The speed of technology vs. the speed of legislation
A recent article in IEEE Spectrum Tech Talk claims that regulation will lag developments in self-driving cars. This is a familiar theme amongst pundits of all kinds of technology, but why would anyone expect regulation to be ahead of technology? What kind of lawmaker would bother to write laws about technology that doesn't yet exist, let alone presume to have the 20/20 foresight required to make sensible ones? And what technologist would applaud lawmakers for making law without first developing an understanding of the technology involved?
I also happened to be reading Jack Goldsmith and Tim Wu's Who Controls the Internet? (2006) this week. A section of Chapter 7 portrays the history of copyright law and attendant media industries as a series of equilibria punctuated by new technologies. The arrival of a new technology heralds a confrontation between established players and new players, frequently loud and ill-tempered. But eventually everyone settles into a new equilibrium that allows life to go on. They conclude the section with an argument that the court cases surrounding Grokster and the like did not come about because the technology had over-run the government's ability to control it, but because the government was simply taking its time to determine the best way forward, just as it had for technologies like vinyl records, radio, cable television and video recorders.
Put that way, having regulation lag technology sounds like eminent good sense. Goldsmith and Wu themselves refer to it as "business as usual". Jonathan Zittrain, writing on related issues, proposes that lawmakers regulate Internet technologies using more or less this strategy in The Future of the Internet and How to Stop it (2008): spend time watching how the technology plays out, then act if some harm becomes evident. And the time spent working out what to do about video recorders, for example, now seems pretty minor compared to the three decades we've spent enjoying rental videos since.
Technologists, I suppose, might like to think that they already know all about the technology and are therefore in a position to set appropriate rules for their inventions right away — if, indeed, they feel the need for any rules at all. I suppose similar thinking underlies the calls for "self-regulation" that feature in much industry input into public policy.
Technologists may well know the most about the technology, and would surely be high on any capable lawmaker's list of people to speak to in drafting legislation. But technologists have some fairly obvious conflicts of interest in developing rules for technology that might make them wealthy or powerful, and even the most disinterested technologist is as subject to the law of unintended consequences as anyone else. As Zittrain suggests, then, perhaps the humble and wise technologist ought to embrace the lag of legislation behind technology rather than expressing constant amazement at the hopeless laggards in parliament, who might just be taking the same care in their job as we do in ours.
