of engineering, no patron saint, no motto or simple credo. There is no unique methodology that has been distilled from millenia of technological effort.”  Or, more simply, it may also be the case that the profession lacked articulate defenders. “The engineer may merely be waiting for his Shakespeare,” he suggested.^[78]

Through his life’s work, however, Samuel Florman became that Shakespeare; the great bard of engineering and passionate defender of technological innovation and rational optimism more generally. In looking for a quote or two to close out my latest book, I ended with this one from Florman:

“By turning our backs on technological change, we would be expressing our satisfaction with current world levels of hunger, disease, and privation. Further, we must press ahead in the name of the human adventure. Without experimentation and change our existence would be a dull business.”^[79]

Let us resolve to make sure that Florman’s greatest fear does not come to pass. Let us resolve to make sure that the great human adventure never ends. And let us resolve to counter the antitechnologists and their fundamentally anti-humanist worldview, which would most assuredly make our existence the “dull business” that Florman dreaded.

We can do better when we put our minds and hands to work innovating in an attempt to build a better future for humanity. Samuel Florman, the great prophet of progress, showed us the way forward.

Additional Reading from Adam Thierer:

• “How to Get the Future We Were Promised,” Discourse, January 18, 2022.
• “Defending Innovation Against Attacks from All Sides,” Discourse, November 9, 2021.
•  “Is There a Science of Progress?” AIER, August 8, 2019.
• “How Technology Expands the Horizons of Our Humanity,” Medium, November 19, 2018.
• “Is It ‘Techno-Chauvinist’ & ‘Anti-Humanist’ to Believe in the Transformative Potential of Technology?” Medium, September 18, 2018.
• “Deep Technologies & Moonshots: Should We Dare to Dream?” Medium, September 7, 2018.
• Permissionless Innovation: The Continuing Case for Comprehensive Technological Freedom, 2nd ed. (Arlington, VA: Mercatus Center at George Mason University, 2016).
• “Muddling Through: How We Learn to Cope with Technological Change,” Medium, June 30, 2014.

Endnotes:

[1]    Matt Ridley, The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves (New York: Harper Collins, 2010).

[2]    Adam Thierer, “Defending Innovation Against Attacks from All Sides,” Discourse, November 9, 2021, https://www.discoursemagazine.com/ideas/2021/11/09/defending-innovation-against-attacks-from-all-sides.

[3]    Samuel C. Forman, The Civilized Engineer (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1987), p. 26.

[4]    Samuel C. Florman, The Existential Pleasures of Engineering (New York, St. Martins Griffin, 2^nd Edition, 1994), p. 53-4.

[5]    Existential Pleasures of Engineering, p. 53-4.

[6]    Samuel C. Florman, Blaming Technology: The Irrational Search for Scapegoats (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1981), p. 186.

[7]    Existential Pleasures of Engineering, p. 76.

[8]    Existential Pleasures of Engineering, p. 77.

[9]    The Civilized Engineer, p. 38.

[10]   Thomas Sowell, The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy (New York: Basic Books, 1995).

[11]   Existential Pleasures of Engineering, p. 72.

[12]   Existential Pleasures of Engineering, p. 76.

[13]   The Civilized Engineer, p. 35.

[14]   Existential Pleasures of Engineering, p. 102.

[15]   Blaming Technology, p. 162.

[16]   Existential Pleasures of Engineering, p. 55.

[17]   Blaming Technology, p. 70.

[18]   Existential Pleasures of Engineering, p. 77.

[19]   Existential Pleasures of Engineering, p. 60.

[20]   Adam Thierer, “Technopanics, Threat Inflation, and the Danger of an Information Technology Precautionary Principle,” Minnesota Journal of Law, Science & Technology 14, no. 1 (2013), p. 312–50, https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2012494.

[21]   Existential Pleasures of Engineering, p. 62.

[22]   Blaming Technology, p. 9.

[23]   Hans Rosling, Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong about the World—and Why Things Are Better Than You Think (New York: Flatiron Books, 2018).

[24]   Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress (New York: Viking, 2018).

[25]   Gregg Easterbrook, It’s Better than It Looks: Reasons for Optimism in an Age of Fear (New York: Public Affairs, 2018); Michael A. Cohen & Micah Zenko, Clear and Present Safety: The World Has Never Been Better and Why That Matters to Americans (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2019).

[26]   Existential Pleasures of Engineering, p. 54.

[27]   Existential Pleasures of Engineering, p. 72.

[28]   Existential Pleasures of Engineering, p. 72.

[29]   Existential Pleasures of Engineering, p. 55.

[30]   Existential Pleasures of Engineering, p. 117.

[31]   David Hume, “Of the Populousness of Ancient Nations,” (1777), https://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/hume-essays-moral-political-literary-lf-ed.

[32]   The Civilized Engineer, p. 20.

[33]   Existential Pleasures of Engineering, p. 6.

[34]   The Civilized Engineer, p. 20.

[35]   Existential Pleasures of Engineering, p. 115.

[36]   The Civilized Engineer, p. 20.

[37]   Arthur Diamond, Openness to Creative Destruction: Sustaining Innovative Dynamism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019).

[38]   Existential Pleasures of Engineering, p. 19.

[39]   Existential Pleasures of Engineering, p. 147.

[40]   Existential Pleasures of Engineering, p. 148.

[41]   The Civilized Engineer, p. 30.

[42]   Adam Thierer, “Muddling Through: How We Learn to Cope with Technological Change,” Medium, June 30, 2014, https://medium.com/tech-liberation/muddling-through-how-we-learn-to-cope-with-technological-change-6282d0d342a6.

[43]   Existential Pleasures of Engineering, p. 84.

[44]   The Civilized Engineer, p. 71.

[45]   The Civilized Engineer, p. 72.

[46]   The Civilized Engineer, p. 72.

[47]   Adam Thierer, “Failing Better: What We Learn by Confronting Risk and Uncertainty,” in Sherzod Abdukadirov (ed.), Nudge Theory in Action: Behavioral Design in Policy and Markets (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016): 65-94.

[48]   The Civilized Engineer, p. xi.

[49]   Existential Pleasures of Engineering, p. 85.

[50]   Adam Thierer, “Is the Public Served by the Public Interest Standard?” The Freeman, September 1, 1996,  https://fee.org/articles/is-the-public-served-by-the-public-interest-standard.

[51]   The Civilized Engineer, p. 84.

[52]   The Existential Pleasures of Engineering, p. 22.

[53]   Adam Thierer, “Are ‘Permissionless Innovation’ and ‘Responsible Innovation’ Compatible?” Technology Liberation Front, July 12, 2017, https://techliberation.com/2017/07/12/are-permissionless-innovation-and-responsible-innovation-compatible.

[54]   The Civilized Engineer, p. 79.

[55]   Blaming Technology, p. 106.

[56]   The Civilized Engineer, p. 158.

[57]   Blaming Technology, p. 41.

[58]   Blaming Technology, p. 40-1.

[59]   Adam Thierer, “Embracing a Culture of Permissionless Innovation,” Cato Online Forum, November 17, 2014, https://www.cato.org/publications/cato-online-forum/embracing-culture-permissionless-innovation; Christopher Koopman, “Creating an Environment for Permissionless Innovation,” Testimony before the US Congress Joint Economic Committee, May 22, 2018, https://www.mercatus.org/publications/creating-environment-permissionless-innovation.

[60]   The Civilized Engineer, p. 117.

[61]   Joel Mokyr, Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990).

[62]   Deirdre N. McCloskey, The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2006); Deirdre N. McCloskey, Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can’t Explain the Modern World (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. 2010).

[63]   Existential Pleasures of Engineering, p. 57.

[64]   Blaming Technology, p. 22.

[65]   The Existential Pleasures of Engineering, p. 58.

[66]   Blaming Technology, p. 10.

[67]   The Existential Pleasures of Engineering, p. 48, 53.

[68]   Existential Pleasures of Engineering, p. 70.

[69]   Existential Pleasures of Engineering, p. 49.

[70]   Existential Pleasures of Engineering, p. 16.

[71]   Existential Pleasures of Engineering, p. 61.

[72]   Existential Pleasures of Engineering, p. 61.

[73]   Existential Pleasures of Engineering, p. 60.

[74]   Blaming Technology, p. 104.

[75]   Evgeny Morozov, To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism (New York: Public Affairs, 2013).

[76]   Adam Thierer, “A Net Skeptic’s Conservative Manifesto,” Reason, April 27, 2013, https://reason.com/2013/04/27/a-net-skeptics-conservative-manifesto-2/.

[77]   Emily Bobrow, “JoeBen Bevirt Is Bringing Flying Taxis from Sci-Fi to Reality,” Wall Street Journal, July 9, 2021, https://www.wsj.com/articles/joeben-bevirt-is-bringing-flying-taxis-from-sci-fi-to-reality-11625848177.

[78]   Existential Pleasures of Engineering, p. 96.

[79]   Blaming Technology, p. 193.

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.

Opportunity Costs Matter

Here we get to the true danger of strict versions of the precautionary principle: It essentially becomes a crime to get off the fence and do anything risky at all. This sets up the potential for stasis and stagnation as societal learning is severely curtailed. Progress becomes harder because there can be no reward without some risk. — both individually or societally. “Caution makes sense except when it doesn’t,” Bauer notes. She continues on to note:

Used too liberally, the precautionary principle can keep us stuck in a state of extreme risk-aversion, leading to cumbersome policies that weigh down our lives. To get to the good parts of life, we need to accept some risk.

As I argued in a book on these issues, the root problem with precautionary principle thinking is that “living in constant fear of worst-case scenarios—and premising public policy on them—means that best-case scenarios will never come about.” If societal attitudes and public policy will not tolerate the idea of any error resulting from experimentation with new and better ways of doing things, then we will obviously not get many new and better things! Scientist Martin Rees refers to this truism about the precautionary principle as “the hidden cost of saying no.”

The opportunity cost of inaction or stasis can be hard to quantify but imagine if we organized our entire society around a rigid application of the precautionary principle. Bauer notes that this is basically what we did during COVID. And the results are in. “It’s far past time we ask ourselves when  abundance really means excess, when our precautionary measures against Covid have gone too far, when we have ignored the costs and lost all sense of proportionality.” Unfortunately, the precautionary mindset–which is always rooted in fear of the unknown–took control. As Bauer notes:

It should have been socially acceptable to debate the merits of these tradeoffs, with nuance and without censure. But that is not what happened. Early in the pandemic, an unspoken rule — thou shalt not question the costs — sprang up and stifled discourse.

“And here’s the worst of it: the costs of excess caution can persist long after the initial danger has passed,” she notes. “It’s no different with Covid: our knee-jerk caution may have downstream effects that persist after the virus has ceased to be a threat.” She cites many compelling examples of the negative effects associated with extreme precautionary thinking during COVID, noting how, “[t]he impact of travel and trade restrictions on food security and childhood vaccination in developing countries will likely reverberate for decades.” Moreover:

The Covid-19 pandemic has laid bare the risks of extreme protection: lost businesses, lost livelihoods, lost graduations, lost loves, lost goodbyes; the loss of personal agency over life’s most intimate and meaningful moments; the loss, quite possibly, of our cherished principles of liberal democracy. A recent report by International IDEA, a democracy advocacy organization, concluded that many countries had become more authoritarian as they took steps to contain the pandemic.

This list of lockdown trade-offs goes on and the aggregate costs will be staggering once economists and others get around to better estimating them. As noted, gauging those costs will be challenging because of the many variables and values that come into play. But it remains vital that society takes risk analysis and trade-offs more seriously so that we don’t make these mistakes again and again.

Proportionality is the Key

Toward that end, Bauer makes “a plea for proportionality.” She wants society to strike a more reasonable balance when it comes to policy measures that might block actions and research that could help us better understand how to deal with risk uncertainties. Accordingly, “we must understand when to apply the precautionary principle and when to move on from it.”

“The precautionary principle doesn’t come with such checks and balances. On the contrary, it tends to perpetuate itself and acquire a life of its own,” she notes. In other words, once set in place initially for a given issue or sector, precautionary principle thinking tends to grow like bad weeds until it has taken over everything in sight. (To see the consequences of that in fields like aviation, space, nanotech, and others, please check out J. Storrs Hall’s amazing new book, Where Is My Flying Car?)

Of course, proportionality cuts both ways, and as I noted in my last two books, there are some instances in which at least a light version of the precautionary principle should be preemptively applied, but they are limited to scenarios where the threat in question is tangible, immediate, irreversible, and catastrophic in nature. In such cases, I argue, society might be better suited thinking about when an “anti-catastrophe principle” is needed, which narrows the scope of the precautionary principle and focuses it more appropriately on the most unambiguously worst-case scenarios that meet those criteria. Generally speaking, however, this test is not satisfied in the vast majority of cases. “Innovation Allowed” should be our default principle. 

Conclusion

The single most important thing that we must always remember when debating precautionary principle-based policies is that, just because someone has good intentions and claims safety as their goal, that does not automatically make the world a safer place. To repeat: Excessive safety-related measure can result in less safety overall. Or again, as Bauer says, “extreme caution comes at a cost.”

No one ever summarized this truism more clearly than the great political scientist Aaron Wildavsky, who devoted much of his life’s work to proving how efforts to create a risk-free society would instead lead to an extremely unsafe society. In his 1988 book, Searching for Safety, Wildavsky warned of the dangers of “trial without error” reasoning, and contrasted it with the trial-and-error method of evaluating risk and seeking wise solutions to it. He argued that wisdom is born of experience and that we can learn how to be wealthier and healthier as individuals and a society only by first being willing to embrace uncertainty and even occasional failure. Here was the crucial takeaway:

The direct implication of trial without error is obvious: If you can do nothing without knowing first how it will turn out, you cannot do anything at all. An indirect implication of trial without error is that if trying new things is made more costly, there will be fewer departures from past practice; this very lack of change may itself be dangerous in forgoing chances to reduce existing hazards. . . . Existing hazards will continue to cause harm if we fail to reduce them by taking advantage of the opportunity to benefit from repeated trials.

Trial and error is the basis of all societal learning, and without it, humanity will be less safe and less prosperous over the long run. Gabrielle Bauer’s new essay captures that insight better than anything I’ve read since Wildavsky was writing about the dangers of the precautionary principle. I beg you to jump over to New Atlantis and read her entire article. It’s absolutely essential.

Additional reading from Adam Thierer on the precautionary principle

• Adam Thierer, “How Many Lives Are Lost Due to the Precautionary Principle?” The Bridge, October 31, 2019.
• Adam Thierer, “How to Get the Future We Were Promised,” Discourse, January 18, 2022.
• Adam Thierer, “Failing Better: What We Learn by Confronting Risk and Uncertainty,” in Sherzod Abdukadirov (ed.), Nudge Theory in Action: Behavioral Design in Policy and Markets (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016): 65-94.
• Adam Thierer, “Innovation and the Trouble with the Precautionary Principle,” AIER, April 20, 2020.
• Adam Thierer, “Are ‘Permissionless Innovation’ and ‘Responsible Innovation’ Compatible?” Technology Liberation Front, July 12, 2017.
• Adam Thierer, Permissionless Innovation: The Continuing Case for Comprehensive Technological Freedom, 2nd ed. (Arlington, VA: Mercatus Center at George Mason University, 2016).
• Adam Thierer, “Problems with Precautionary Principle-Minded Tech Regulation & a Federal Robotics Commission,” Medium, September 22, 2014.
• Adam Thierer, “Technopanics, Threat Inflation, and the Danger of an Information Technology Precautionary Principle,” Minnesota Journal of Law, Science & Technology 14, no. 1 (2013): 312–50.

This is a compendium of readings on “ progress studies ,” or essays and books which generally make the case for technological innovation, dynamism, economic growth, and abundance. I will update this list as additional material of relevance is brought to my attention.   

[Last update: 10/11/22]

Recent Essays

• Marc Andreessen, “The Techno-Optimist Manifesto,” a16z.com, October 16, 2023.
• Will Rinehart, “The Abundance Agenda,” The Exformation Newsletter, October 15, 2022.
• Sarah Constantin, “Unblocking Abundance: A Model for Activism,” Rough Diamonds, October 10, 2022.
• Derek Thompson, “The Forgotten Stage of Human Progress,” The Atlantic, May 11, 2022.
• Adam Thierer, “Where is ‘Progress Studies’ Going?” Progress Forum, April 23, 2022.
• Katherine Boyle, “The Case for American Seriousness,” Common Sense, April 18, 2022.
• William Rinehart, “Vetocracy, the Costs of Vetos and Inaction,” Center for Growth & Opportunity at Utah State University, March 24, 2022.
• James Pethokoukis, “Forget about Left Wing and Right Wing. How about an Up Wing America?” Faster Please, March 23, 2022.
• John W. Lettieri & Kenan Fikri, “The Case for Economic Dynamism and Why it Matters for the American Worker,” Economic Innovation Group, March 2022.
• Adam Kovacevich, “Saying YIMBY (Yes In My Back Yard) to “Civic Innovation,” Chamber of Progress, March 21, 2022.
• Eli Dourado, “Remove Barriers to Productivity,” City Journal, March 18, 2022.
• “A Case for Innovation and Optimism,” (A conversation with Jason Crawford), Discourse, March 2, 2022.
• Noah Smith, “A New Industrialist Roundup,” Noahpinion, February 3, 2022.
• James Pethokoukis, “When Will the Next Big Thing Arrive?” Faster Please, February 3, 2022.
• Alec Stapp & Caleb Watney,  “ Progress is a Policy Choice ,” Institute for Progress, January 20, 2022.
• Adam Thierer, “ How to Get the Future We Were Promised ,” Discourse, January 18, 2022.
• Katherine Boyle, “ Building American Dynamism ,” Future, January 14, 2022.  
• Derek Thompson, “ A Simple Plan to Solve All of America’s Problems ,” The Atlantic, January 12, 2022.
• Jason Crawford, “Progress, Humanism, Agency: An Intellectual Core for the Progress Movement,” Roots of Progress, January 11, 2022.
• Adam Thierer, “Defending Innovation Against Attacks from All Sides,” Discourse, November 9, 2021.
• Matthew Yglesias, “The Case for More Energy,” October 7, 2021.
• Jason Crawford, “ We need a new philosophy of progress ,” The Roots of Progress, August 23, 2021.
• Gale Pooley & Marian L. Tupy, “The Simon Abundance Index 2021,” Human Progress, April 22, 2021.
• Noah Smith, “ Techno-optimism for the 2020s ,” December 3, 2020. 
• Ezra Klein, “ Why We Can’t Build ,” Vox, April 22, 2020.
• Marc Andreesen, “ It’s Time to Build ,” Future, April 18, 2020.
• Eli Dourado, “ How do we move the needle on progress ?” September 26, 2019.
• José Luis Ricón, “ About the ‘Progress’ in Progress Studies ” September 6, 2019.
• Will Rinehart, “ Progress Studies: Some Initial Thoughts ,” August 30, 2019.
• Adam Thierer, “ Is There a Science of Progress ?” AIER, August 8, 2019.
• Patrick Collison and Tyler Cowen, “ We Need a New Science of Progress ,” The Atlantic, July 30, 2019.
• Tyler Cowen, “ The Case for the Longer Term ,” Cato Unbound, January 9, 2019.
• Vinod Khosla, “ We Need Large Innovations ,” Medium, January 1, 2018.
• Adam Thierer, “ How Technology Expands the Horizons of Our Humanity ,” Medium, November 19, 2018. 
• Chelsea Follett, “Utopianism: One of the Biggest Obstacles to Progress,” Human Progress, August15, 2018.
• Eli Dourado, “ How Technological Innovation Can Massively Reduce the Cost of Living ,” PlainText, January 29, 2016.

Books

• J. Storrs Hall, Where Is My Flying Car ? (Stripe Press, 2021).
• Matt Ridley, How Innovation Works: And Why It Flourishes in Freedom (New York: Harper, 2020).
• Andrew McAfee, More from Less (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2020).
• Ronald Bailey & Marian L. Tupy, Ten Global Trends Every Smart Person Should Know: And Many Others You Will Find Interesting (Cato Institute, 2020).
• Arthur M. Diamond Jr., Openness to Creative Destruction: Sustaining Innovative Dynamism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019).
• Tyler Cowen, Stubborn Attachments: A Vision for a Society of Free, Prosperous, and Responsible Individuals (San Francisco, CA: Stripe Press, 2018).
• Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress (New York: Viking, 2018).
• Hans Rosling, Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong about the World—and Why Things Are Better Than You Think (New York: Flatiron Books, 2018).
• Tim Harford, 50 Things That Made the Modern Economy (New York: Riverhead Books, 2017).
• Joel Mokyr, A Culture of Growth: The Origins of the Modern Economy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017).
• Adam Thierer, Permissionless Innovation: The Continuing Case for Comprehensive Technological Freedom , 2nd ed. (Arlington, VA: Mercatus Center at George Mason University, 2016).
• Calestous Juma, Innovation and Its Enemies: Why People Resist New Technologies (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016).
• Deirdre N. McCloskey, Bourgeois Equality: How Ideas, Not Capital or Institutions, Enriched the World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016).
• Joe Carlen, A Brief History of Entrepreneurship: The Pioneers, Profiteers, and Racketeers Who Shaped Our World (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016).
• Robert Bryce, Smaller Faster Lighter Denser Cheaper: How Innovation Keeps Proving the Catastrophists Wrong (New York: Public Affairs, 2014).
• Matt Ridley, The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves (New York: Harper Collins, 2010).
• Larry Downes, The Laws of Disruption: Harnessing the New Forces That Govern Life and Business in the Digital Age (New York: Basic Books, 2009).
• Amar Bhidé, The Venturesome Economy: How Innovation Sustains Prosperity in a More Connected World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008).
• Robert Friedel, A Culture of Improvement: Technology and the Western Millennium (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2007).
• Benjamin M. Friedman, The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth , (New York: Vintage Books, 2006).
• Virginia Postrel, The Future and Its Enemies (New York: The Free Press, 1998).
• David Landes, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some are So Poor (New York: W.W. Norton & Co, 1998).
• Robert Nisbet, History of the Idea of Progress (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1994).
• Joel Mokyr, Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990).
• Nathan Rosenberg and L. E.. Birdzell, How the West Grew Rich: The Economic Transformation of the Industrial World (New York: Basic Books, 1986).
• Samuel C. Florman, The Existential Pleasures of Engineering (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1976, 1994).

Discourse magazine has just published my review of Where Is My Flying Car?, by J. Storrs Hall, which I argue is the most important book on technology policy written in the past quarter century. Hall perfectly defines what is at stake if we fail to embrace a pro-progress policy vision going forward. Hall documents how a “Jetsons” future was within our grasp, but it was stolen away from us. What held back progress in key sectors like transportation, nanotech & energy was anti-technological thinking and the overregulation that accompanies it. “[T]he Great Stagnation was really the Great Strangulation,” he argues. The culprits: negative cultural attitudes toward innovation, incumbent companies or academics looking to protect their turf, litigation-happy trial lawyers, and a raft of risk-averse laws and regulations.

Hall coins the term “the Machiavelli Effect” to identify why many people simultaneously fear the new and different, and they also want to protect whatever status quo they benefit from (or at least feel comfortable with). He builds on this passage from Niccolò Machiavelli’s classic 1532 study of political power, “The Prince”:

[I]t ought to be remembered that there is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, then to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things. Because the innovator has for enemies all those who have done well under the old conditions, and lukewarm defenders in those who may do well under the new. This coolness arises partly from fear of the opponents, who have the laws on their side, and partly from the incredulity of men, who do not readily believe in new things until they have had a long experience of them. Thus it happens that whenever those who are hostile have the opportunity to attack they do it like partisans, whilst the others defend lukewarmly, in such wise that the prince is endangered along with them.

Hall notes that the Machiavelli Effect “has nothing to do with any conspiracy.” Rather, it comes down to human nature: Many people simultaneously fear the new and different, and they also want to protect whatever status quo they benefit from (or at least feel comfortable with). Isaac Asimov identified the same problem in a 1974 lecture when he noted how there had been “bitter, exaggerated, last-stitch resistance . . . to every significant technological change that had taken place on earth.” [On this same point, also see Innovation and Its Enemies: Why People Resist New Technologies, by Calestous Juma. It’s the best history on the topic.]

Hall identifies how the Machiavelli Effect held back nuclear, nanotech, and aviation technologies. “Over the long run, unchecked regulation destroys the learning curve, prevents innovation, protects and preserves inefficiency, and makes progress run backward.” The problem is the Precautionary Principle, which undermines the learning curve is by setting policy defaults to no trial and error as opposed to free to experiment. There can be no reward without some risk! Hall quotes Wilbur Wright on this, who once noted that, “If you are looking for perfect safety, you would do well to sit on a fence and watch the birds.”

Over-regulation of those sectors also resulted in massive misallocation of talent, “taking more than a million of the country’s most talented and motivated people and putting them to work making arguments and filing briefs instead of inventing, developing, and manufacturing.” Hall is equally critical of government R&D efforts. “One of the great tragedies of the latter 20th century, and clearly one of the causes of the Great Stagnation,” he argues, “was the increasing centralization and bureaucratization of science and research funding.”

Hall’s book builds on Jason Crawford’s insight that, “We need a new philosophy of progress,” that is rooted in optimism about the future and support for a culture of trial-and-error experimentation. Hall’s book is a major contribution to that effort. Hall makes a profoundly moral case for innovation. “The zero-sum society is a recipe for evil,” because it leaves us with a “static level of existence” that denies us the ability to improve the human condition. Indeed, Hall’s book is the most full-throated defense of innovation by a trained scientist or engineer since Samuel Florman’s 1976 “Existential Pleasures of Engineering.” Both are celebrations of the potential for humanity to build more and better tools to improve the world.

Hall’s book should also be read alongside books from Virginia Postrel (“The Future and Its Enemies”), Steven Pinker (“Enlightenment Now”), Matt Ridley (“How Innovation Works”) and Deirdre McCloskey’s three-volume trilogy about the history of modern economic growth. These scholars argue that there is a symbiotic relationship between innovation, economic growth, pluralism and human betterment, and that to deny people the ability to improve their lot in life is fundamentally anti-human.

I just cannot recommend Hall’s Where Is My Flying Car? highly enough. It’s a masterpiece. And bravo to Stripe Press for publishing a beautiful hardbound edition. It is a stunning book both to behold and read. Order it now, and jump over to Discourse to read my entire review of it.

[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:

• Defending Innovation Against Attacks from All Sides (November 2021)
• How to Get the Future We Were Promised (January 2022)
• The Radicalization of Modern Tech Criticism (April 2019)
• Is It ‘Techno-Chauvinist’ & ‘Anti-Humanist’ to Believe in the Transformative Potential of Technology? (September 2018)

HOW WE MUST RESPOND = “Rational Optimism” / Right to Earn a Living / Permissionless Innovation

• A Case for Innovation and Optimism (A conversation with Jason Crawford, March 2022)
• How To Defend a Culture of Innovation During the Technopanic (April 2019)
• Is This the End of Permissionless Innovation? (January 2021)
• How Technology Expands the Horizons of Our Humanity (November 2018)
• Deep Technologies & Moonshots: Should We Dare to Dream? (September 2018)
• The Right to Pursue Happiness, Earn a Living, and Innovate (September 2018)
• Permissionless Innovation: The Continuing Case for Comprehensive Technological Freedom (2016)

ADDITIONAL READING:

• Is There a Science of Progress?  (August 2019)
• Technological Innovation and Economic Growth: A Brief Report on the Evidence (March 2019)
• 5 Books that Shaped My Thinking on Innovation (April 2020)
• Innovation and the Trouble with the Precautionary Principle (April 2020)

NEW BOOK (tying together all the essays and papers listed above):

• Evasive Entrepreneurs and the Future of Governance: How Innovation Improves Economies and Governments (2020)

Marc Andreessen is interviewed by Sriram Krishan in his new newsletter, The Observer Effect, and asked what motivates him to support technological innovation and “to go read up on a new topic every day” related to tech and progress. His answer is inspirational and perfectly encapsulates why I also have made technological progress the focus of my life’s work:

I am a deep believer in – after learning a lot over the years about economic history and of cultural history – that technology really is the driver. There were basically millennia of just subsistence farming industry and all of a sudden, there was this vertical takeoff a few hundred years ago. And quality of life exploded around the world. Not evenly but starting in Europe and expanding out. It’s basically all technology. It’s always the printing press, it’s the internet and on and on. And you get this incredible upward trajectory. We have the potential over the course of the next century or over the next few centuries to really dramatically advance and have life be better for virtually everybody. Technology is quite literally the lever for being able to take natural resources and able to make something better out of them. And so it’s just it’s the most interesting and by far the most useful and the most beneficial thing I can think of doing.

Amen, brother! I devoted my last two books (Permissionless Innovation and Evasive Entrepreneurs) and all my life’s work, to proving that exact point. Also, I really like Andreessen’s definition of technology as, “the lever for being able to take natural resources and able to make something better out of them.” I’ve added that to my running compendium, “Defining Technology,” which features various definitions of technology.

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:

There is nothing new about resistance to innovation. […] Incumbent vested interests, overcautious regulators, opportunistic activists and rent-seeking patent holders combine to oppose or delay almost every innovation.

And that’s a real shame because, Ridley correctly concludes, “It turns out that continuous tinkering to develop and refine a better product is much more important than protecting what you’ve already created.”

Spot on. Head over to the  Wall Street Journal to read the entire thing and then go order a copy of Ridley’s new book. He’s one of the most important living defenders of technological innovation and human progress. His work has had a huge influence on my way of thinking about innovation, science, and technology. Thank you Matt!

[First published by AIER on April 20, 2020 as “Innovation and the Trouble with the Precautionary Principle.”]

In a much-circulated new essay (“It’s Time to Build”), Marc Andreessen has penned a powerful paean to the importance of building. He says the COVID crisis has awakened us to the reality that America is no longer the bastion of entrepreneurial creativity it once was. “Part of the problem is clearlyforesight, a failure of imagination,” he argues. “But the other part of the problem is what we didn’t do in advance, and what we’re failing to do now. And that is a failure of action, and specifically our widespread inability to build.”

Andreessen suggests that, somewhere along the line, something changed in the DNA of the American people and they essentially stopped having the desire to build as they once did. “You don’t just see this smug complacency, this satisfaction with the status quo and the unwillingness to build, in the pandemic, or in healthcare generally,” he says. “You see it throughout Western life, and specifically throughout American life.” He continues:

“The problem is desire. We need to want these things. The problem is inertia. We need to want these things more than we want to prevent these things. The problem is regulatory capture. We need to want new companies to build these things, even if incumbents don’t like it, even if only to force the incumbents to build these things.”

Accordingly, Andreessen continues on to make the case to both the political right and left to change their thinking about building more generally. “It’s time for full-throated, unapologetic, uncompromised political support from the right for aggressive investment in new products, in new industries, in new factories, in new science, in big leaps forward.”

What’s missing in Andreessen’s manifesto is a concrete connection between America’s apparent dwindling desire to build these things and the political realities on the ground that contribute to that problem. Put simply, policy influences attitudes. More specifically, policies that frown upon entrepreneurial risk-taking actively disincentivize the building of new and better things. Thus, to correct the problem Andreessen identifies, it is essential that we must first remove political barriers to productive entrepreneurialism or else we will never get back to being the builders we once were.    

Attitudes about Progress Matter 

The economic historian Joel Mokyr has noted how, “technological progress requires above all tolerance toward the unfamiliar and the eccentric” and that the innovation that undergirds economic growth is best viewed as “a fragile and vulnerable plant” that “is highly sensitive to the social and economic environment and can easily be arrested by relatively small external changes.” Specifically, societal and political attitudes toward growth, risk-taking, and entrepreneurial activities (and failures) are important to the competitive standing of nations and the possibility of long-term prosperity. “How the citizens of any country think about economic growth, and what actions they take in consequence, are,” Benjamin Friedman observes, “a matter of far broader importance than we conventionally assume.”

Former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan and co-author Adrian Wooldridge have observed that “[t]he key to America’s success lies in its unique toleration for ‘creative destruction,’” and an “enduring preference for change over stability.” This is consistent with the findings of Deirdre McCloskey’s recent 3-volume trilogy about the history of modern economic growth. McCloskey meticulously documents how an embrace of “bourgeois virtues” (i.e., positive attitudes about markets and innovation) was the crucial factor propelling the invention and economic growth that resulted in the Industrial Revolution.The importance of positive attitudes toward innovation and risk-taking were equally important for the Information Revolution more recently. In turn, that also helps explain why so many US-based tech innovators became global powerhouses, while firms from other countries tend to flounder because their innovation culture was more precautionary in orientation.

There are limits to how much policymakers can do to influence the attitudes among citizens toward innovation, entrepreneurialism, and economic growth. When policymakers set the right tone with a positive attitude toward innovation, however, it inevitably infuses various institutions and creates powerful incentives for entrepreneurial efforts to be undertaken. This, in turn, influences broader societal attitudes and institutions toward innovation and creates a positive feedback loop. “If we learn anything from the history of economic development,” argued David Landes in his magisterial The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some Are So Poor, “it is that culture makes all the difference.” Research by other scholars finds that, “existing cultural conditions determine whether, when, how and in what form a new innovation will be adopted.”

Economists like Mancur Olson speak of the importance of a “structure of incentives” that helps explain why “the great differences in the wealth of nations are mainly due to differences in the quality of their institutions and economic policies.”In this sense, “institutions” include what Elhanan Helpman defines as “systems of rules, beliefs, and organizations,”including the rule of law and court systems,property rights,contracts, free trade policies and institutions, light-touch regulations and regulatory regimes, freedom to travel, and various other incentives to invest.

It is the freedom to invest, the freedom to work, and the freedom to build that particularly concerns Marc Andreessen. But he needs to draw the connection with the specific public policies that hold back our ability to exercise those freedoms. 

Policy Defaults toward Innovation Matter Even More

Unfortunately, a great many barriers exist to entrepreneurial efforts. Those barriers to building include inflexible health and safety regulation, occupational licensing rules, cronyist industrial protectionist schemes, inefficient (industry-rigged) tax schemes, rigid zoning ordinances, and many other layers of regulatory red tape at the federal, state, and local level.  

What unifies all these policies is risk aversion and the precautionary principle. As I argued in my last book, we have a choice when it comes to setting defaults for innovation policy. We can choose to set innovation defaults closer to the green light of “permissionless innovation,” generally allowing entrepreneurial acts unless a compelling case can be made not to. Alternatively, we can set our default closer to the red light of the precautionary principle, which disallows risk-taking or entrepreneurialism until some authority gives us permission to proceed. 

My book made the case for permissionless innovation as the superior default regime. My argument for rejecting the precautionary principle as the default came down to belief that, “living in constant fear of worst-case scenarios—and premising public policy on them—means that best-case scenarios will never come about. When public policy is shaped by precautionary principle reasoning,” I argued, “it poses a serious threat to technological progress, economic entrepreneurialism, social adaptation, and long-run prosperity.”  

Heavy-handed preemptive restraints on innovative acts have such deleterious effects because they raise barriers to entry, increase compliance costs, and create more risk and uncertainty for entrepreneurs and investors. Progress is impossible without constant trial-and-error experimentation and entrepreneurial risk-taking. Thus, it is the unseen costs of forgone innovation opportunities that make the precautionary principle so troubling as a policy default. Without risk, there can be no reward. Scientist Martin Rees refers to this truism about the precautionary principle as “the hidden cost of saying no.”  

More generally, risk analysts have noted that the precautionary principle “lacks a firm logical foundation” and is “literally incoherent” because it fails to specify a clear standard by which to judge which risks are most serious and worthy of preemptive control. Moreover, regulatory policy experts have criticized the fact that the precautionary principle, “may be misused for protectionist ends; it tends to undermine international regulatory cooperation; and it may have highly undesirable distributive consequences.” Specifically, large incumbent firms are almost always more likely able to deal with rigid, expensive regulatory regimes or, worse yet, can game those systems by “capturing” policymakers and using regulatory regimes to exclude new rivals.  

Precaution Suffocates Productive Entrepreneurialism 

The problem today is that a massive volume of precautionary policies exist that discourage “productive entrepreneurship” (i.e., building) and instead actively encourage “unproductive entrepreneurship” (i.e., preservation of the status quo). Andreessen identifies this problem when he speaks of “smug complacency, this satisfaction with the status quo and the unwillingness to build.” But he doesn’t fully connect the dots between how the attitudes came about and the public policy incentives that actively encourage such thinking. 

Why try to build when all the incentives are aligned against you? Andreessen wants to know “Where are the supersonic aircraft? Where are the millions of delivery drones? Where are the high speed trains, the soaring monorails, the hyperloops, and yes, the flying cars?” Well, I’ll tell you where they are at. They are trapped in the minds of inventive people who cannot bring them to fruition so long as an endless string of barriers makes it costly or impossible for them to realize those dreams. 

Read Eli Dourado’s important essay on “How Do We Move the Needle on Progress?” to get a more concrete feel for the specific barriers to building in the fields where productive entrepreneurialism is most needed: health, housing, energy, and transportation.

The bottom line, as Dustin Chambers and Jonathan Munemo noted in a 2017 Mercatus Center report on the impact of regulation on entrepreneurial activity, is that “If a nation wishes to promote higher levels of domestic entrepreneurship in both the short and long run, top priority should be given to reducing barriers to entry for new firms and to improving overall institutional quality (especially political stability, regulatory quality, and voice and accountability).” 

This doesn’t mean there is no role for government in helping to promote “building” and entrepreneurialism. A healthy debate continues to rage about “state capacity” as it pertains to government investments in research and development, for example. While I am skeptical, there may very well be some steps governments can take to encourage more and better investments in the sectors and technologies we desperately need. But all the “state capacity” in the world isn’t going to help until we first clear away the barriers that hold back the productive spirit of the people. 

Oiling the Wheels of Novelty

My new book, which is due out next week, discusses how innovation improves economies and government institutions. It builds on the fundamental insight of Calestous Juma, who concluded his masterwork Innovation and Its Enemies by reminding us of the continued importance of “oiling the wheels of novelty,” to constantly replenish the well of important ideas and innovations. “The biggest risk that society faces by adopting approaches that suppress innovation,” Juma said, “is that they amplify the activities of those who want to preserve the status quo by silencing those arguing for a more open future.”

The openness Juma had in mind represents a tolerance of new ideas, inventions, and unknown futures. It can and should also represent an openness to new, more flexible methods of governance. For, if it doesn’t, the builder movement that Andreessen and others long for will remain just a distant dream, incapable of ever being realized so long as the wheels of novelty are gummed up by decades of inefficient, archaic, counterproductive public policies.

_________

P.S. I highly recommend this excellent essay by Jerry Brito, “We don’t want to build? Maybe we should build anyway.” It touches on many of the same themes I discuss in my response essay as well as in my new book, Evasive Entrepreneurs and the Future of Governance: How Innovation Improves Economies and Governments.

I wanted to draw your attention to yet another spectacular speech by Maureen K. Ohlhausen, a Commissioner with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). I have written here before about Commissioner Ohlhausen’s outstanding speeches, but this latest one might be her best yet.

On Tuesday, Ohlhausen was speaking at U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation day-long event on “The Internet of Everything: Data, Networks and Opportunities.” The conference featured various keynote speakers and panels discussing, “the many ways that data and Internet connectiviting is changing the face of business and society.” (It was my honor to also be invited to deliver an address to the crowd that day.)

As with many of her other recent addresses, Commissioner Ohlhausen stressed why it is so important that policymakers “approach new technologies and new business models with regulatory humility.” Building on the work of the great Austrian economist F.A. Hayek, who won a Nobel prize in part for his work explaining the limits of our knowledge to plan societies and economies, Ohlhausen argues that:

regulators face a fundamental knowledge problem that limits the effective reach of regulation. A regulator must acquire knowledge about the present state and future trends of the industry being regulated. The more prescriptive the regulation, and the more complex the industry, the more detailed knowledge the regulator must collect. But, regulators simply cannot gather all the information relevant to every problem. Such information is widely distributed and therefore very expensive to collect. Even when a regulator manages to collect information, it quickly becomes out of date as a regulated industry continues to evolve. Obsolete data is a particular concern for regulators of fast-changing technological fields like the Internet of Things. This knowledge problem means that centralized problem solving cannot make full use of the available knowledge about a problem. Therefore, centralized regulation generally offers worse solutions when compared to distributed or emergent constraints such as social norms.

She continued on to explain the dangers of “precautionary principle” thinking as applied to new technologies, noting that, far too often, policymakers seek to impose preemptive, top-down controls on new sectors and technologies based on “concern over largely hypothetical future harms.” That’s a point I have stressed repeatedly in my own work on the importance of “permissionless innovation.” As I note in my book of the same title, living in constant fear of worst-case scenarios—and premising public policy upon them—means that best-case scenarios will never come about. When public policy is shaped by precautionary principle reasoning, it poses a serious threat to technological progress, economic entrepreneurialism, social adaptation, and long-run prosperity.

What’s the better alternative to precautionary controls to address potential risks? As Commissioner Ohlhausen noted in her speech to the Chamber of Commerce, regulators should “focus on identifying and addressing real, not speculative, consumer harm.” She explains how the FTC already has the tools to do so:

At the FTC, this focus is part of our statute. Congress charged us in Section 5 of the FTC Act with preventing deceptive or unfair acts and practices. Deceptive acts violate Section 5 only if they are material – that is, if they actually harm consumers. And practices are only unfair if there is a substantial harm that consumers cannot avoid and that outweighs any benefits to consumers or competition. In both cases, the law concerns itself with addressing actual consumer harms. Likewise the FTC carefully evaluates consumer welfare (or, its corollary, consumer harm) when it exercises its antitrust authority.

Importantly, she noted, the focus in this regard is on  ex post enforcement, not highly prescriptive ex ante regulation. “This incremental approach, which we have been using for nearly 100 years, has significant benefits,” Ohlhausen argued, and it is “consistent with Hayek’s thesis about the knowledge problem.” Namely, regulators should not be acting based on limited knowledge to address hypothetical future threats. Doing so derails opportunities for innovation and leads to myriad unintended consequences.

But the best part of Commissioner Ohlhausen’s speech was her embrace of what author Matt Ridley calls “rational optimism”:

Over the past two centuries, humankind has proven its ability to transform innovation into widespread prosperity. Fueled by supportive social attitudes and free market institutions, businesses have been the engines of this prosperity. Regulators who don’t want to stall these engines of innovation should remember the long history of beneficial innovation, remain humble about what they can know and accomplish, focus on addressing real consumer harm, and apply tools appropriate to the harms that do arise.

Critics will protest that innovation can just be too darn disruptive and that we have to preemptively legislate or regulate to counter those effects. But Ohlhausen has a powerful response to those critics:

innovation can, and will, be unnerving or unsettling. By its very nature, innovation changes things. Change is uncomfortable. That is why, as long as there has been innovation, there have been detractors and doomsayers. William Petty, the economist and doctor, said, “When a new invention is first propounded, in the beginning every man objects and the poor inventor runs the gauntloop of all petulant wits.” And he was talking in 1679! Pessimism about innovation sells newspapers and books. It also has a surprising intellectual caché. “The man who despairs when others hope is admired by a large class of persons as a sage,” said John Stuart Mill. But if the past 200 years of innovation have any lesson, it is this: society has repeatedly and quickly integrated and greatly benefited from innovation. The somber doomsday “sages” – from the Luddites in 19th century England to critics of credit card technology in the 1970s – have been wrong about the general effects of innovation. The many benefits have far outweighed the few costs. I am quite optimistic that the disruption of the Internet of Everything will continue the trend and greatly promote our prosperity.

Preach it, sister! That is exactly right.

Anyway, make sure to read Commissioner Ohlhausen’s entire speech. It is absolutely spectacular. I wish every regulatory approached their jobs with the same degree of humility, patience, and “rational optimism” that Commissioner Ohlhausen does.

I was delivering a lecture to a group of academics and students out in San Jose recently [see the slideshow here] and someone in the crowd asked me to send them a list of some of the many books I had mentioned during my talk, which was about future policy clashes over various emerging technologies. I cut the list down to the five books that I believe best frame the nature of debates over innovation and technology policy. They are:

• Virginia Postrel, The Future and Its Enemies (1998): Contrasts the conflicting worldviews of “dynamism” and “stasis” and shows how the tensions between these two visions influences debates over technological progress. No book has had a greater influence on my own thinking about debates over innovation and progress.
• Joel Garreau, Radical Evolution: The Promise and Peril of Enhancing Our Minds, Our Bodies — and What It Means to Be Human (2005). Describes how debates about emerging technologies are typically framed in terms of “Heaven” versus “Hell” scenarios. He then offers an alternative “Prevail” paradigm explaining how we “muddle through” and prosper in the face of adversity.
• Joel Mokyr, Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress (1990): One of the finest histories of technological innovation ever penned. It’s certainly my favorite. It explores how earlier technologies evolved and created social and economic tensions.
• Matt Ridley, The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves (2010): Makes the case for “rational optimism” in debates about technology and innovation and takes on pessimistic critics of technological change.
• Larry Downes, The Laws of Disruption: Harnessing the New Forces That Govern Life and Business in the Digital Age (2009): Explains how lawmaking in the information age is inexorably governed by the “law of disruption” or the fact that “technology changes exponentially, but social, economic, and legal systems change incrementally.” That fact, he explains, has profound ramifications for all technology policy debates going forward.

If you haven’t read these amazing books yet, add them to your collection  right now! They are worth reading again and again. They will forever change the way you think about debates over technology and innovation.

Last Wednesday, it was my great pleasure to testify at a Senate Commerce Committee hearing entitled, “The Connected World: Examining the Internet of Things.” The hearing focused “on how devices… will be made smarter and more dynamic through Internet technologies. Government agencies like the Federal Trade Commission, however, are already considering possible changes to the law that could have the unintended consequence of slowing innovation.”

But the session went well beyond the Internet of Things and became a much more wide-ranging discussion about how America can maintain its global leadership for the next-generation of Internet-enabled, data-driven innovation. On both sides of the aisle at last week’s hearing, one Senator after another made impassioned remarks about the enormous innovation opportunities that were out there. While doing so, they highlighted not just the opportunities emanating out of the IoT and wearable device space, but also many other areas, such as connected cars, commercial drones, and next-generation spectrum.

I was impressed by the energy and nonpartisan vision that the Senators brought to these issues, but I wanted to single out the passionate statement that Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) delivered when it came his turn to speak because he very eloquently articulated what’s at stake in the battle for global innovation supremacy in the modern economy. (Sen. Booker’s remarks were not published, but you can watch them starting at the 1:34:00 mark of the hearing video.)

Embrace the Opportunity

First, Sen. Booker stressed the enormous opportunity with the Internet of Things. “ This is a phenomenal opportunity for a bipartisan, profoundly patriotic approach to an issue that can explode our economy. I think that there are trillions of dollars, creating countless jobs, improving quality of life, [and] democratizing our society,” he said. “We can’t even imagine the future that this portends of, and we should be embracing that.”

Sen. Booker has it exactly right. And for more details about the enormous innovation opportunities associated with the Internet of Things, see Section 2 of my new law review article, “The Internet of Things and Wearable Technology Addressing Privacy and Security Concerns without Derailing Innovation,” which provides concrete evidence.

Protect America’s Competitive Advantage in the Innovation Age

Second, Sen. Booker highlighted the importance of getting our policy vision right to achieve those opportunities. He noted that “a lot of my concerns are what my Republican colleagues also echoed, which is we should be doing everything possible to encourage this and nothing to restrict it.”

“ America right now is the net exporter of technology and innovation in the globe, and we can’t lose that advantage,” he said and “we should continue to be the global innovators on these areas.” He continued on to say:

And so, from copyright issues, security issues, privacy issues… all of these things are worthy of us wrestling and grappling with, but to me we cannot stop human innovation and we can’t give advantages in human innovation to other nations that we don’t have. America should continue to lead.

This is something I have been writing actively about now for many years and I agree with Sen. Booker that America needs to get our policy vision right to ensure we don’t lose ground in the international competition to see who will lead the next wave of Internet-enabled innovation. As I noted in my testimony, “If America hopes to be a global leader in the Internet of Things, as it has been for the Internet more generally over the past two decades, then we first have to get public policy right. America took a commanding lead in the digital economy because, in the mid-1990s, Congress and the Clinton administration crafted a nonpartisan vision for the Internet that protected “permissionless innovation”—the idea that experimentation with new technologies and business models should generally be permitted without prior approval.”

Meanwhile, as I documented in my longer essay, “Why Permissionless Innovation Matters: Why does economic growth occur in some societies & not in others?” our international rivals languished on this front because they strapped their tech sectors with layers of regulatory red tape that thwarted digital innovation.

Reject Fear-Based Policymaking

Third, and perhaps most importantly, Sen. Booker stressed how essential it was that we reject a fear-based approach to public policymaking. As he noted at the hearing about these new information technologies, “ there’s a lot of legitimate fears, but in the same way of every technological era, there must have been incredible fears.”

He cited, for example, the rise of air travel and the onset of humans taking flight. Sen. Booker correctly noted that while that must have been quite jarring at first, we quickly came to realize the benefits of that new innovation. The same will be true for new technologies such as the Internet of Things, connected cars, and private drones, Booker argued. In each case, some early fears about these technologies could lead to overly-precautionary approach to policy. “ But for us to do anything to inhibit that leap in humanity to me seems unfortunate,” he said.

Once again, the Senator has it exactly right. As I noted in my law review article on “Technopanics, Threat Inflation, and the Danger of an Information Technology Precautionary Principle,” as well as my recent essay, “Muddling Through: How We Learn to Cope with Technological Change,” humans have exhibited the uncanny ability to adapt to changes in their environment, bounce back from adversity, and learn to be resilient over time. A great deal of wisdom is born of experience, including experiences that involve risk and the possibility of occasional mistakes and failures while both developing new technologies and learning how to live with them. More often than not, citizens have found ways to adapt to technological change by employing a variety of coping mechanisms, new norms, or other creative fixes.

Booker gets that and understands why we need to be patient to allow that process to unfold once again so that we can enjoy the abundance of riches that will accompany a more innovative economy.

Avoiding Global Innovation Arbitrage

Sen. Booker also highlighted how some existing government legal and regulatory barriers could hold back progress. On the wireless spectrum front he noted that “ the government hoards too much spectrum and there is a need for more spectrum out there. Everything we are talking about,” he argued, “is going to necessitate more spectrum.” Again, 100% correct. Although some spectrum reform proposals (licensed vs. unlicensed, for example) will still prove contentious, we can at least all agree that we have to work together to find ways to open up more spectrum since the coming Internet of Things universe of technologies is going to demand lots of it.

Booker also noted that another area where fear undermines American leadership is the issue of private drone use. He noted that, “ the potential possibilities for drone technology to alleviate burdens on our infrastructure, to empower commerce, innovation, jobs… to really open up unlimited opportunities in this country is pretty incredible to me.”

The problem is that existing government policies, enforced by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), have been holding back progress. And that has had consequences in terms of global competitiveness. “As I watch our government go slow in promulgating rules holding back American innovation,” Booker said, “what happened as a result of that is that innovation has spread to other countries that don’t have these rules (or have) put in place sensible regulations. But now we seeing technology exported from America and going other places.”

Correct again! I wrote about this problem in a recent essay on “global innovation arbitrage,” in which I noted how “Capital moves like quicksilver around the globe today as investors and entrepreneurs look for more hospitable tax and regulatory environments. The same is increasingly true for innovation. Innovators can, and increasingly will, move to those countries and continents that provide a legal and regulatory environment more hospitable to entrepreneurial activity.”

That’s already happening with drone innovation, as I documented in that piece. Evidence suggests that the FAA’s heavy-handed and overly-precautionary approach to drones has encouraged some innovators to flock overseas in search of more hospitable regulatory environment.

Luckily, just this weekend, the FAA finally announced its (much-delayed) rules for private drone operations. (Here’s a summary of those rules.) Unfortunately, the rules are a bit of mixed bag, with some greater leeway being provided for very small drones, but the rules will still be too restrictive to allow for other innovative applications, such as widespread drone delivery (which has Amazon angry, among others.)

Bottom line: if our government doesn’t take a more flexible, light-touch approach to these and other cutting-edge technologies, than some of our most creative minds and companies are going to bolt.

I dealt with all of these innovation policy issues in far more detail in my latest little book Permissionless Innovation: The Continuing Case for Comprehensive Technological Freedom, which I condensed further still into this essay on, “Embracing a Culture of Permissionless Innovation.” But Sen. Booker has offered us an even more concise explanation of just what’s at stake in the battle for innovation leadership in the modern economy. His remarks point the way forward and illustrate, as I have noted before, that innovation policy can and should be a nonpartisan issue.

Additional Reading

• testimony: “My Testimony for Senate Internet of Things Hearing,” February 11, 2015.
• essay: “A Nonpartisan Policy Vision for the Internet of Things,” December 11, 2014.
• law review article: “The Internet of Things and Wearable Technology Addressing Privacy and Security Concerns without Derailing Innovation,” November 2014.
• essay: “Don’t Hit the (Techno-)Panic Button on Connected Car Hacking & IoT Security,” February 10, 2015.
• essay: “Striking a Sensible Balance on the Internet of Things and Privacy,” January 16, 2015.
• essay: “Some Initial Thoughts on the FTC Internet of Things Report,” January 28, 2015.
• slide presentation: “Policy Issues Surrounding the Internet of Things & Wearable Technology,” September 12, 2014.
• essay: “CES 2014 Report: The Internet of Things Arrives, but Will Washington Welcome It?” January 8, 2014.

In my previous essay, I discussed a new white paper by my colleague Robert Graboyes, Fortress and Frontier in American Health Care, which examines the future of medical innovation. Graboyes uses the “fortress vs frontier” dichotomy to help explain different “visions” about how public policies debates about technological innovation in the health care arena often play out.  It’s a terrific study that I highly recommend for all the reasons I stated in my previous post.

As I was reading Bob’s new report, I realized that his approach shared much in common with a couple of other recent innovation policy paradigms I have discussed here before from Virginia Postrel (“Stasis” vs. “Dynamism”), Robert D. Atkinson (“Preservationists” vs. “Modernizers”), and myself (“Precautionary Principle” vs. “Permissionless Innovation”). In this essay, I will briefly relate Bob’s’ approach to those other three innovation policy paradigms and then note a deficiency with our common approaches. I’ll conclude by briefly discussing another interesting framework from science writer Joel Garreau.

Stasis vs. Dynamism – Virginia Postrel (1998)

In her 1998 book, The Future and Its Enemies, Virginia Postrel contrasted the conflicting worldviews of “dynamism”and “stasis” and showed how the tensions between these two visions would affect the course of future human progress. Postrel made the case for embracing dynamism — “a world of constant creation, discovery, and competition” — over the “regulated, engineered world” of the stasis mentality. She argued that we should “see technology as an expression of human creativity and the future as inviting” and reject the idea “that progress requires a central blueprint.” Dynamism defines progress as “a decentralized, evolutionary process” in which mistakes aren’t viewed as permanent disasters but instead as “the correctable by-products of experimentation.” (p. xiv)

Postrel argued that our dynamic modern world and the amazing technologies that drive it have united diverse “stasis”-minded forces in opposition to its continued, unfettered evolution:

[It] has united two types of stasists who would have once been bitter enemies: reactionaries, whose central value is stability, and technocrats, whose central value is control. Reactionaries seek to reverse change, restoring the literal or imagined past and holding it in place. . . . Technocrats, for their part, promise to manage change, centrally directing “progress” according to a predictable plan. . . . They do not celebrate the primitive or traditional. Rather, they worry about the government’s inability to control dynamism. (p. 7-8)

Preservationists vs. Modernizers – Robert D. Atkinson (2004)

Robert D. Atkinson, President, Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, presented another useful way of looking at innovation policy divides in his 2004 book, The Past and Future of America’s Economy. In Chapter 6 on “The New Economy and Its Discontents,” Atkinson noted how “American history is rife with resistance to change,” as he recounted some of the heated battles over previous industrial / technological revolutions. He argued:

This conflict between stability and progress, security and prosperity, dynamism and stasis, has led to the creation of a major political fault line in American politics. On one side are those who welcome the future and look at the New Economy as largely positive. On the other are those who resist change and see only the risks of new technologies and the New Economy.  As a result, a political divide is emerging between preservationists who want to hold onto the past and modernizers who recognize that new times require new means. (p. 201)

Precautionary Principle vs. Permissionless Innovation – Adam Thierer (2014)

In my latest book, “Permissionless Innovation: The Continuing Case for Comprehensive Technological Freedom,” I argued that the central fault line in almost all modern technology policy debates revolves around “the permission question,” which asks: Must the creators of new technologies seek the blessing of public officials before they develop and deploy their innovations? I argued that we are today witnessing a grand clash of visions between two competing mindsets about how that question should be answered for a wide variety of new inventions:

One disposition is known as the “precautionary principle.” Generally speaking, it refers to the belief that new innovations should be curtailed or disallowed until their developers can prove that they will not cause any harms to individuals, groups, specific entities, cultural norms, or various existing laws, norms, or traditions.

The other vision can be labeled “permissionless innovation.” It refers to the notion that experimentation with new technologies and business models should generally be permitted by default. Unless a compelling case can be made that a new invention will bring serious harm to society, innovation should be allowed to continue unabated and problems, if they develop at all, can be addressed later.

Fortress vs. Frontier – Robert Graboyes (2014)

In his new white paper, Fortress and Frontier in American Health Care, Robert Graboyes seeks to reframe the debate over the future of health care innovation in terms of “Fortress versus Frontier” and to highlight what lessons we can learn from the Internet and the Information Revolution that can better inform health care policy. Graboyes defines “Fortress and Frontier” as follows:

The Fortress is an institutional environment that aims to obviate risk and protect established producers (insiders) against competition from newcomers (outsiders). The Frontier, in contrast, tolerates risk and allows outsiders to compete against established insiders. . . .  The Fortress-Frontier divide does not correspond neatly with the more familiar partisan or ideological divides. Framing health care policy issues in this way opens the door for a more productive national health care discussion and for unconventional policy alliances. (p. 4)

He elaborates in more detail later in the paper:

the Frontier encourages creative destruction and disruptive innovation. Undreamed-of products arise and old, revered ones vanish. New production processes sweep away old ones. This is a place where unknown innovators in garages destroy titans of industry. The Frontier celebrates and rewards risk, and there is a brutal egalitarianism to the creative process. In contrast, the Fortress discourages creative destruction and disruptive innovation. Insiders are protected from competition by government or by private organizations (such as insurers and medical societies) acting in quasigovernmental fashion. In the Fortress, insiders preserve the existing order. Innovation comes from well-established, credentialed insiders who, it is presumed, have the wisdom and motives and competence to identify opportunities for innovation. (p. 13)

The Common Themes

There are several themes that unify these four frameworks. Most notably, they all seek to escape the traditional “Left vs. Right,” “Conservative vs. Liberal,” and “Democrat vs. Republican” labels and models. Postrel’s book noted that, although there are differences at the margin, “reactionaries” (who tend to be more politically and socially “conservative”) and “technocrats” (who tend to identify as politically “progressive”) are united by their desire for greater control over the pace and shape of technological innovation. They both hope that sagacious, noble-minded public officials can set us on a “better path,” or return us to an old path from which we have drifted.

Similarly, Atkinson’s “preservationists versus modernizers” dichotomy identified the “small-c” conservatism that animates the preservationist mindset, regardless of which party or political movement they belong to. Graboyes and I identify this same tendency of those with a precautionary, Fortress mindset to be deeply suspicious of change, and sometimes even being quite openly hostile to it–regardless of their political affiliation. Moreover, all four authors note that, at a minimum, Stasis/Preservationist/Fortress/Precautionary vision is unified by a general gloominess about the prospect for technological change to really better our economy or culture.

From a policy perspective, the competing visions outlined in each of these four paradigms are unified by their preferred policy default for new innovation. Generally speaking, those subscribing to the Dynamist/Modernizer/Frontier/Permissionless Innovation vision believe that innovators should have a clear green light to experiment without fear of prior restraint. By contrast, those adhering to the Stasis/Preservationist/Fortress/Precautionary vision are more risk-adverse and tend to opt for “better to be safe than sorry” policy defaults.

Here’s a little table I put together to highlight the “conflict of visions” over innovation policy identified in these works.

A Problem with These Paradigms

An astute reader will notice a potential problem with these four paradigms: They were crafted by people (including myself) who were much more favorably disposed to one vision than the other. In fact, each of the authors listed here (including me) firmly embraced a common “positive” or “optimistic” vision about the potential for innovation and technological change to generally boost human welfare. We were all writing defenses of visions that, generally speaking, encourage the adoption of attitudes and public policies that are generally welcoming toward new innovations. Postrel, for example, was seeking to articulate and defend the superiority of the dynamist vision over the stasis mentality. Atkinson defended modernizers and bashed preservationists. Graboyes embraced the Frontier mentality and warned of the dangers of the Fortress mentality. Finally, in my own work, I have vociferously defended the notion of permissionless innovation while repeatedly criticizing precautionary principle-based thinking.

I will proudly defend my own work as well as the visions sketched out by Postrel, Atkinson, and Graboyes, which are all very much in league with my own. Nonetheless, some readers or critics might claim that we have stacked the deck in our favor by framing innovation policy debates in the ways we have. We each had a polemical purpose in mind when writing these books; we were hoping to convince others to embrace our way of thinking about technological progress and the future. As a result, that influenced our choice of language and labels. Some critics might even claim that the words we chose to describe the alternative vision are too simplistic or unfairly derogatory. After all, who wants to be labeled a “stasis”-minded “preservationist” who is trapped in a “fortress” mentality advocating hopelessly “precautionary” policies?! By contrast, it is relatively easy for many of us to say we are “modernizers” who embrace “dynamism” and the “frontier” spirit in defense of “permissionless innovation.”

Technological critics have penned a wide variety of polemics making their views on these matters clear, but what is interesting is how few of them attempt to describe the opposing positions in clear detail, or even bother trying to label them. Nor do they usually bother labeling their own positions or perspectives. I suspect that many of them would claim their visions or critiques cannot be succinctly summarized in a mere word or phrase, and that trying to craft conflicting “visions” about innovation policy over-simplifies very complex matters. I actually appreciate that point more than you think. When I am writing about these matters, I try not to over-generalize the very nuanced, sensitive issues in play in here, such as the privacy, safety, and security implications associated with various new innovations. These are profound matters and they deserve to be analyzed carefully and respectfully.

That being said, I still believe that there is a role for visions when thinking about the past, the present, and the future of technological change. Labels and classifications can help us unpack the philosophical differences between different people and organizations and then also evaluate their preferred policy solutions. This allows us to better understand what animates the opposing forces that are pushing for specific policy changes.

Nonetheless, I welcome alternative framings of these proposals and the personalities behind them. Moreover, I would very much like to see others — either those who take opposing views, or analysts with no stake in the fight — suggest other ways of looking at the conflict of visions that animates debates over technological innovation and the future of progress.

A Note on Joel Garreau’s Framing

I want to close with a quick postscript related to my point about over-simplifying “visions” about technological change.  In 2010, I penned an essay that got a fair amount of attention entitled, “Are You An Internet Optimist or Pessimist? The Great Debate over Technology’s Impact on Society.” As the title implied, it was an attempt to divide the history of thinking about technological innovation into two camps: “pessimists” and “optimists.” It was a crude and overly-simplistic dichotomy, but it was an attempt to begin sketching out a rough taxonomy of the personalities and perspectives that we often seen pitted against each other in debates about the impact of technology on culture and humanity.

I was never really satisfied with the “optimist vs. pessimist” breakdown, and I got an earful from some people about it. I always thought there must be somebody who had figured out a better way of reviewing the long arc of history and human thinking about technological change and coming up with better labels or “visions.” And there was!

When I wrote that earlier piece, I was unfortunately not aware of a similar (and much better) framing of this divide that was developed by science and technology writer Joel Garreau in his outstanding 2005 book, Radical Evolution: The Promise and Peril of Enhancing Our Minds, Our Bodies — and What It Means to Be Human. In that book, Garreau is thinking in much grander terms about technology and the future than I was in my earlier essay. He was focused on how various emerging technologies might be changing our very humanity and he notes that narratives about these issues are typically framed in “Heaven” versus “Hell” scenarios.

Under the “Heaven” scenario, technology drives history relentlessly, and in almost every way for the better. As Garreau describes the beliefs of the Heaven crowd, they believe that going forward, “almost unimaginably good things are happening, including the conquering of disease and poverty, but also an increase in beauty, wisdom, love, truth, and peace.” (p. 130) By contrast, under the “Hell” scenario, “technology is used for extreme evil, threatening humanity with extinction.” (p. 95) Garreau notes that what unifies the Hell scenario theorists is the sense that in “wresting power from the gods and seeking to transcend the human condition,” we end up instead creating a monster — or maybe many different monsters — that threatens our very existence. Garreau says this “Frankenstein Principle” can be seen in countless works of literature and technological criticism throughout history, and it is still very much with us today. (p. 108)

After discussing the “Heaven” and “Hell” scenarios cast about by countless tech writers throughout history, Garreau outlined a third, and more pragmatic “Prevail” option, which views history “as a remarkably effective paean to the power of humans to muddle through extraordinary circumstances.” As Garreau explains it, under the “Prevail” scenario, “humans shape and adapt [technology] in entirely new directions.” (p. 95) “Just because the problems are increasing doesn’t mean solutions might not also be increasing to match them,” he rightly notes. (p. 154)

That pretty much sums up my own perspective on things, as I noted in this essay earlier this year, “Muddling Through: How We Learn to Cope with Technological Change.”  I think the “prevail” or “muddling through” notion offers the best explanation for how we learn to cope with technological disruption and prosper in the process. (I also wrote a lengthy law review article on this and discussed this issue more in my recent book.) In any event, I chose not to include Garreau’s framework in the above discussion because Garreau — a former reporter and editor at The Washington Post — tries to be somewhat more objective in discussing the various “Heaven” vs. “Hell” scenarios and the personalities behind them (even though in the concluding chapter he seems to be aligning himself with the “Prevail” crowd.) So, it doesn’t quite align perfectly with the more polemical visions I described above. But I continue to think it is the single best thing penned in recent years on the nature of these debates. I cannot recommend it strongly enough.

In closing, I want to reiterate that I would very much welcome suggestions from others about alternative framings and paradigms for thinking about the future of technological change and progress. I imagine I will spend the rest of my life researching and writing about these issues, so I’d love to get more input.  As you can tell, I find these debates terrifically interesting!

How is it that we humans have again and again figured out how to assimilate new technologies into our lives despite how much those technologies “unsettled” so many well-established personal, social, cultural, and legal norms?

In recent years, I’ve spent a fair amount of time thinking through that question in a variety of blog posts (“Are You An Internet Optimist or Pessimist? The Great Debate over Technology’s Impact on Society”), law review articles (“Technopanics, Threat Inflation, and the Danger of an Information Technology Precautionary Principle”), opeds (“Why Do We Always Sell the Next Generation Short?”), and books (See chapter 4 of my new book, “Permissionless Innovation: The Continuing Case for Comprehensive Technological Freedom”).

It’s fair to say that this issue — how individuals, institutions, and cultures adjust to technological change — has become a personal obsession of mine and it is increasingly the unifying theme of much of my ongoing research agenda. The economic ramifications of technological change are part of this inquiry, of course, but those economic concerns have already been the subject of countless books and essays both today and throughout history. I find that the social issues associated with technological change — including safety, security, and privacy considerations — typically get somewhat less attention, but are equally interesting. That’s why my recent work and my new book narrow the focus to those issues.

Optimistic (“Heaven”) vs. Pessimistic (“Hell”) Scenarios

Modern thinking and scholarship on the impact of technological change on societies has been largely dominated by skeptics and critics.

In the past century, for example, French philosopher Jacques Ellul ( The Technological Society), German historian Oswald Spengler (Man and Technics), and American historian Lewis Mumford (Technics and Civilization) penned critiques of modern technological processes that took a dour view of technological innovation and our collective ability to adapt positively to it. (Concise summaries of their thinking can be found in Christopher May’s edited collection of essays, Key Thinkers for the Information Society.)

These critics worried about the subjugation of humans to “technique” or “technics” and feared that technology and technological processes would come to control us before we learned how to control them. Media theorist Neil Postman was the most notable of the modern information technology critics and served as the bridge between the industrial era critics (like Ellul, Spengler, and Mumford) and some of today’s digital age skeptics (like Evgeny Morozov and Nick Carr). Postman decried the rise of a “technopoly” — “the submission of all forms of cultural life to the sovereignty of technique and technology” — that would destroy “the vital sources of our humanity” and lead to “a culture without a moral foundation” by undermining “certain mental processes and social relations that make human life worth living.” We see that attitude on display in countless works of technological criticism since then.

Of course, there’s been some pushback from some futurists and technological enthusiasts. But there’s often a fair amount of irrational exuberance at work in their tracts and punditry. Many self-proclaimed “futurists” have predicted that various new technologies would produce a nirvana that would overcome human want, suffering, ignorance, and more.

In a 2010 essay, I labeled these two camps technological “pessimists” and “optimists.” It was a crude and overly-simplistic dichotomy, but it was an attempt to begin sketching out a rough taxonomy of the personalities and perspectives that we often seen pitted against each other in debates about the impact of technology on culture and humanity.

Sadly, when I wrote that earlier piece, I was not aware of a similar (and much better) framing of this divide that was developed by science writer Joel Garreau in his terrific 2005 book, Radical Evolution: The Promise and Peril of Enhancing Our Minds, Our Bodies — and What It Means to Be Human. In that book, Garreau is thinking in much grander terms about technology and the future than I was in my earlier essay. He was focused on how various emerging technologies might be changing our very humanity and he notes that narratives about these issues are typically framed in “Heaven” versus “Hell” scenarios.

Under the “Heaven” scenario, technology drives history relentlessly, and in almost every way for the better. As Garreau describes the beliefs of the Heaven crowd, they believe that going forward, “almost unimaginably good things are happening, including the conquering of disease and poverty, but also an increase in beauty, wisdom, love, truth, and peace.” (p. 130) By contrast, under the “Hell” scenario, “technology is used for extreme evil, threatening humanity with extinction.” (p. 95) Garreau notes that what unifies the Hell scenario theorists is the sense that in “wresting power from the gods and seeking to transcend the human condition,” we end up instead creating a monster — or maybe many different monsters — that threatens our very existence. Garreau says this “Frankenstein Principle” can be seen in countless works of literature and technological criticism throughout history, and it is still very much with us today. (p. 108)

Theories of Collapse: Why Does Doomsaying Dominate Discussions about New Technologies?

Indeed, in examining the way new technologies and inventions have long divided philosophers, scientists, pundits, and the general public, one can find countless examples of that sort of fear and loathing at work. “Armageddon has a long and distinguished history,” Garreau notes. “Theories of progress are mirrored by theories of collapse.” (p. 149)

In that regard, Garreau rightly cites Arthur Herman’s magisterial history of apocalyptic theories, The Idea of Decline in Western History, which documents “declinism” over time. The irony of much of this pessimistic declinist thinking, Herman notes, is that:

In effect, the very things modern society does best — providing increasing economic affluence, equality of opportunity, and social and geographic mobility — are systematically deprecated and vilified by its direct beneficiaries. None of this is new or even remarkable.” (p. 442)

Why is that? Why has the “Hell” scenario been such a dominant reoccurring theme in past writing and commentary throughout history, even though the general trend has been steady improvements in human health, welfare, and convenience?

There must be something deeply rooted in the human psyche that accounts for this tendency. As I have discussed in my new book as well as my big “Technopanics” law review article, our innate tendency to be pessimistic but also want to be certain about the future means that “the gloom-mongers have it easy,” as author Dan Gardner argues in his book, Future Babble: Why Expert Predictions Are Next to Worthless, and You Can Do Better. He continues on to note of the techno-doomsday pundits:

Their predictions are supported by our intuitive pessimism, so they feel right to us. And that conclusion is bolstered by our attraction to certainty. As strange as it sounds, we want to believe the expert predicting a dark future is exactly right, because knowing that the future will be dark is less tormenting than suspecting it. Certainty is always preferable to uncertainty, even when what’s certain is disaster. (p. 140-1)

Similarly, in his new book, Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better, Clive Thompson notes that “dystopian predictions are easy to generate” and “doomsaying is emotionally self-protective: if you complain that today’s technology is wrecking the culture, you can tell yourself you’re a gimlet-eyed critic who isn’t hoodwinked by high-tech trends and silly, popular activities like social networking. You seem like someone who has a richer, deeper appreciation for the past and who stands above the triviality of today’s life.” (p. 283)

Another explanation is that humans are sometimes very poor judges of the relative risks to themselves or those close to them. Harvard University psychology professor Steven Pinker, author of The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, notes:

The mind is more comfortable in reckoning probabilities in terms of the relative frequency of remembered or imagined events. That can make recent and memorable events—a plane crash, a shark attack, an anthrax infection—loom larger in one’s worry list than more frequent and boring events, such as the car crashes and ladder falls that get printed beneath the fold on page B14. And it can lead risk experts to speak one language and ordinary people to hear another. (p. 232)

Put simply, there exists a wide variety of explanations for why our collective first reaction to new technologies often is one of dystopian dread. In my work, I have identified several other factors, including: generational differences; hyper-nostalgia; media sensationalism; special interest pandering to stoke fears and sell products or services; elitist attitudes among intellectuals; and the so-called “third-person effect hypothesis,” which posits that when some people encounter perspectives or preferences at odds with their own, they are more likely to be concerned about the impact of those things on others throughout society and to call on government to “do something” to correct or counter those perspectives or preferences.

Some combination of these factors ends up driving the initial resistance we have see to new technologies that disrupted long-standing social norms, traditions, and institutions. In the extreme, it results in that gloom-and-doom, sky-is-falling disposition in which we are repeatedly told how humanity is about to be steam-rolled by some new invention or technological development.

The “Prevail” (or “Muddling Through”) Scenario

“The good news is that end-of-the-world predictions have been around for a very long time, and none of them has yet borne fruit,” Garreau reminds us. (p. 148) Why not? Let’s get back to his framework for the answer. After discussing the “Heaven” (optimistic) and “Hell” (skeptical or pessimistic) scenarios cast about by countless tech writers throughout history, Garreau outlines a third, and more pragmatic “Prevail” option, which views history “as a remarkably effective paean to the power of humans to muddle through extraordinary circumstances.”

That pretty much sums up my own perspective on things, and in the remainder of this essay I want sketch out the reasons why I think the “prevail” or “muddling through” scenario offers the best explanation for how we learn to cope with technological disruption and prosper in the process.

As Garreau explains it, under the “Prevail” scenario, “humans shape and adapt [technology] in entirely new directions.” (p. 95) “Just because the problems are increasing doesn’t mean solutions might not also be increasing to match them,” he rightly notes. (p. 154) As John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid noted in their excellent 2001, “ Response to Bill Joy and the Doom-and-Gloom Technofuturists”:

technological and social systems shape each other. The same is true on a larger scale. […] Technology and society are constantly forming and reforming new dynamic equilibriums with far-reaching implications. The challenge for futurology (and for all of us) is to see beyond the hype and past the over-simplifications to the full import of these new sociotechnical formations.  Social and technological systems do not develop independently; the two evolve together in complex feedback loops, wherein each drives, restrains and accelerates change in the other.

It is this process of “constantly forming and reforming new dynamic equilibriums” that interests me most. In a recent exchange with Michael Sacasas – one of the most thoughtful modern technology critics I’ve come across — I noted that the nature of individual and societal acclimation to technological change is worthy of serious investigation if for no other reason that it has continuously happened! What I hope to better understand is the process by which we humans have again and again figured out how to assimilate new technologies into their lives despite how much those technologies disrupted our personal, social, economic, cultural, and legal norms.

In a response to me, Sacasas put forth the following admonition: “That people eventually acclimate to changes precipitated by the advent of a new technology does not prove that the changes were inconsequential or benign.” This is undoubtedly true, but it does not undermine the reality of societal adaptation. What can we learn from this? What were the mechanics of that adaptive process? As social norms, personal habits, and human relationships were disrupted, what helped us muddle through and find a way of coping with new technologies? Likewise, as existing markets and business models were disrupted, how were new ones formulated in response to the given technological disruption? Finally, how did legal norms and institutions adjust to those same changes?

Of course, this raises an entirely different issue: What metrics are we using to judge whether “the changes were inconsequential or benign”? As I noted in my exchange with Sacasas, at the end of the day, it may be that we won’t be able to even agree on a standard by which to make that judgment and will instead have to settle for a rough truce about what history has to teach us that might be summed up by the phrase: “something gained, something lost.”

Resiliency: Why Do the Skeptics Never Address It (and Its Benefits)?

Nonetheless, I believe that while technological change often brings sweeping and quite consequential change, there is great value in the very act of living through it.

In my work, including my latest little book, I argue that humans have exhibited the uncanny ability to adapt to changes in their environment, bounce back from adversity, and learn to be resilient over time. A great deal of wisdom is born of experience, including experiences that involve risk and the possibility of occasional mistakes and failures while both developing new technologies and learning how to live with them. I believe it wise to continue to be open to new forms of innovation and technological change, not only because it provides breathing space for future entrepreneurialism and invention, but also because it provides an opportunity to see how societal attitudes toward new technologies evolve — and to learn from it. More often than not, I argue, citizens have found ways to adapt to technological change by employing a variety of coping mechanisms, new norms, or other creative fixes.

What we’re talking about here is resiliency. Andrew Zolli and Ann Marie Healy, authors of Resilience: Why Things Bounce Back, define resilience as “the capacity of a system, enterprise, or a person to maintain its core purpose and integrity in the face of dramatically changed circumstances.” (p. 7) “To improve your resilience,” they note, “is to enhance your ability to resist being pushed from your preferred valley, while expanding the range of alternatives that you can embrace if you need to. This is what researchers call preserving adaptive capacity—the ability to adapt to changed circumstances while fulfilling once core purpose—and it’s an essential skill in an age of unforeseeable disruption and volatility.” (p. 7-8, emphasis in original) Moreover, they note, “by encouraging adaptation, agility, cooperation, connectivity, and diversity, resilience-thinking can bring us to a different way of being in the world, and to a deeper engagement with it.” (p. 16)

Even if you one doesn’t agree with all of that, again, I would think one would find great value in studying the process by which such adaptation happens precisely because it does happen so regularly. And then we could argue about whether it was all really worth it! Specially, was it worth whatever we lost in the process (i.e., a change in our old moral norms, our old privacy norms, our old institutions, our old business models, our old laws, or whatever else)?

As Sacasas correctly argues, “That people before us experienced similar problems does not mean that they magically cease being problems today.” Again, quite right. On the other hand, the fact that people and institutions learned to cope with those concerns and become more resilient over time is worthy of serious investigation because somehow we “muddled through” before and we’ll have to muddle through again. And, again, what we learned from living through that process may be extremely valuable in its own right.

Of Course, Muddling Through Isn’t Always Easy

Now, let’s be honest about this process of “muddling through”: it isn’t always neat or pretty. To put it crudely, sometimes muddling through really sucks! Think about the modern technologies that violate our visceral sense of privacy and personal space today. I am an intensely private person and if I had a life motto it would probably be: “ Leave Me Alone!” Yet, sometimes there’s just no escaping the pervasive reach of modern technologies and processes. On the other hand, I know that, like so many others, I derive amazing benefits from all these new technologies, too. So, like most everyone else I put up with the downsides because, on net, there are generally more upsides.

Almost every digital service that we use today presents us with these trade-offs. For example, email has allowed us to connect with a constantly growing universe of our fellow humans and organizations. Yet, spam clutters our mailboxes and the sheer volume of email we get sometimes overwhelms us. Likewise, in just the past five years, smartphones have transformed our lives in so many ways for the better in terms of not just personal convenience but also personal safety. On the other hand, smartphones have become more than a bit of nuisance in certain environments (theaters, restaurants, and other closed spaces.) And they also put our safety at risk when we use them while driving automobiles.

But, again, we adjust to most of these new realities and then we find constructive solutions to the really hard problems – yes, and that sometimes includes legal remedies to rectify serious harms. But a certain amount of social adaptation will, nonetheless, be required. Law can only slightly slow that inevitability; it can’t stop it entirely. And as messy and uncomfortable as muddling through can be, we have to (a) be aware of what we gain in the process and (b) ask ourselves what the cost of taking the alternative path would be. Attempts to through a wrench in the works and derail new innovations or delay various types of technological change are always going to be tempting, but such interventions will come at a very steep cost: less entreprenurialism, diminished competition, stagnant markets, higher prices, and fewer choices for citizens. As I note in my new book, if we spend all our time living in constant fear of worst-case scenarios — and premising public policy upon such fears — it means that many best-case scenarios will never come about.

Social Resistance / Pressure Dynamics

There’s another part to this story that often gets overlooked. “Muddling through” isn’t just some sort of passive process where individuals and institutions have to figure out how to cope with technological change. Rather, there is an active dynamic at work, too. Individuals and institutions push back and actively shape their tools and systems.

In a recent Wired essay on public attitudes about emerging technologies such as the controversial Google Glass, Issie Lapowsky noted that:

If the stigma surrounding Google Glass (or, perhaps more specifically, “Glassholes”) has taught us anything, it’s that no matter how revolutionary technology may be, ultimately its success or failure ride on public perception. Many promising technological developments have died because they were ahead of their times. During a cultural moment when the alleged arrogance of some tech companies is creating a serious image problem, the risk of pushing new tech on a public that isn’t ready could have real bottom-line consequences.

In my new book, I spend some time think about this process of “norm-shaping” through social pressure, activist efforts, educational steps, and even public shaming. A recent Ars Technica essay by Joe Silver offered some powerful examples of how when “shamed on Twitter, corporations do an about-face.” Silver notes that “A few recent case-study examples of individuals who felt they were wronged by corporations and then took to the Twitterverse to air their grievances show how a properly placed tweet can be a powerful weapon for consumers to combat corporate malfeasance.” In my book and in recent law review articles, I have provided other examples how this works at both a corporate and individual level to constrain improper behavior and protect various social norms.

Edmund Burke once noted that, “Manners are of more importance than laws. Manners are what vex or soothe, corrupt or purify, exalt or debase, barbarize or refine us, by a constant, steady, uniform, insensible operation, like that of the air we breathe in.” Cristina Bicchieri, a leading behavioral ethicist, calls social norms “the grammar of society” because,

like a collection of linguistic rules that are implicit in a language and define it, social norms are implicit in the operations of a society and make it what it is. Like a grammar, a system of norms specifies what is acceptable and what is not in a social group. And analogously to a grammar, a system of norms is not the product of human design and planning.

Put simply, more than law can regulate behavior — whether it is organizational behavior or individual behavior. It’s yet another way we learn to cope and “muddle through” over time. Again, check out my book for several other examples.

A Case Study: The Long-Standing “Problem” of Photography

Let’s bring all this together and be more concrete about it by using a case study: photography. With all the talk of how unsettling various modern technological developments are, they really pale in comparison to just how jarring the advent of widespread public photography must have been in the late 1800s and beyond. “For the first time photographs of people could be taken without their permission—perhaps even without their knowledge,” notes Lawrence M. Friedman in his 2007 book, Guiding Life’s Dark Secrets: Legal and Social Controls over Reputation, Propriety, and Privacy.

Thus, the camera was viewed as a highly disruptive force as photography became more widespread. In fact, the most important essay ever written on privacy law, Samuel D. Warren and Louis D. Brandeis’s famous 1890 Harvard Law Review essay on “The Right to Privacy,” decried the spread of public photography. The authors lamented that “instantaneous photographs and newspaper enterprise have invaded the sacred precincts of private and domestic life” and claimed that “numerous mechanical devices threaten to make good the prediction that ‘what is whispered in the closet shall be proclaimed from the house-tops.’”

Warren and Brandeis weren’t alone. Plenty of other critics existed and many average citizens were probably outraged by the rise of cameras and public photography. Yet, personal norms and cultural attitudes toward cameras and public photography evolved quite rapidly and they became ingrained in human experience. At the same time, social norms and etiquette evolved to address those who would use cameras in inappropriate, privacy-invasive ways.

Again, we muddled through. And we’ve had to continuously muddle through in this regard because photography presents us with a seemingly endless set of new challenges. As cameras grow still smaller and get integrated into other technologies (most recently, smartphones, wearable technologies, and private drones), we’ve had to learn to adjust and accommodate. With wearables technologies (check out Narrative, Butterflye, and Autographer, for example), personal drones (see “Drones are the future of selfies,”) and other forms of microphotography all coming online now, we’ll have to adjust still more and develop new norms and coping mechanisms. There’s never going to be an end to this adjustment process.

Toward Pragmatic Optimism

Should we really remain bullish about humanity’s prospects in the midst of all this turbulent change? I think so.

Again, long before the information revolution took hold, the industrial revolution produced its share of cultural and economic backlashes, and it is still doing so today. Most notably, many Malthusian skeptics and environmental critics lamented the supposed strain of population growth and industrialization on social and economic life. Catastrophic predictions followed.

In his 2007 book, Prophecies of Doom and Scenarios of Progress, Paul Dragos Aligicia, a colleague of mine at the Mercatus Center, documented many of these industrial era “prophecies of doom” and described how this “doomsday ideology” was powerfully critiqued by a handful of scholars — most notably Herman Kahn and Julian Simon. Aligicia explains that Kahn and Simon argued for, “the alternative paradigm, the pro-growth intellectual tradition that rejected the prophecies of doom and called for realism and pragmatism in dealing with the challenge of the future.”

Kahn and Simon were pragmatic optimists or what author Matt Ridley calls “rational optimists.” They were bullish about the future and the prospects for humanity, but they were not naive regarding the many economic and scosial challenges associated with technological change. Like Kahn and Simon, we should embrace the amazing technological changes at work in today’s information age but with a healthy dose of humility and appreciation for the disruptive impact and pace of that change.

But the rational optimists never get as much attention as the critics and catastrophists. “For 200 years pessimists have had all the headlines even though optimists have far more often been right,” observes Ridley. “Arch-pessimists are feted, showered with honors and rarely challenged, let alone confronted with their past mistakes.” At least part of the reason for that, as already noted, goes back to the amazing rhetorical power of good intentions. Techno-pessimists often exhibit a deep passion about their particular cause and are typically given more than just the benefit of doubt in debates about progress and the future; they are treated as superior to opponents who challenge their perspectives or proposals. When a privacy advocate says they are just looking out consumers, or an online safety claims they have the best interests of children in mind, or a consumer advocate argues that regulation is needed to protect certain people from some amorphous harm, they are assuming the moral high ground through the assertion of noble-minded intentions. Even if their proposals will often fail to bring about the better state of affairs they claim or derail life-enriching innovations, they are more easily forgiven for those mistakes precisely because of their fervent claim of noble-minded intentions.

If intentions are allowed to trump empiricism and a general openness to change, however, the results for a free society and for human progress will be profoundly deleterious. That is why, when confronted with pessimistic, fear-based arguments, the pragmatic optimist must begin by granting that the critics clearly have the best of intentions, but then point out how intentions can only get us so far in the real-world, which is full of complex trade-offs.

The pragmatic optimist must next meticulously and dispassionately outline the many reasons why restricting progress or allowing planning to enter the picture will have many unintended consequences and hidden costs. The trade-offs must be explained in clear terms. Examples of previous interventions that went wrong must be proffered.

The Evidence Speaks for Itself

Luckily, we pragmatic optimists have plenty of evidence working in our favor when making this case. As Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Richard Rhodes noted in his 1999 book, Visions of Technology: A Century of Vital Debate About Machines Systems And The Human World:

it’s surprising that [many intellectual] don’t value technology; by any fair assessment, it has reduced suffering and improved welfare across the past hundred years. Why doesn’t this net balance of benevolence inspire at least grudging enthusiasm for technology among intellectuals? (p. 23)

Great question, and one that we should never stop asking the techno-critics to answer. After all, as Joel Mokyr notes in his wonderful 1990 book, Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress, “Without [technological creativity], we would all still live nasty and short lives of toil, drudgery, and discomfort.” (p. viii) “Technological progress, in that sense, is worthy of its name,” he says. “It has led to something that we may call an ‘achievement,’ namely the liberation of a substantial portion of humanity from the shackles of subsistence living.” (p. 288) Specifically,

The riches of the post-industrial society have meant longer and healthier lives, liberation from the pains of hunger, from the fears of infant mortality, from the unrelenting deprivation that were the part of all but a very few in preindustrial society. The luxuries and extravagances of the very rich in medieval society pale compared to the diet, comforts, and entertainment available to the average person in Western economies today. (p. 303)

In his new book, Smaller Faster Lighter Denser Cheaper: How Innovation Keeps Proving the Catastrophists Wrong, Robert Bryce hammers this point home when he observes that:

The pessimistic worldview ignores an undeniable truth: more people are living longer, healthier, freer, more peaceful, lives than at any time in human history… the plain reality is that things are getting better, a lot better, for tens of millions of people around the world. Dozens of factors can be cited for the improving conditions of humankind. But the simplest explanation is that innovation is allowing us to do more with less.

This is framework Herman Kahn, Julian Simon, and the other champions of progress used to deconstruct and refute the pessimists of previous eras. In line with that approach, we modern pragmatic optimists must continuously point to the unappreciated but unambiguous benefits of technological innovation and dynamic change. But we should also continue to remind the skeptics of the amazing adaptability of the human species in the face of adversity. As Kahn taught us long ago, is that when it comes to technological progress and humanity’s ingenious responses to it, “we should expect to go on being surprised” — and in mostly positive ways. Humans have consistently responded to technological change in creative, and sometimes completely unexpected ways. There’s no reason to think we can’t get through modern technological disruptions using similar coping and adaptation strategies. As Mokyr noted in his recent City Journal essay on “The Next Age of Invention”:

Much like medication, technological progress almost always has side effects, but bad side effects are rarely a good reason not to take medication and a very good reason to invest in the search for second-generation drugs. To a large extent, technical innovation is a form of adaptation—not only to externally changing circumstances but also to previous adaptations.

In sum, we need to have a little faith in the ability of humanity to adjust to an uncertain future, no matter what it throws at us. We’ll muddle through and come out better because of what we have learned in the process, just as we have so many times before.

I’ll give venture capitalist Marc Andreessen the last word on this since he’s been on an absolute tear on Twitter lately when discussing many of the issues I’ve raised in this essay. While addressing the particular fear that automation is running amuck and that robots will eat all our jobs, Andreessen eloquently noted:

We have no idea what the fields, industries, businesses, and jobs of the future will be. We just know we will create an enormous number of them. Because if robots and AI replace people for many of the things we do today, the new fields we create will be built on the huge number of people those robots and AI systems made available. To argue that huge numbers of people will be available but we will find nothing for them (us) to do is to dramatically short human creativity. And I am way long human creativity.

Me too, buddy. Me too.

Additional Reading:

Journal articles & book chapters:

• Permissionless Innovation: The Continuing Case for Comprehensive Technological Freedom (2014)
• “Technopanics, Threat Inflation, and the Danger of an Information Technology Precautionary Principle,” Minnesota Journal of Law, Science & Technology, 14 (2013): 309–86.
• “The Case for Internet Optimism, Part 1: Saving the Net from Its Detractors,” in The Next Digital Decade: Essays on the Future of the Internet, ed.Berin Szoka and Adam Marcus (Washington, DC:Tech Freedom, 2010), 57–87.
• “The Pursuit of Privacy in a World Where Information Control Is Failing,” Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy, Vol. 36 (2013): 409–55.
• “Privacy Law’s Precautionary Principle Problem,” Maine Law Review, Vol. 66, No. 2 (2014): 467-86.

Blog posts:

• “Are You An Internet Optimist or Pessimist? The Great Debate over Technology’s Impact on Society,” Technology Liberation Front, January 31, 2010.
• “Who Really Believes in ‘Permissionless Innovation’?” Technology Liberation Front, March 4, 2013.
• “What Does It Mean to ‘Have a Conversation’ about a New Technology?” Technology Liberation Front, May 23, 2013.
• “Planning for Hypothetical Horribles in Tech Policy Debates,” Technology Liberation Front, August 6, 2013.
• “On the Line between Technology Ethics vs. Technology Policy,” Technology Liberation Front, August 1, 2013.
• “Can We Adapt to the Internet of Things?” IAPP Privacy Perspectives, June 19, 2013.
• “Why Do We Always Sell the Next Generation Short?” Forbes, January 8, 2012.
• “The Six Things That Drive ‘Technopanics,’” Forbes, March 4, 2012.
• “10 Things Our Kids Will Never Worry about Thanks to the Information Revolution,” Forbes, December 18, 2011.

[Last updated July 2021.]

I spend a lot of time reading books and essays about technology; more specifically, books and essays about technology history and criticism. Yet, I am often struck by how few of the authors of these works even bother defining what they mean by “technology.” I find that frustrating because, if you are going to make an attempt to either study or critique a particular technology or technological practice or development, then you probably should take the time to tell us how broadly or narrowly you are defining the term “technology” or “technological process.”

Of course, it’s not easy. “In fact, technology is a word we use all of the time, and ordinarily it seems to work well enough as a shorthand, catch-all sort of word,” notes the always-insightful Michael Sacasas in his essay “Traditions of Technological Criticism.” “That same sometimes useful quality, however, makes it inadequate and counter-productive in situations that call for more precise terminology,” he says.

Quite right, and for a more detailed and critical discussion of how earlier scholars, historians, and intellectuals have defined or thought about the term “technology,” you’ll want to check out Michael’s other recent essay, “What Are We Talking About When We Talk About Technology?” which preceded the one cited above. We don’t always agree on things — in fact, I am quite certain that most of my comparatively amateurish work must make his blood boil at times! — but you won’t find a more thoughtful technology scholar alive today than Michael Sacasas. If you’re serious about studying technology history and criticism, you should follow his blog and check out his book, The Tourist and The Pilgrim: Essays on Life and Technology in the Digital Age, which is a collection of some of his finest essays.

Anyway, for what it’s worth, I figured I would create this post to list some of the more interesting definitions of “technology” that I have uncovered in my own research. I suspect I will add to it in coming months and years, so please feel free to suggest other additions since I would like this to be a useful resource to others.

I figure the easiest thing to do is to just list the definitions by author. There’s no particular order here, although that might change in the future since I could arrange this chronologically and push the inquiry all the way back to how the Greeks thought about the term (the root term “techne,” that is). But for now this collection is a bit random and incorporates mostly modern conceptions of “technology” since the term didn’t really gain traction until relatively recent times.

Also, I’ve not bothered critiquing any particular definition or conception of the term, although that may change in the future, too. (I did, however, go after a few modern tech critics briefly in my recent booklet, “Permissionless Innovation: The Continuing Case for Comprehensive Technological Freedom.” So, you might want to check that out for more on how I feel, as well as my old essays, “What Does It Mean to ‘Have a Conversation’ about a New Technology?” and, “On the Line between Technology Ethics vs. Technology Policy.”)

So, I’ll begin with two straight-forward definitions from the Merriam-Webster and Oxford dictionaries and then bring in the definitions from various historians and critics.

Merriam-Webster Dictionary

Technology (noun):

1)     (a): the practical application of knowledge especially in a particular area; (b): a capability given by the practical application of knowledge

2)      a manner of accomplishing a task especially using technical processes, methods, or knowledge.

3)      the specialized aspects of a particular field of endeavor.

Oxford Dictionary

Technology (noun):

1)      The application of scientific knowledge for practical purposes, especially in industry.

2)      Machinery and devices developed from scientific knowledge.

3)      The branch of knowledge dealing with engineering or applied sciences.

Emmanuel Mesthene

My personal favorite definition of the term comes from Emmanuel G. Mesthene’s terrific little 1970 book, Technological Change: Its Impact on Man and Society:

“we define technology as the organization of knowledge for the achievement of practical purposes.”

John Kenneth Galbraith

A very similar definition to Mesthene’s was employed by Galbraith in his 1967 book  The New Industrial State:

“Technology means the systematic application of scientific or other organized  knowledge to practical tasks.”

Thomas P. Hughes

I have always loved the opening passage from Thomas Hughes’s 2004 book, Human-Built World: How to Think about Technology and Culture:

“Technology is messy and complex. It is difficult to define and to understand. In its variety, it is full of contradictions, laden with human folly, saved by occasional benign deeds, and rich with unintended consequences.” (p. 1) “Defining technology in its complexity,” he continued, “is as difficult as grasping the essence of politics.” (p. 2)

So true! Nonetheless, Hughes went on to offer his own definition of technology as:

“a creativity process involving human ingenuity.” (p. 3)

Interestingly, in another book, American Genesis: A Century of Invention and Technological Enthusiasm, 1870-1970, he offered a somewhat different definition:

“Technology is the effort to organize the world for problem solving so that goods and services can be invented, developed, produced, and used.” (p. 6, 2004 ed., emphasis in original.)

W. Brian Arthur

In his 2009 book, The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves, W. Brian Arthur sketched out three conceptions of technology.

1)      “The first and most basic one is a technology is a means to fulfill a human purpose. … As a means, a technology may be a method or process or device… Or it may be complicated… Or it may be material… Or it may be nonmaterial. Whichever it is, it is always a means to carry out a human purpose.” 2)      “The second definition is a plural one: technology as an assemblage of practices and components.” 3)      “I will also allow a third meaning. This technology as the entire collection of devices and engineering practices available to a culture.” (p. 28, emphasis in original.) 

Alfred P. Sloan Foundation / Richard Rhodes

In his 1999 book, Visions of Technology: A Century Of Vital Debate About Machines Systems And The Human World, Pulitizer Prize-winning historian Richard Rhodes assembled a wonderful collection of essays about technology that spanned the entire 20^th century. It’s a terrific volume to have on your bookshelf if want a quick overview of how over a hundred leading scholars, critics, historians, scientists, and authors thought about technology and technological advances.

The collection kicked off with a brief preface from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation (no specific Foundation author was listed) that included one of the most succinct definitions of the term you’ll ever read:

“Technology is the application of science, engineering and industrial organization to create a human-build world.” (p. 19)

Just a few pages later, however, Rhodes notes that is probably too simplistic:

“Ask a friend today to define technology and you might hear words like ‘machines,’ ‘engineering,’ ‘science.’ Most of us aren’t even sure where science leaves off and technology begins. Neither are the experts.”

Again, so true!

Joel Mokyr

Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress(1990) by Joel Mokyr is one of the most readable and enjoyable histories of technology you’ll ever come across. I highly recommend it. [My thanks to my friend William Rinehart for bringing the book to my attention.]  In Lever of Riches, Mokyr defines “technological progress” as follows:

“By technological progress I mean any change in the application of information to the production process in such a way as to increase efficiency, resulting either in the production of a given output with fewer resources (i.e., lower costs), or the production of better or new products.” (p. 6)

Edwin Mansfield

You’ll find definitions of both “technology” and “technological change” in Edwin Mansfield’s Technological Change: An Introduction to a Vital Area of Modern Economics (1968, 1971):

“Technology is society’s pool of knowledge regarding the industrial arts. It consists of knowledge used by industry regarding the principles of physical and social phenomena… knowledge regarding the application of these principles to production… and knowledge regarding the day-to-day operations of production…” “Technological change is the advance of technology, such advance often taking the form of new methods of producing existing products, new designs which enable the production of products with important new characteristics, and new techniques of organization, marketing, and management.” (p. 9-10)

Read Bain

In his December 1937 essay in Vol. 2, Issue No. 6 of the American Sociological Review, “Technology and State Government,” Read Bain said:

 “technology includes all tools, machines, utensils, weapons, instruments, housing, clothing, communicating and transporting devices and the skills by which we produce and use them.” (p. 860)

[My thanks to Jasmine McNealy for bringing this one to my attention.]

David M. Kaplan

Found this one thanks to Sacasas. It’s from David M. Kaplan, Ricoeur’s Critical Theory (2003), which I have not yet had the chance to read:

“Technologies are best seen as systems that combine technique and activities with implements and artifacts, within a social context of organization in which the technologies are developed, employed, and administered. They alter patterns of human activity and institutions by making worlds that shape our culture and our environment. If technology consists of not only tools, implements, and artifacts, but also whole networks of social relations that structure, limit, and enable social life, then we can say that a circle exists between humanity and technology, each shaping and affecting the other. Technologies are fashioned to reflect and extend human interests, activities, and social arrangements, which are, in turn, conditioned, structured, and transformed by technological systems.”

I liked Michael’s comment on this beefy definition: “This definitional bloat is a symptom of the technological complexity of modern societies. It is also a consequence of our growing awareness of the significance of what we make.”

Jacques Ellul

Jacques Ellul, a French theologian and sociologist, penned a massive, 440-plus page work of technological criticism in 1954, La Technique ou L’enjeu du Siècle (1954), which was later translated in English as, The Technological Society (New York: Vintage Books, 1964). In setting forth his critique of modern technological society, he used the term “technique” repeatedly and contrasted with “technology.” He defined technique as follows:

“The term technique, as I use it, does not mean machines, technology, or this or that procedure for attaining an end. In our technological society, technique is the totality of methods rationally arrived at and having absolute efficiency (for a given state of development) in every field of human activity. […] Technique is not an isolated fact in society (as the term technology would lead us to believe) but is related to every factor in the life of modern man; it affects social facts as well as all others. Thus technique itself is a sociological phenomenon…” (p. xxvi, emphasis in original.)

Bernard Stiegler

In  La technique et le temps, 1: La faute d’Épiméthée, or translated, Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus (1998), French philosopher Bernard Stiegler defines technology as:

“the pursuit of life by means other than life”

[I found that one here.]

Peter Thiel

In Zero to One: Notes on How to Build the Future (2014), Internet entrepreneur and venture capitalist Peter Thiel says,

“Properly understood, any new and better way of doing things is technology.”

Marc Andressen

Marc Andreessen is interviewed in June 2020 by Sriram Krishan in his newsletter, The Observer Effect, and asked what motivates him to support technological innovation. He closes by defining technology as follows:

“Technology is quite literally the lever for being able to take natural resources and able to make something better out of them.”

Frederick Ferré

Frederick Ferré’s Philosophy Of Technology (1988) is a wonderful introduction to the study of this subject and has become a widely assigned textbook used in many college courses. In Chapter 2, “Defining Technology,” Ferré provided a remarkably concise definition of “technologies” as:

“practical implementations of intelligence” (with the caveat that “‘Practical’ requires that they not be wholly ends in themselves; ‘implementations’ entails that a technology be somehow concretely embodied, normally in implements or artifacts, sometimes simply in social organization…”)

Importantly, Ferré arrived at this definition by carefully detailing what should and should not be considered “technological.” In an attempt to avoid excessive breadth when defining the term, Ferré made four important stipulations:

1. Technology is implemented, not ’empty-handed’: “[I]t would be wise to resist a definition of technology that includes empty hands as technological implements. The totally naked human body, interacting face-to-face with the environment, unmediated by any artifact, contrivance, invention, or tool, would seem to stand as a paradigm case of the non-technological.”
2. Technology is practical, not ‘for its own sake’: Where “the notion of the ‘practical’. . . [means] supporting such ends as survival, health, comfort, and material well-being.”
3. Technology is embodied, non ‘in the head’ alone: “[I]t would be wise to guard against the absorption of all methods and techniques, including wholly mental ones, into the concept of technology.” He uses the examples of natural language and mathematics.
4. Technology is intelligent, not ‘blind’: “[T]he concept of technology will not usefully be extended to behavior that, among humans, is merely accidental or, among other species, is entirely instinctive. . . . Put positively, it suggests our definition will need to stipulate that technology involves (i) implements used as (ii) means to practical ends that are somehow (iii) manifested in the material world as (iv) expressions of intelligence.”

John Fernald

Compared to philosophers, historians, and social critics, economists tend to define technology in a somewhat more dry fashion. (No surprise there, right?!) That being said, it is surprising how few economists bother defining the term in their articles and textbooks. But here’s a concise definition of the term that I recently heard John Fernald, an economist and Senior Research Adviser at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, articulate at a policy conference. In an October 2014 presentation entitled, “Technology and the American Economy: Or, What’s the New Normal?,” Fernald defined technology as the:

“Ability to convert society’s resources (labor and capital) into output (goods and services that we value).”

Ian Barbour

In Chapter 1 of his 1993 book, Ethics in an Age of Technology, Ian Barbour discussed three  conflicting views of technology: “Technology as Liberator,” “Technology as Threat,” and “Technology as Instrument of Power.” Before discussing each, he defined technology as follows:

“Technology may be defined as the application of organized knowledge to practical tasks by ordered systems of people and machines.” (p. 3)

He continued on to note that:

“There are several advantages to such a broad definition. ‘Organized knowledge’ allows us to include technologies based on practical experience and invention as well as those based on scientific theories. The ‘practical tasks’ can include both the production of material goods (in industry and agriculture, for instance) and the provision of services (by computers, communications media, and biotechnologies, among others). Reference to ‘ordered systems of people and machines’ directs attention to social institutions as well as to the hardware of technology. The breadth of the definition also reminds us that there are major differences among technologies.” (p. 3-4)

Robert Friedel

In his 2007 book, A Culture of Improvement: Technology and the Western Millennium, University of Maryland historian Robert Friedel offers a formal definition of technology to kick off the book and then ends with a less formal one:

“By technology we typically mean the knowledge and instruments that humans use to accomplish the purposes of life.” (p. 1)

He also clarifies the definition by explaining what it does  not include, namely: “processes that completely mental or biological;” “knowledge of the world … that is purely in the realm of ideas and description;” and “nature.”  He then closes the book by noting that:

“Technology can, indeed, be defined as a pursuit of power over nature.” (p. 543).

Again, please feel free to suggest additions to this compendium that future students and scholars might find useful. I hope that this can become a resource to them.

Additional Reading:

• Frederick Ferré – Philosophy Of Technology (1988)
• Carl Mitcham, “From Philosophy to Technology, ” Ch. 6 in Thinking Through Technology: The Path Between Engineering and Philosophy (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1994), 137-160.
• Eric Schatzberg – “Technik Comes to America: Changing Meanings of Technology,” Technology and Culture (2006)

This past week I posted two new essays related to my new book, “Permissionless Innovation: The Continuing Case for Comprehensive Technological Freedom.” Just thought I would post quick links here.

First, my old colleague Dan Rothschild was kind enough to ask me to contribute a post to the R Street Blog entitled, “Bucking the ‘Mother, May I?’ Mentality.” In it, I offered this definition and defense of permissionless innovation as a policy norm:

Permissionless innovation is about the creativity of the human mind to run wild in its inherent curiosity and inventiveness, even when it disrupts certain cultural norms or economic business models. It is that unhindered freedom to experiment that ushered in many of the remarkable technological advances of modern times. In particular, all the digital devices, systems and networks that we now take for granted came about because innovators were at liberty to let their minds run wild. Steve Jobs and Apple didn’t need a permit to produce the first iPhone. Jeff Bezos and Amazon didn’t need to ask anyone for the right to create a massive online marketplace. When Sergey Brin and Larry Page wanted to release Google’s innovative search engine into the wild, they didn’t need to get a license first. And Mark Zuckerberg never had to get anyone’s blessing to launch Facebook or let people freely create their own profile pages. All of these digital tools and services were creatively disruptive technologies that altered the fortunes of existing companies and challenged various social norms. Luckily, however, nothing preemptively stopped that innovation from happening. Today, the world is better off because of it, with more and better information choices than ever before.

I also posted an essay over on Medium entitled, ” Why Permissionless Innovation Matters.” It’s a longer essay that seeks to answer the question: Why does economic growth occur in some societies & not in others? I build on the recent comments of venture capitalist Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures noted during recent testimony: “If you look at the countries around the world where the most innovation happens, you will see a very high, I would argue a direct, correlation between innovation and freedom. They are two sides of the same coin.” I continue on to argue in my essay:

that’s true in both a narrow and broad sense. It’s true in a narrow sense that innovation is tightly correlated with the general freedom to experiment, fail, and learn from it. More broadly, that general freedom to experiment and innovate is highly correlated with human freedom in the aggregate. Indeed, I argue in my book that we can link an embrace of dynamism and permissionless innovation to the expansion of cultural and economic freedom throughout history. In other words, there is a symbiotic relationship between freedom and progress. In his book, History of the Idea of Progress, Robert Nisbet wrote of those who adhere to “the belief that freedom is necessary to progress, and that the goal of progress, from most distant past to the remote future, is ever-ascending realization of freedom.” That’s generally the ethos that drives the dynamist vision and that also explains why getting the policy incentives right matters so much. Freedom — including the general freedom to engage in technological tinkering, endless experimentation, and acts of social and economic entrepreneurialism — is essential to achieving long-term progress and prosperity.

I also explain how the United States generally got policy right for the Internet and the digital economy in the 1990s by embracing this vision and enshrining it into law in various ways. I conclude by noting that:

If we hope to encourage the continued development of even more “technologies of freedom,” and enjoy the many benefits they provide, we must make sure that, to the maximum extent possible, the default position toward new forms of technological innovation remains “innovation allowed.” Permissionless innovation should, as a general rule, trump precautionary principle thinking. The burden of proof rests on those who favor precautionary policy prescriptions to explain why ongoing experimentation with new ways of doing things should be prevented preemptively.

Again, read the entire thing over at Medium. Also, over at Circle ID this week, Konstantinos Komaitis published a related essay, “Permissionless Innovation: Why It Matters,” in which he argued that “Permissionless innovation is key to the Internet’s continued development. We should preserve it and not question it.” He was kind enough to quote my book in that essay. I encourage you to check out his piece.

I am pleased to announce the release of my latest book, “Permissionless Innovation: The Continuing Case for Comprehensive Technological Freedom.” It’s a short manifesto (just under 100 pages) that condenses — and attempts to make more accessible — arguments that I have developed in various law review articles, working papers, and blog posts over the past few years. I have two goals with this book.

First, I attempt to show how the central fault line in almost all modern technology policy debates revolves around “the permission question,” which asks: Must the creators of new technologies seek the blessing of public officials before they develop and deploy their innovations? How that question is answered depends on the disposition one adopts toward new inventions. Two conflicting attitudes are evident.

One disposition is known as the “precautionary principle.” Generally speaking, it refers to the belief that new innovations should be curtailed or disallowed until their developers can prove that they will not cause any harms to individuals, groups, specific entities, cultural norms, or various existing laws, norms, or traditions.

The other vision can be labeled “permissionless innovation.” It refers to the notion that experimentation with new technologies and business models should generally be permitted by default. Unless a compelling case can be made that a new invention will bring serious harm to society, innovation should be allowed to continue unabated and problems, if they develop at all, can be addressed later.

I argue that we are witnessing a grand clash of visions between these two mindsets today in almost all major technology policy discussions today.

The second major objective of the book, as is made clear by the title, is to make a forceful case in favor of the latter disposition of “permissionless innovation.” I argue that policymakers should unapologetically embrace and defend the permissionless innovation ethos — not just for the Internet but also for all new classes of networked technologies and platforms. Some of the specific case studies discussed in the book include: the “Internet of Things” and wearable technologies, smart cars and autonomous vehicles, commercial drones, 3D printing, and various other new technologies that are just now emerging.

I explain how precautionary principle thinking is increasingly creeping into policy discussions about these technologies. The urge to regulate preemptively in these sectors is driven by a variety of safety, security, and privacy concerns, which are discussed throughout the book. Many of these concerns are valid and deserve serious consideration. However, I argue that if precautionary-minded regulatory solutions are adopted in a preemptive attempt to head-off these concerns, the consequences will be profoundly deleterious.

The central lesson of the booklet is this: Living in constant fear of hypothetical worst-case scenarios — and premising public policy upon them — means that best-case scenarios will never come about. When public policy is shaped by precautionary principle reasoning, it poses a serious threat to technological progress, economic entrepreneurialism, social adaptation, and long-run prosperity.

Again, that doesn’t mean we should ignore the various problems created by these highly disruptive technologies. But how we address these concerns matters greatly. If and when problems develop, there are many less burdensome ways to address them than through preemptive technological controls. The best solutions to complex social problems are almost always organic and “bottom-up” in nature. Luckily, there exists a wide variety of constructive approaches that can be tapped to address or alleviate concerns associated with new innovations. These include:

• education and empowerment efforts (including media literacy, digital citizenship efforts);
• social pressure from activists, academics, and the press and the public more generally.
• voluntary self-regulation and adoption of best practices (including privacy and security “by design” efforts); and,
• increased transparency and awareness-building efforts to enhance consumer knowledge about how new technologies work.

Such solutions are almost always superior to top-down, command-and-control regulatory edits and bureaucratic schemes of a “Mother, May I?” (i.e., permissioned) nature. The problem with “top-down” traditional regulatory systems is that they often tend to be overly-rigid, bureaucratic, inflexible, and slow to adapt to new realities. They focus on preemptive remedies that aim to predict the future, and future hypothetical problems that may not ever come about. Worse yet, administrative regulation generally preempts or prohibits the beneficial experiments that yield new and better ways of doing things. It raises the cost of starting or running a business or non-business venture, and generally discourages activities that benefit society.

To the extent that other public policies are needed to guide technological developments, simple legal principles are greatly preferable to technology-specific, micro-managed regulatory regimes. Again, ex ante (preemptive and precautionary) regulation is often highly inefficient, even dangerous. To the extent that any corrective legal action is needed to address harms, ex post measures, especially via the common law (torts, class actions, etc.), are typically superior. And the Federal Trade Commission will, of course, continue to play a backstop here by utilizing the broad consumer protection powers it possesses under Section 5 of the Federal Trade Commission Act, which prohibits “unfair or deceptive acts or practices in or affecting commerce.” In recent years, the FTC has already brought and settled many cases involving its Section 5 authority to address identity theft and data security matters. If still more is needed, enhanced disclosure and transparency requirements would certainly be superior to outright bans on new forms of experimentation or other forms of heavy-handed technological controls.

In the end, however, I argue that, to the maximum extent possible, our default position toward new forms of technological innovation must remain: “innovation allowed.” That is especially the case because, more often than not, citizens find ways to adapt to technological change by employing a variety of coping mechanisms, new norms, or other creative fixes. We should have a little more faith in the ability of humanity to adapt to the challenges new innovations create for our culture and economy. We have done it countless times before. We are creative, resilient creatures. That’s why I remain so optimistic about our collective ability to confront the challenges posed by these new technologies and prosper in the process.

If you’re interested in taking a look, you can find a free PDF of the book at the Mercatus Center website or you can find out how to order it from there as an eBook. Hardcopies are also available. I’ll be doing more blogging about the book in coming weeks and months. The debate between the “permissionless innovation” and “precautionary principle” worldviews is just getting started and it promises to touch every tech policy debate going forward.

Related Essays :

• “The Growing Conflict of Visions over the Internet of Things & Privacy,” Technology Liberation Front, January 14, 2014.
• “CES 2014 Report: The Internet of Things Arrives, but Will Washington Welcome It?” Technology Liberation Front, January 8, 2014.
• “Who Really Believes in ‘Permissionless Innovation’?” Technology Liberation Front, March 4, 2013.
• “What Does It Mean to ‘Have a Conversation’ about a New Technology?” Technology Liberation Front, May 23, 2013.
• “On the Line between Technology Ethics vs. Technology Policy,” Technology Liberation Front, August 1, 2013.
• “Planning for Hypothetical Horribles in Tech Policy Debates,” Technology Liberation Front, August 6, 2013.
• “Edith Ramirez’s ‘Big Data’ Speech: Privacy Concerns Prompt Precautionary Principle Thinking,” Technology Liberation Front, August 29, 2013.
• “When It Comes to Information Control, Everybody Has a Pet Issue & Everyone Will Be Disappointed,” Technology Liberation Front, April 29, 2011.
• “Copyright, Privacy, Property Rights & Information Control: Common Themes, Common Challenges,” Technology Liberation Front, April 10, 2012.
• “Can We Adapt to the Internet of Things?” IAPP Privacy Perspectives, June 19, 2013.
• “Why Do We Always Sell the Next Generation Short?” Forbes, January 8, 2012.
• “The Six Things That Drive ‘Technopanics,’” Forbes, March 4, 2012.

Last week, it was my great pleasure to be invited on NPR’s “On Point with Tom Ashbrook,” to debate Jeffrey Rosen, a leading privacy scholar and the president and chief executive of the National Constitution Center. In an editorial in the previous Sunday’s New York Times (“Madison’s Privacy Blind Spot”), Rosen proposed “constitutional amendment to prohibit unreasonable searches and seizures of our persons and electronic effects, whether by the government or by private corporations like Google and AT&T.” He said his proposed amendment would limit “outrageous and unreasonable” collection practices and would even disallow consumers from sharing their personal information with private actors even if they saw an advantage in doing so.

I responded to Rosen’s proposal in an essay posted on the IAPP  Privacy Perspectives blog, “Do We Need A Constitutional Amendment Restricting Private-Sector Data Collection?” In my essay, I argued that there are several legal, economic, and practical problems with Rosen’s proposal. You can head over to the IAPP blog to read my entire response but the gist of it is that “a constitutional amendment [governing private data collection] would be too sweeping in effect and that better alternatives exist to deal with the privacy concerns he identifies.” There are very good reasons we treat public and private actors differently under the law and there “are all far more practical and less-restrictive steps that can be taken without resorting to the sort of constitutional sledgehammer that Jeff Rosen favors. We can protect privacy without rewriting the Constitution or upending the information economy,” I concluded.

But I wanted to elaborate on one particular thing I found particularly interesting about Rosen’s comments when we were on NPR together. During the show, Rosen kept stressing how we needed to adopt a more European construction of privacy as “dignity rights” and he even said his proposed privacy amendment would even disallow individuals from surrendering their private data or their privacy because he viewed these rights as “unalienable.” In other words, from Rosen’s perspective, privacy pretty much trumps  everything, even if you want to trade it off against other values. 

Privacy Paternalism?

I’ve been seeing more and more privacy advocates and scholars adopt this attitude, including Anita Allen, Julie Cohen, Siva Vaidhyanathan, and others. Allen, for example, says that privacy is such a “foundational” human right that it some cases the law should override individual choice when consumers act against their own privacy interests. Cohen and Vaidhyanathan make similar arguments in their recent books. Vaidhyanathan claims that consumers are being tricked by the “smokescreen” of “free” online services and “freedom of choice.” Although he admits that no one is forced to use online services and that consumers are also able to opt-out of most of services or data collection practices, he argues that “such choices mean very little” because “the design of the system rigs it in favor of the interests of the company and against the interests of users.” “Celebrating freedom and user autonomy is one of the great rhetorical ploys of the global information economy,” he says.“We are conditioned to believe that having more choices–empty though they may be–is the very essence of human freedom. But meaningful freedom implies real control over the conditions of one’s life.” These are the sort of arguments I increasingly hear made by privacy scholars when claiming that consumers simply can’t be left free to make choices for themselves in this regard.  In an interesting recent article in the Harvard Law Review , privacy scholar  Daniel Solove notes that what binds these thinkers and their work together is, in essence, a sort of privacy paternalism. The point of most modern privacy advocacy has been to better empower consumers to make privacy decisions for themselves. But, Solove notes, “t he implication [of these privacy scholar’s work] is that the law must override individual consent in certain instances.” Yet, if that choice is taken away from us by law, Solove notes, then privacy regulation, “risks becoming too paternalistic. Regulation that sidesteps consent denies people the freedom to make choices,” Solove argues.

Jeff Rosen now appears to be adopting the sort of approach Solove identifies by claiming that privacy is an “unalienable right” such that it cannot be traded away for other things. By making that choice for us, Rosen’s proposed amendment would, therefore, suffer from that same sort of privacy paternalism Solove identifies. In a forthcoming law review aritcle that will appear in the  Maine Law Review, I identify some of the problems associated with privacy paternalism. Most obviously, these scholars should keep in mind that not everyone shares the same privacy values as they do and that many of us will voluntarily trade some of our data for the innovative information services and devices that we desire. If imposed in the form of legal sanctions, privacy paternalism would open the door to almost boundless controls on the activities of both producers and consumers of digital services, potentially limiting future innovations in this space.

For example, when we were on  NPR together, Rosen mentioned wireless geolocation technology as a potential source of serious privacy harm, although he did not make it clear whether he wanted it stopped entirely or what. If used improperly, wireless geolocation technology certainly can raise serious privacy concerns. But wireless geolocation technology is also what powers the mapping and traffic services that most of us now take for granted. Many of us expect — no, we demand — that our digital devices be able to give us real-time mapping and traffic notification capabilities. And most of us are willing to make the minor privacy trade-off associated with sharing our location constantly in exchange for the right to receive these services, which are also provided to us free of charge.

So, what would Rosen’s proposed amendment have to say about this trade-off? Would these wireless geolocation technologies be banned altogether, even if consumers desire them? It isn’t really clear at this point because he hasn’t offered us many details about his proposal. But, to the extent it would preempt these technological capabilities on the grounds that our locational privacy is somehow in unalienable right, then that seems like a fairly paternalistic approach to policy and it it would seem to confirm Thomas Lenard and Paul Rubin’s claim that “many of the privacy advocates and writers on the subject do not trust the consumers for whom they purport to advocate.”

Such paternalism is particularly problematic in this case since privacy is such a highly subjective value and one that evolves over time. As Solove notes, “the correct choices regarding privacy and data use are not always clear. For example, although extensive self-exposure can have disastrous consequences, many people use social media successfully and productively.” Privacy norms and ethics are changing faster than ever today. One day’s “creepy” tool or service is often the next day’s “killer app.”

Balancing Values; Considering Costs

As I will discuss in my forthcoming  Maine Law Review article and I also discussed in my recent George Mason University Law Review  article, at least here in the United States, consumer protection standards have traditionally depended on a clear showing of actual, not prospective or hypothetical, harm. In some cases, when the potential harm associated with a particular practice or technology is extreme in character and poses a direct threat to physical well-being, law has preempted the general presumption that ongoing experimentation and innovation should be allowed by default. But these are extremely rare scenarios, at least as it pertains to privacy concerns under American law, and they mostly involved health and safety measures aimed at preemptively avoiding catastrophic harm to individual or environmental well-being. In the vast majority of other cases, our culture has not accepted that paternalistic idea that law must “save us from ourselves” (i.e., our own irrationality or mistakes). As Solove notes in his recent essay, “People make decisions all the time that are not in their best interests. People relinquish rights and take bad risks, and the law often does not stop them.” Sometimes privacy advocates also ignore the costs of preemptive policy action and don’t bother conducting a serious review of the potential costs of their regulatory proposals. As a result, preemptive policy action is almost always the preferred remedy to any alleged harm. “By limiting or conditioning the collection of information, regulators can limit market manipulation at the activity level,” Ryan Calo argues in a recent paper. “We could imagine the government fashioning a rule — perhaps inadvisable for other reasons―that limits the collection of information about consumers in order to reduce asymmetries of information.” [*Clarification: In a comment down below and a subsequent Twitter exchange, Ryan clarifies that he ultimately does not come down in favor of such a rule, preferring instead to find various other incentives to solve these problems. I thank him for this clarification — and definitely welcome it! — although I found his position somewhat murky after debating him personally on these issues recently. Nonetheless, I apologize if I mischaracterized his position in any way here.]

Unfortunately, Professor Calo does not fully consider the corresponding cost of such regulatory proposals in calling for the enactment of such a rule. If preemptive regulation slowed or ended certain information practices, it could stifle the provision of new and better services that consumers demand, as I have noted elsewhere. It might also trump other choices or values that consumers care about. While privacy is obviously an incredibly important value, we cannot assume that it is the only value, or the most important value, at stake here. Consumers also care about having access to a constantly growing array of innovative goods and services, and they also care about getting those goods and services at a reasonable price.

Moving from “Rights Talk” to Practical Privacy Solutions

This is the point in the essay where some readers are getting pretty frustrated with me and thinking I am some sort of nihilist who doesn’t give a damn about privacy. I assure you that nothing is further from the truth and that I care very deeply about privacy.

But if you really care about expanding the horizons of privacy protection in our modern world, at some point you have to accept that all the “rights talk” and top-down enforcement efforts in the world are not necessarily going to help as much as you wish they would. The same thing is true for online safety, digital security, and IP protection efforts: No matter how much you might wish the opposite was true, information control is just really, really hard. Legal and regulatory approaches to bottling up information flows will inevitably be several steps behind cutting-edge technological developments. (I’ve discussed these issues in several essays here, including: “Privacy as an Information Control Regime: The Challenges Ahead,” “Copyright, Privacy, Property Rights & Information Control: Common Themes, Common Challenges,” and “When It Comes to Information Control, Everybody Has a Pet Issue & Everyone Will Be Disappointed.”)

That doesn’t mean we should surrender in our efforts to identify more concrete privacy harms, but we should recognize that it will always be a hugely contentious matter and that a great many people will gladly trade away their privacy in a way that others will consider outrageous. In a free society, we must allow them to do so if they derive greater utility from other things. A paternalistic approach based on a sort of privacy fundamentalism will deny them the right to make that choice for themselves. And, practically speaking, no matter how much some might think that privacy values are “unalienable,” the reality is that there will be no way to stop many others from making different choices and relinquishing their privacy all the time.

Educating and empowering citizens is the better way to address this issue. We can try to teach them to make better privacy choices and treat their information, and information about others, with far greater care. We should also work to provide citizens more tools to help accomplish those goals. And if the problem is “information asymmetry” or some general lack of awareness about certain data collection and use practices, then let’s work even harder to make sure consumers are aware of those practices and what they can do about them.

It’s all part of the media literacy and digital citizenship agenda that we need to be investing much more of time and resources into. I outlined that approach in much more detail in this law review article. We need diverse tools and strategies for a diverse citizenry. We need to be talking to both consumers and developers about smarter data hygiene and sensible digital ethics. We need more transparency. We need more privacy privacy professionals working inside organizations to craft sensible data collection and use policies. And so on. Only by working to change attitudes about privacy, online “Netiquette,” and more ethical data use, can we really start to make a dent in this problem.

If nothing else, we must understand the limitations of information control in such highly context-specific harm scenarios. Prof. Rosen might want to ask himself how long it would take to even get his proposed constitutional amendment in place and what the chances are such a movement would even been successful. But, again, and far more importantly, Prof. Rosen and advocates of similar regulatory approaches should remember that their values are not shared by everyone and that, in a free society, a value as inherently subjective as privacy is likely to remain a hugely contentious, every-changing matter, especially when elevated to the level of constitutional rights talk. We need practical solutions to our privacy problems, not pie-in-the-sky Hail Mary schemes that are unlikely to go anywhere and, even if they did, would end up being too heavy-handed and potentially override individual autonomy in the process.

What works well as an ethical directive might not work equally well as a policy prescription. Stated differently, what one ought to do it certain situations should not always be synonymous with what they must do by force of law.

I’m going to relate this lesson to tech policy debates in a moment, but let’s first think of an example of how this lesson applies more generally. Consider the Ten Commandments. Some of them make excellent ethical guidelines (especially the stuff about not coveting neighbor’s house, wife, or possessions). But most of us would agree that, in a free and tolerant society, only two of the Ten Commandments make good law: Thou shalt not kill and Thou shalt not steal.

In other words, not every sin should be a crime. Perhaps some should be; but most should not. Taking this out of the realm of religion and into the world of moral philosophy, we can apply the lesson more generally as: Not every wise ethical principle makes for wise public policy.

Before I get accused of being accused of being some sort of nihilist, I want to be clear that I am absolutely not saying that ethics should never have a bearing on policy. Obviously, all political theory is, at some level, reducible to ethical precepts. My own political philosophy is strongly rooted in the Millian harm principle (“The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others.”) Not everyone will agree will Mill’s principle, but I would hope most of us could agree that, if we hope to preserve a free and open society, we simply cannot convert every ethical directive into a legal directive or else the scope of human freedom will need to shrink precipitously.

Can We Plan for Every “Bad Butterfly-Effect”?

Anyway, what got me thinking about all this and it its applicability to technology policy was an interesting Wired essay by Patrick Lin entitled, “The Ethics of Saving Lives With Autonomous Cars Are Far Murkier Than You Think.” Lin is the director of the Ethics + Emerging Sciences Group at California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo and lead editor of Robot Ethics (MIT Press, 2012). So, this a man who has obviously done a lot of thinking about the potential ethical challenges presented by the growing ubiquity of robots and autonomous vehicles in society. (His column makes for particularly fun reading if you’ve ever spent time pondering Asimov’s “Laws of Robotics.”)

Lin walks through various hypothetical scenarios regarding the future of autonomous vehicles and discusses the ethical trade-offs at work here. He asks a number of questions about a future of robotic cars and encourages us to give some thoughtful deliberation to the benefits and potential costs of autonomous vehicles. I will not comment here on all the specific issues that lead Lin to question whether they are worth it; instead I want to focus on Lin’s ultimate conclusion.

I commenting on the potential risks and trade-offs, Lin notes:

The introduction of any new technology changes the lives of future people. We know it as the “butterfly effect” or chaos theory: Anything we do could start a chain-reaction of other effects that result in actual harm (or benefit) to some persons somewhere on the planet.

That’s self-evident, of course, but what of it? How should that truism influence tech ethics and/or tech policy? Here are Lin’s thoughts:

For us humans, those effects are impossible to precisely predict, and therefore it is impractical to worry about those effects too much. It would be absurdly paralyzing to follow an ethical principle that we ought to stand down on any action that could have bad butterfly-effects, as any action or inaction could have negative unforeseen and unintended consequences. But … we can foresee the general disruptive effects of a new technology, especially the nearer-term ones, and we should therefore mitigate them. The butterfly-effect doesn’t release us from the responsibility of anticipating and addressing problems the best we can. As we rush into our technological future, don’t think of these sorts of issues as roadblocks, but as a sensible yellow light — telling us to look carefully both ways before we cross an ethical intersection.

Lin makes some important points here, but these closing comments (and his article more generally) have a whiff of “precautionary principle” thinking to it that makes me more than a bit uncomfortable. The precautionary principle generally holds that, because a new idea or technology could pose some theoretical danger or risk in the future, public policies should control or limit the development of such innovations until their creators can prove that they won’t cause any harms. Before we walk down that precautionary path, we need to consider the consequences.

The Problem with Precaution

I have spent a great deal of time writing about the dangers of precautionary principle thinking in my recent articles and essays, including my recent law review article, “Technopanics, Threat Inflation, and the Danger of an Information Technology Precautionary Principle,” as well as in two lengthy blog posts asking the questions, “Who Really Believes in ‘Permissionless Innovation’?” and “What Does It Mean to ‘Have a Conversation’ about a New Technology?”

The key point I try to get across in those essays is that letting such precautionary thinking guide policy poses a serious threat to technological progress, economic entrepreneurialism, social adaptation, and long-run prosperity. If public policy is guided at every turn by the precautionary principle, technological innovation is impossible because of fear of the unknown; hypothetical worst-case scenarios trump all other considerations. Social learning and economic opportunities become far less likely, perhaps even impossible, under such a regime. In practical terms, it means fewer services, lower quality goods, higher prices, diminished economic growth, and a decline in the overall standard of living.

In Lin’s essay, we see some precautionary reasoning at work when he argues that “we can foresee the general disruptive effects of a new technology, especially the nearer-term ones, and we should therefore mitigate them” and that we have “responsibility [for] anticipating and addressing problems the best we can.”

To be fair, Lin caveats this by first noting that precise effects are “impossible to predict” and, therefore, that “It would be absurdly paralyzing to follow an ethical principle that we ought to stand down on any action that could have bad butterfly-effects, as any action or inaction could have negative unforeseen and unintended consequences.” Second, as it relates to general effects, he says we should just be “addressing problems the best we can.”

Despite those caveats, I continue to have serious concerns about the potential blurring of ethics and law here. The most obvious question I would have for Lin is: Who is the “we” in this construct?  Is it “we” as individuals and institutions interacting throughout society freely and spontaneously, or is it “we” as in the government imposing precautionary thinking through top-down public policy?

I can imagine plenty of scenarios in which a certain amount of precautionary thinking may be entirely appropriate if applied as an informal ethical norm at the individual, household, organizational or even societal level, but which would not be as sensible if applied as a policy prescription. For example, parents should take steps to shield their kids from truly offensive and hateful material on the Internet before they are mature enough to understand the ramifications of it. But that doesn’t mean it would be wise to enshrine the same principle into law in the form of censorship.

Similarly, there are plenty of smart privacy and security norms that organizations should practice that need not be forced on them by law, especially since such mandates would have serious costs if mandated. For example, I think that organizations should feel a strong obligation to safeguard user data and avoid privacy and security screw-ups. I’d like to see more organizations using encryption wherever they can in their systems and also delete unnecessary data whenever possible. But, for a variety of reasons, I do not believe any of these things should be mandated through law or regulation.

Don’t Foreclose Experimentation

While Lin rightly acknowledges the “negative unforeseen and unintended consequences” of preemptive policy action to address precise concerns, he does not unpack the full ramifications of those unseen consequences. Nor does he answer how the royal “we” separate the “precise” from the “general” concerns? (For example, are the specific issues I just raised in the preceding paragraphs “precise” or “general”? What’s the line between the two?)

But I have a bigger concern with Lin’s argument, as well with the field of technology ethics more generally: We rarely hear much discussion of the benefits associated with the ongoing process of trial-and-error experimentation and, more importantly, the benefits of failure and what we learn — both individually and collectively — from the mistakes we inevitably make.

The problem with regulatory systems is that they are permission-based. They focus on preemptive remedies that aim to forecast the future, and future mistakes (i.e., Lin’s “butterfly effects”) in particular.  Worse yet, administrative regulation generally preempts or prohibits the beneficial experiments that yield new and better ways of doing things — including what we learn from failed efforts at doing things. But we will never discover better ways of doing things unless the process of evolutionary, experimental change is allowed to continue. We need to keep trying and failing in order to learn how we can move forward. As Samuel Beckett once counseled: “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better.” Real wisdom is born of experience, especially mistakes we make along the way.

This is why I feel so passionately about drawing a distinction between ethical norms and public policy pronouncements.  Law forecloses. It is inflexible. It does not adapt as efficiently or rapidly as social norms do. Ethics and norms provide guidance but also leave plenty of breathing room for ongoing experimentation, and they are refined continuously and in response to ongoing social developments.

It is worth noting that ethics evolve, too. There is a sort of ethical trial-and-error that occurs in society over time as new developments challenge, and then change, old ethical norms. This is another reason we want to be careful about enshrining norms into law.

Thus, policymakers should not be imposing prospective restrictions on new innovations without clear evidence of actual, not merely hypothesized, harm. That’s especially the case since, more often than not, human adapt to new technologies and find creative ways to assimilate even the most disruptive innovations into their lives. We cannot possibly plan for all the “bad butterfly-effects” that might occur, and attempts to do so will result in significant sacrifices in terms of social and economic liberty.

The burden of proof should be on those who advocate preemptive restrictions on technological innovation to show why freedom to tinker and experiment must be foreclosed by policy. There should exist the strongest presumption that the freedom to innovate and experiment will advance human welfare and teach us new and better ways of doing things to overcome most of those “bad butterfly-effects” over time.

So, in closing, let us yield at Lin’s “sensible yellow light — telling us to look carefully both ways before we cross an ethical intersection.” But let us not be cowed into an irrational fear of an unknown and ultimately unknowable future. And let us not be tempted to try to plan for every potential pitfall through preemptive policy prescriptions, lest progress and prosperity get sacrificed as a result of such hubris.

Few modern intellectuals gave more serious thought to forecasting the future than Herman Kahn. He wrote several books and essays imagining what the future might look like. But he was also a profoundly humble man who understood the limits of forecasting the future. On that point, I am reminded of my favorite Herman Kahn quote:

History is likely to write scenarios that most observers would find implausible not only prospectively but sometimes, even in retrospect. Many sequences of events seem plausible now only because they have actually occurred; a man who knew no history might not believe any. Future events may not be drawn from the restricted list of those we have learned are possible; we should expect to go on being surprised.^[1]

I have always loved that phrase, “a man who knew no history might not believe any.” Indeed, sometimes the truth (how history actually unfolds) really is stranger than fiction (or the hypothetical forecasts that came before it.)

This insight has profound ramifications for public policy and efforts to “plan progress,” something that typically ends badly.  No two scholars nailed that point better in their work than Karl Popper and F.A. Hayek, two of the preeminent philosophers of science and politics of the 20^th century. Popper cogently argued that the problem with “the Utopian programme” is that “we do not possess the experimental knowledge needed for such an undertaking.”^[2] “Progress by its very nature cannot be planned,” Hayek taught us, and the wiser man “is very much aware that we do not know all the answers and that he is not sure that the answers he has are certainly the right ones or even that we can find all the answers.”^[3] One hundred years prior to Hayek making that insight, social philosopher Herbert Spencer explained how humans would only be truly wise once they fathomed the limits of their own knowledge:

In all directions his investigations eventually bring him face to face with the unknowable; and he ever more clearly perceives it to be the unknowable. He learns at once the greatness and the littleness of human intellect—its power in dealing with all that comes within the range of experience; its impotence in dealing with all that transcends experience. He feels more vividly than any others can feel, the utter incomprehensibleness of the simplest fact, considered in itself. He alone truly sees that absolute knowledge is impossible. He alone knows that under all things there lies an impenetrable mystery.^[4]

Unfortunately, most humans suffer from what Nassim Nicholas Taleb calls “epistemic ignorance” or hubris concerning the limits of our knowledge. “We are demonstrably arrogant about what we think we know,” he says.^[5] “We overestimate what we know, and underestimate uncertainty.”^[6] “There are no crystal balls, and no style of thinking, no technique, no model will ever eliminate uncertainty,” argues Dan Gardner, author of Future Babble: Why Expert Predictions Are Next to Worthless. “The future will forever be shrouded in darkness. Only if we accept and embrace this fundamental fact can we hope to be prepared for the inevitable surprises that lie ahead,” Gardner notes.^[7]

This is why attempts to forecast the future so often end in folly. The great Austrian school economist Israel Kirzner spoke of “the shortsightedness of those who, not recognizing the open-ended character of entrepreneurial discovery, repeatedly fall into the trap of forecasting the future against the background of today’s expectations rather than against the unknowable background of tomorrow’s discoveries.”^[8] This is especially true as it pertains to technological change and change in information markets. “Anyone who predicts the technological future is sure soon to seem foolish,” noted technology scholar George Gilder. “It springs from human creativity and thus inevitably consists of surprise.”^[9]

Knowledge of history and historical trends can help inform our decisions and predictions, yet they are insufficient to accurately forecast all that may come our way. “The past seldom obliges by revealing to us when wildness will break out in the future,” observes Peter L. Bernstein, author of Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk.^[10]

We can relate these lessons to Internet policy and digital economics. A largely unfettered cyberspace has left digital denizens better off in terms of the information they can access as well as the goods and services from which they can choose. In true Schumpeterian fashion, “information empires” have come and gone in increasingly rapid progression.^[11] There are countless “tech titans” that, for a time, seemed to rule their respective sectors only to experience a precipitous fall.^[12] Indeed, if you blink your eyes in the information age, you can miss revolutions.^[13]

“The challenge of disruptive innovation,” observes technology lawyer Glenn Manishin, is that “it forces market participants to rethink their premises and reimagine the business they are in. Those who get it wrong will be lost in the dustbin (or buggy whip rack) of history. Those who get it right typically enjoy a window of success until the next inflection point arrives.”^[14] And the cycle Manishin describes just keeps repeating faster and faster throughout modern information sectors.

This explain why, just as planning and forecasting often fail in a macro sense, they also fail in the micro sense as industries and analysts repeatedly fail to accurately identify future trends and marketplace developments. “Markets that don’t exist can’t be analyzed,” observes Clayton M. Christensen, author of The Innovator’s Dilemma. “In dealing with disruptive technologies leading to new markets,” he finds, “researchers and business planners have consistently dismal records.”^[15]  Simply put, as Yogi Berra once famously quipped: “It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.”

The ramifications for public policy are clear. Patience and humility are key virtues since, as economist Daniel F. Spulber correctly writes, “Governments are notoriously inept at picking technology winners or steering fast-moving markets in superior directions. Understanding technology requires extensive scientific and technical knowledge. Government agencies cannot expect to replicate or improve upon private sector knowledge. Technological innovation is uncertain by its very nature because it is based on scientific discoveries. The benefits of new technologies and the returns to commercial development also are uncertain.”^[16]

Policymakers would be wise to heed all this advice before trying to “plan progress,” especially in highly-dynamic, rapidly-evolving technology sectors. As the old saying goes, the best-laid plans of mice and men often go awry.

My colleague Eli Dourado brought to my attention this XKCD comic and when tweeting it out yesterday he made the comment that “Half of tech policy is dealing with these people”:

The comic and Eli’s comment may be a bit snarky, but something about it rang true to me because while conducting research on the impact of new information technologies on society I often come across books, columns, blog posts, editorials, and tweets that can basically be summed up with the line from that comic: “we should stop to consider the consequences of [this new technology] before we …”  Or, equally common is the line: “we need to have a conversation about [this new technology] before we…”

But what does that really mean? Certainly “having a conversation” about the impact of a new technology on society is important. But what is the nature of that “conversation”? How is it conducted? How do we know when it is going on or when it is over?

Generally speaking, it is best to avoid guessing as to motive when addressing public policy arguments. It is better to just address the assertions or proposals set forth in someone’s work and not try to determine what motivates it or what other ulterior motives may be driving their reasoning.

Nonetheless, I can’t help but think that sometimes what the “we-need-to-have-a-conversation” crowd is really suggesting is that we need to have a conversation about how to slow or stop the technology in question, not merely talk about its ramifications.

I see this at work all the time in the field of privacy policy. Many policy wonks craft gloom-and-doom scenarios that suggest our privacy is all but dead. I’ve notice a lot more of this lately in essays about the “Internet of Things” and Google Glass in particular. (See these recent essays by Paul Bernal and Bruce Schneier for good examples). Dystopian dread drips from almost every line of these essays.

But, after conjuring up a long parade of horribles and suggesting “we need to have a conversation” about new technologies, authors of such essays almost never finish their thought. There’s no conclusion or clear alternative offered. I suppose that in some cases it is because there aren’t any easy answers. Other times, however, I get the feeling that they have an answer in mind — comprehensive regulation of new technologies in question — but that they don’t want to come out and say it because they think they’ll sound like Luddites. Hell, I don’t know and, again, I don’t want to guess as to motive. I just find it interesting that so much of the writing being done in this arena these days follows that exact model.

But here’s the other point I want to make: I don’t think we’ll ever be able to “have a conversation” about a new technology that yields satisfactory answers because real wisdom is born of experience. This is one of the many important lessons I learned from my intellectual hero Aaron Wildavsky and his pioneering work on risk and safety. In his seminal 1988 book Searching for Safety, Wildavsky warned of the dangers of the “trial without error” mentality — otherwise known as the precautionary principle approach — and he contrasted it with the trial-and-error method of evaluating risk and seeking wise solutions to it. Wildavsky argued that:

The direct implication of trial without error is obvious: If you can do nothing without knowing first how it will turn out, you cannot do anything at all. An indirect implication of trial without error is that if trying new things is made more costly, there will be fewer departures from past practice; this very lack of change may itself be dangerous in forgoing chances to reduce existing hazards … Existing hazards will continue to cause harm if we fail to reduce them by taking advantage of the opportunity to benefit from repeated trials.

This is a lesson too often overlooked not just in the field of health and safety regulation, but also in the world of information policy and this insight is the foundation of a filing I will be submitting to the FTC next week in its new proceeding on the “Privacy and Security Implications of the Internet of Things.” In that filing, I will note that, as was the case with many other new information and communications technologies, the initial impulse may be to curb or control the development of certain Internet of Things technologies to guard against theoretical future misuses or harms that might develop.

Again, when such fears take the form of public policy prescriptions, it is referred to as a “precautionary principle” and it generally holds that, because a given new technology could pose some theoretical danger or risk in the future, public policies should control or limit the development of such innovations until their creators can prove that they won’t cause any harms.

The problem with letting such precautionary thinking guide policy is that it poses a serious threat to technological progress, economic entrepreneurialism, and human prosperity. Under an information policy regime guided at every turn by a precautionary principle, technological innovation would be impossible because of fear of the unknown; hypothetical worst-case scenarios would trump all other considerations. Social learning and economic opportunities become far less likely, perhaps even impossible, under such a regime. In practical terms, it means fewer services, lower quality goods, higher prices, diminished economic growth, and a decline in the overall standard of living.

For these reasons, to the maximum extent possible, the default position toward new forms of technological innovation should be innovation allowed. This policy norm is better captured in the well-known Internet ideal of “permissionless innovation,” or the general freedom to experiment and learn through trial-and-error experimentation.

Stated differently, when it comes to new information technologies such as the Internet of Things, the default policy position should be an “ anti-Precautionary Principle.” Paul Ohm, who recently joined the FTC as a Senior Policy Advisor, outlined the concept in his 2008 article, “The Myth of the Superuser: Fear, Risk, and Harm Online.” “Fear of the powerful computer user, the ‘Superuser,’ dominates debates about online conflict,” Ohm argued, but this superuser is generally “a mythical figure” concocted by those who are typically quick to set forth worst-case scenarios about the impact of digital technology on society. Fear of such superusers and the hypothetical worst-case dystopian scenarios they might bring about prompts policy action, since “Policymakers, fearful of his power, too often overreact by passing overbroad, ambiguous laws intended to ensnare the Superuser but which are instead used against inculpable, ordinary users.” “This response is unwarranted,” Ohm says “because the Superuser is often a marginal figure whose power has been greatly exaggerated.”

Ohm gets it exactly right and he could have cited Wildavsky on the matter, who noted that, “’Worst case’ assumptions can convert otherwise quite ordinary conditions… into disasters, provided only that the right juxtaposition of unlikely factors occur.” In other words, creative minds can string together some random anecdotes or stories and concoct horrific-sounding scenarios for the future that leave us searching for preemptive to solutions to problems that haven’t even developed yet.

Unfortunately, fear of “superusers” and worst-case boogeyman scenarios are already driving much of the debate over the Internet of Things. Most of the fear and loathing involves privacy-related dystopian scenarios that envision a miserable panoptic future from which there is no escape. And that’s about the time the authors suggest “we need to have a conversation” about these new technologies — by which they really mean to suggest we need to find ways to put the genie back in the bottle or smash the bottle before the genie even gets out.

But how are we to know what the future holds? And even to the extent some critics believe they possess a techno-crystal ball that can forecast the future, why is it seemingly always the case that none of those possible futures involves humans gradually adapting and assimilating these new technologies into their lives the way they have countless times before? In my FTC filing next week, I will document examples of that process of initial resistance, gradual adaptation, and then eventual assimilation of various new information technologies into society. But I have already developed a model explaining this process and offering plenty of examples in my recent law review article, “Technopanics, Threat Inflation, and the Danger of an Information Technology Precautionary Principle,” as well as in this lengthy blog post, “Who Really Believes in ‘Permissionless Innovation’?”

In sum, the most important “conversations” we have about new technologies are the ones we have every day as we interact with those new technologies and with each other. Wisdom is born of experience, including experiences involving risk and the possibility of mistakes and accidents. Patience and an openness to permissionless innovation represent the wise disposition toward new technologies not only because it provides breathing space for future entrepreneurialism, but also because it provides an opportunity to observe both the evolution of societal attitudes toward new technologies and how citizens adapt to them.

Kudos to Mashable for collecting these “10 Hilarious Vintage Cellphone Commercials” from the past two decades. Strangely, I don’t remember ever seeing any of these when they originally aired [although some are foreign], but it might have been because I flipped the channel when they came on. Most of really horrendous.  My favorite is the Radio Shack ad shown below, not just because of the phone, but because of the Bill Gates-looking kid at the end.  And speaking of Radio Shack, check out the ad down below, which I originally posted here a few years ago, for a 1989 Tandy machine, then billed as its “Most Powerful Computer Ever.” Accordingly, you would have had to practically mortgage your house to own it with a price tag of $8500!  Whether its phones or computers — which are increasingly one in the same, of course — it’s amazing how much progress we’ve seen in such a short period of time.

I’m very excited to announce that I now have a regular Forbes column that will fly under the banner, “Technologies of Freedom.” My first essay for them is already live and it addresses a topic I’ve dealt with here extensively through the years: Irrational fears about tech monopolies and “information empires.” Jump over to Forbes to read the whole thing.

Regular readers of this blog will understand why I chose “Technologies of Freedom” as the title for my column, but I thought it was worth reiterating. No book has had a more formative impact on my thinking about technology policy than Ithiel de Sola Pool’s 1983 masterpiece, Technologies of Freedom: On Free Speech in an Electronic Age.  As I noted in my short Amazon.com review, Pool’s technological tour de force is simply breathtaking in its polemical power and predictive capabilities. Reading this book almost three decades after it was published, one comes to believe that Pool must have possessed a crystal ball or had a Nostradamus-like ability to foresee the future.

For example, long before anyone else had envisioned what we now refer to as “cyberspace,” Pool was describing it in this book. “Networked computers will be the printing presses of the twenty-first century,” he argued in his remarkably prescient chapter on electronic publishing. “Soon most published information will disseminated electronically,” and “there will be networks on networks on networks,” he predicted. “A panoply of electronic devices puts at everyone’s hands capacities far beyond anything that the printing press could offer.” Few probably believed his prophecies in 1983, but no one doubts him now!

Far more importantly, Pool did all this while also providing a passionate defense of technological freedom and freedom of speech in the electronic age. In his closing chapter on “Policies for Freedom,” Pool discussed possible futures for the emerging world of electronic communications and noted that:

Technology will not be to blame if Americans fail to encompass this system within the political tradition of free speech. On the contrary, electronic technology is conducive to freedom. The degree of diversity and plenitude of access that mature electronic technology allows far exceed what is enjoyed today. Computerized information networks of the twenty-first century need not be any less free for all to use without hindrance than was the printing press. Only political errors might make them so. (p. 231)

Pool went on to outline his “Guidelines for Freedom.” #1 was that “the First Amendment applies fully to all media” and #2 was that “anyone may publish at will.” Regarding economic regulation of tech markets, Pool stressed in principles #3 and #4 that “enforcement must be after the fact, not by prior restraint” and that “regulation is a last recourse. In a free society, the burden of proof is for the least possible regulation of communication.”

This framework for freedom and innovation has governed everything I have done over my first two decades in the field of technology policy and it will shape everything I pen for Forbes, much like it has here at the TLF through the years. I can’t pretend to possess Pool’s predictive powers, but I can and will commit myself to espousing and defending his beautiful vision of technological freedom and progress.

This is what I wake up and go to work for each day.  The fight for technological freedom!

Last night, Declan McCullagh of CNet posted two tweets related to the concerns already percolating in the privacy community about a new Apple and Android app called “Color,” which allows those who use it to take photos and videos and instantaneously share them with other people within a 150-ft radius to create group photo/video albums. In other words, this new app marries photography, social networking, and geo-location. And because the app’s default setting is to share every photo and video you snap openly with the world, Declan wonders “How long will it take for the #privacy fundamentalists to object to Color.com’s iOS/Android apps?” After all, he says facetiously, “Remember: market choices can’t be trusted!”  He then reminds us that there’s really nothing new under the privacy policy sun and that we’ve seen this debate unfold before, such as when Google released its GMail service to the world back in 2004.

Indeed, for me, this debate has a “Groundhog Day” sort of feel to it.  I feel like I’ve been fighting the same fight with many privacy fundamentalists for the past decade. The cycle goes something like this:

• an innovative new information-sharing / social networking technology appears on the scene.
• the technology encourages more information production / sharing and defaults to sharing as the norm (but usually with opt-out capabilities or privacy settings of some sort built in).
• importantly, the technology in question is almost always free to consumers.
• immediately, a vociferous crowd of privacy fundamentalists lament the announcement and calls for the technology or service to be rolled-back or even regulated by the government. At a minimum, major design changes (usually an opt-in privacy default) are requested.  These advocates usually ignore or downplay the inherent quid pro quo involved in the deal, i.e., you share some info and tolerate some ads to get the free goodies.
• most privacy-agnostic people (like me!) usually yawn, sit back and enjoy the new free goodies, and wonder what all the fuss is about. In other words, over time (and usually fairly quickly), social norms adjust to the new technologies and modes of sharing.

In this regard, my favorite case study of this process in action is the one that Declan already mentioned: Gmail. It’s easy to forget now, but back in 2004 there was quite a hullabaloo over the introduction of Gmail. Indeed, the privacy fundamentalists wanted it stopped cold. Letters started flying from privacy groups, sent first directly to Google itself (31 groups signed this letter asking the company to roll back the service), and then to the attorney general of California requesting an investigation following an immediate suspension of the service.  Those signing that particular letter (Chris Jay Hoofnagle of EPIC, Beth Givens of  Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, and Pam Dixon of the World Privacy Forum) also warned of civil and criminal penalties and private rights of action.

It was at about that time that, well, I blew my top. After seeing some traffic on Declan’s old “Politech” listserv about this, and fearing that action might be forthcoming by government officials aimed at restricting this new technology, I fired off this response to the Gmail-haters on April 30, 2004:

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: RE: [Politech] EPIC letter compares Gmail to FBI's Carnivore,
Total Information Awareness [priv]
Date: Fri, 30 Apr 2004 09:16:54 -0400
From: Adam Thierer 
To: Declan McCullagh 

Oh brother, I can't take this lunacy from the privacy absolutists anymore:

(1) What part of VOLUNTARY is it that these privacy fundamentalists do
not understand? How many times and in how many ways must it be said: YOU
DO NOT HAVE TO SIGN UP FOR THIS FREE SERVICE!

(2) Second, these privacy absolutists persistently attempt to equate
private sector privacy concerns and government privacy violations. There
is a world of difference between the two and it basically comes down to
the fact that governments hold guns to our heads and coercively force us
to do certain things against our will. That is the real Big Brother
problem. Google, by contrast, isn't holding a gun to anyone's head and
forcing them to sign up.

(3) If you're concerned about how government might co-opt this service
for its own nefarious ends, that is not a Google problem, that is a Big
Government problem. Let's work together to properly limit the
surveillance powers of government instead of shutting down any new
private service or technology that we feel the feds might have to chance
to abuse.

(4) Final point about these privacy fanatics: Do they not believe in
freedom of contract? Do I or do I not have a right to contract with a
company to exchange certain forms of personal information for a the
right to free e-mail access and storage? Can I not VOLUNTARILY agree to
such a deal? If not, then I fear that there are a heck of lot of things
in this world that these people would make illegal in the name of
"protecting privacy."

Do they believe that companies like Google will - - out of the goodness
of their hearts - - just hand over free e-mail services and massive
storage capacity to everyone without anything in exchange? There is no
free lunch in this world but Google is giving us about the closest thing
to it. And yet, the privacy fanatics want to reject that offer on the
behalf over everyone in society. Well guess what EPIC... you don't speak
for me and a lot of other people in this world who will be more than
happy to cut this deal with Google. So do us a favor and don't ask the
government to shut down a service just because you don't like it.
Privacy is a subjective condition and your value preferences are not
representative of everyone else's values in our diverse nation. Stop
trying to coercively force your values and choices on others. We can
decide these things on our own, thank you very much.

It turns out that I didn’t really have as much to fear as I thought when I fired off that angry email. Most people immediately embraced the new Gmail service.  And why wouldn’t they? It was an amazing innovation at just the right price — free!  Don’t forget that, at that time, Yahoo! mail (the leading webmail provider) offered customers less than 10 megabytes of email storage. By contrast, Gmail offered users an astounding gigabyte of storage that would grow steadily over time.  Rather than charging some users for more storage or special features, Google paid for the service by showing advertisements next to each email “contextually” targeted to keywords in that email — a far more profitable form of advertising than “dumb banner” ads previously used by other webmail providers. That raised some privacy concerns, but it also offered users the ultimate email free lunch.  And they ate it up.

Today, 190 million+ people around the world use Gmail and the service continues to evolve to meet the needs of users.  While I’m not a fan of Gmail’s spartan user interface and lack of other useful features found in other services (like Outlook loaded up with Xobni), there’s no doubt that Gmail has been a terrific boon to consumers. But we should not so easily forget that some people wanted to preemptively kill it by imposing the equivalent of what I have called a “Privacy Precautionary Principle” and stopping innovation before they had given it their blessing.

Again, as I noted in my 2004 rant above, many privacy fundamentalist too often forget that privacy is a highly subjective and ever-changing condition. As Abelson, Ledeen, and Lewis noted in their excellent recent book, Blown to Bits:

The meaning of privacy has changed, and we do not have a good way of describing it. It is not the right to be left alone, because not even the most extreme measures will disconnect our digital selves from the rest of the world. It is not the right to keep our private information to ourselves, because the billions of atomic factoids don’t any more lend themselves into binary classification, private or public. (p. 68)

This struggle to conceptualize privacy and then protect it is going to continue and become quite a heated debate at times. I want to be clear, however, that while I do not share the values of those in the privacy fundamentalist camp, I do understand and appreciate that there are some people who are hyper-sensitive about this issue and I’m fine with them pressuring companies to change their privacy policies or, better yet, encouraging them to offer more tools that will allow users to better manage their own privacy.  I think Microsoft, Facebook,Yahoo! and Google (among many others) have made some amazing strides in this regard and some of the credit must go to the hard-core privacy advocates for pushing them to offer more flexible privacy-enhancing tools and settings for those who demand them.

But let’s be clear about another thing: This should be an evolutionary, experimental process. Educating and empowering consumers to handle their personal privacy settings is a wonderful thing. On the other hand, making those decisions for consumers preemptively, as some privacy advocates often seem to want to do, is an entirely different matter. A Privacy Precautionary Principle mentality — as we saw in display in the early spat over Gmail — would have resulted in hundreds of millions of people being denied an amazingly innovative new service based on largely on phantom fears and conjectural “harms.”  It is better to let these things play out in the information marketplace and see what the ongoing interaction of consumers and companies yields in terms of new innovation and new privacy settings / norms.  Those new settings and norms may not always be to the liking of some privacy fundamentalists, or even to privacy agnostics like me, but that experimental, evolutionary, organic process remains the right way to go if we value both progress and liberty.

Update 3/29: I somehow completely spaced-out and forgot about this terrific old 2004 essay by Tim O’Reilly on “The Fuss About Gmail and Privacy: Nine Reasons Why It’s Bogus.”  Go back and read it. Great stuff.  This Business Insider article brought it back to my attention.

Over at Silicon Alley Insider, Gregory Galant has a wonderful post about “18 Awesome Tech Things We Didn’t Have 10 Years Ago.” It serves as another great example of the amazing technological progress we have witnessed over the past decade.  He’s asking people for suggestions for what else should be on the list, so head over there and let him know. Seems like wi-fi technologies should be on there somehow. FiOS deserves a shout-out, too. And where’s Firefox & Chrome? Also, I’ll put in a special word for some amazing new home theater technologies: high-def flat-screens and projectors; media servers & Windows Media Center; BluRay; and 3 incredible gaming / media consoles (Wii, PS3, & XBox). Anyway, here’s Galant’s list:

Wikipedia Gmail Facebook YouTube Twitter AdWords Amazon AWS RSS (started in ‘99 but didn’t catch on till the ’00s) Meetup iPod Google Maps Podcasts Mint Skype/VOIP iPhone Google Docs Creative Commons Flickr

My friend Larry Magid, a technology columnist for CBS News.com and others, has a wonderful new column out about “The Decade in Technology.”  You have to read it to appreciate just how far we have come in such a short time. Larry notes:

[T]he past 10 years were a momentous period for technology.  Not only was there no iPhone a decade ago, there was hardly anything that could be considered a smartphone. The BlackBerry was introduced in 1999, when the well-heeled techno-savvy were carrying around flip phones. That year, 1999, was the height of the dot-com boom. But when you look back at it, the online world was nothing like it is today. There was no Facebook (founded in 2004) or Twitter (2007). Even MySpace wasn’t founded until 2003. The term Web 2.0 hadn’t been coined and most people who were online used the Web mostly to consume information. Those with the skills and resources to post to the Web were called “Webmasters.” Today, everyone with a Facebook account is a master of his or her own Web.

I tried to document the incredible technological changes in my own life over the past decade in this essay I penned on Super Bowl Sunday last February: “10 Years Ago Today… (Thinking About Technological Progress).”

Larry also notes that giants came and went as technology continued to evolve in unexpected ways:

Ten years ago AOL was the most popular Internet service provider and was so successful that it was able to purchase media giant Time Warner in January 2000 for $182 billion in stock. But the marriage didn’t make it through the decade. The two companies formally split up this month, with AOL, once again, being traded on the New York Stock Exchange as a separate company. AOL thrived in the ’90s because people were using the service to go online via phone. Today most American homes have broadband.

That’s something I wrote about at length in my recent paper on “A Brief History of Media Merger Hysteria.”  Anyway, read Larry’s entire piece. It really drives home how lucky we are to be living in the midst of such at technological renaissance and information cornucopia.