Regulation vs Innovation

I personally found myself in the middle of the argument on regulation versus innovation. I one hundred percent believe that there needs to be at least some regulations on technology. But we should not go too far with the regulations as that would stagnate our development of technology. Without regulations technology innovation would climb, yet this would lead to many unintended side effects, some less dangerous than others but still bad. Without these regulations the workers and scientists could be taken advantage of and there would be human right violations. However on the flip side if there are too many regulations technology becomes grasped in a stranglehold and people would begin to suffer. Lets say a scientist and engineer come up with a breakthrough device that could save lives from something that couldn’t be stopped before like pancreatic cancer. These regulations would slow the development and approval of this device or treatment and would cause many preventable deaths. If you can balance the regulations to prevent dangerous situations and human rights violations while still allowing creativity and freedom for experimentation and development, then you can both minimize deaths and suffering while maximizing quality of life and technical development. However I can see problems with this idea and I will admit nothing is flawless because of human intervention and ideas. With these more lax regulations I’m suggesting there will inevitably be someone who takes advantage of the system to hurt or steal. This will lead to stricter regulations as time progresses which will cause the stagnation anyways, but I believe it is worth the risks to push technology ahead now while we still have the chance before it becomes impossible in the future. It does make me wonder though, what technologies would we loose by having even some regulations, because with complete freedom and no restrictions human ingenuity shines.

I believe that there should be minimal regulation when it comes to technology. The regulations should obviously protect workers and humans but other than that I see no other regulations coming into play. Take self-driving cars for example. Many people believe they should not be allowed on roads because of the technology having an error and crashing even though it is way more likely for a human to have an error and cause a crash. This may sound crazy, but I think I’d rather trust a self driving car more than most people. With too much regulation, how is Tesla ever going to get to the point of a complete self driving car? It would take a significantly longer time for them to get to that point.

Connecting this to a previous class I took, I learned that a lot of error in technology is not from the actual technology but from human error. According to Boeing, the aerospace company, humans are overall the largest cause of all airplane accidents. Not the machine, but humans. Most regulation is not to protect us but here because humans are scared. We are scared of what could happen instead of what’s most likely to happen which is us messing things up.

Technology regulation is obviously complicated, but I wonder if regulations even make it possible for technology innovation at times. How can we define when technology has ‘gone too far’? What types of regulations are needed? Will innovation be extremely slow due to regulations? These are all things I wonder.

In terms of where I stand, I am probably as far towards regulation as you can get without outright banning technology or anything. Don’t get me wrong, I love technology, and I will agree that less regulation leads to more innovation, but I always have to look at things in a risk-reward system, and to me having greater scientific progress is not worth risking human lives. Maybe it is just my suspicion talking, but I am always cautious of new tech. I still am very uneasy about Amazon Echos and the like, and smart TVs are also way too exploitable to me. I draw the line at covering up my laptop camera, but otherwise I’m very suspicious of tech. If I had to compare my stance to another type of R&D, I’d say that I feel similarly about technology and cures/vaccines. Take your time, develop it carefully, and test it many times before it is released in order to make it as effective as possible, and if these steps aren’t taken, I want to make sure it’s safe myself before I go forward with it.. To summarize, I believe that the extra time taken to research and manufacture a new piece of technology can be used to troubleshoot it more effectively, finding and squishing bugs/glitches and making it less exploitable for hackers or other groups. So, to me, regulation, while it does slow down a product’s release, overall produces a better product that’s worth the wait.

Does regulation actually stop innovation? That’s an assumption that this entire “choice” is based on, but personally I don’t think that premise is a valid one. Regulation ensures safe innovation to be sure, but I see no reason that innovation and regulation must be inherently at odds.

If an innovation is safe, worst case scenario is that (logical) regulation adds a bit of testing time to ensure it’s safety. Innovation is not hindered.

If an innovation is unsafe, regulation ensures that it will be made safe before it’s release. Without regulation, an unsafe innovation is released to the public and people get hurt; And then the innovation is either made safe or abandoned. Regulation just makes sure that last bit happens *before* people get hurt, not after. Innovation is not hindered.

Now, I made the caveat of logical regulation  Allow me to clarify: Regulation exists to protect people. If a regulation is not protecting people, then that regulation has no purpose and is therefore illogical. Connecting to Jean-Paul’s post, in his example the self-driving car statistically causes less accidents than human drivers. Banning that car would therefore not protect anyone, and as such that regulation is inherently illogical. What is logical however, is putting that autonomous driver software through testing to ensure that it is as statistically safe as human drivers or safer. The alternative is the possibility of a whole lot of needless accidents with no benefit other than showing that the software is unsafe.

I believe that there should be a balance of both. If there is too much freedom with no rules, then there can  be fatal consequences and it could possibly drastically alter our daily lives. On the other hand, if there are too many rules then we risk essentially “nerfing” the potential of technology.

Jean-paul, Michael, and Tallis have an interesting thread going about relative benefits and tradeoffs of regulations as a protective mechanism.

But it’s important to note that regulations do not all exist to protect people. And those that do require the technology to exist before it can be effectively regulated.

In fact, technologically speaking, most current federal regulations in the US are designed to ensure fair market competition (i.e. economic protection) rather than human protection. This is why tech researchers often refer to the tech market as the “wild west.” Tech companies have relied on a virtuous corporate image (Google’s “don’t be evil” slogan) or use consumer demand post-development (Amazon consequentialist view?) to make people be ok with this.

Recently Google engineers have called the industry’s bluff though by staging internal protests and walkouts to force the company to halt projects that the employees deem too dangerous to continue.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/04/technology/google-letter-ceo-pentagon-project.html

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/11/27/read-google-employees-open-letter-protesting-project-dragonfly.html

These are very good points. With respect to medical technologies, the need for speed vs safety is something we can see playing out right now. Most coronavirus research is exempt from the normal process of review and validation that is normally required for virus testing and vaccine approval.

On the flip side, even in normal research there is a benevolence clause built in– if during clinical trials (human testing), the intervention (drug, tech, vaccine, etc) is found to be so effective in preventing death or disability that it would more harmful not to give it to everyone, then the experimental protocols require that everyone in the trial get the most effective version of the drug.

The challenge with technology interventions is how to define and recognize “benefit” and “harm” in a way that lets us make these kinds of decisions.

I personally think that there must be an appropriate amount of regulations on the creations of new technologies. By having these regulations it provides us with a safe way to innovate. Yes, some inventions and improvements have been made because of uncontrolled conditions, but there can still be that same innovation with rules. Regulations are essential to the balance between humans and technology.

If we think of a topic of today’s world, COVID, the vaccine is a technology. We have systems in place that check the progress of the vaccine and if the trials aren’t going according to regulation then it is shut down. this is to ensure the health and safety of the world because what’s worse than randomly getting the virus? If we injected it into everyone on purpose with no real test of its effectiveness and safety.

I feel like regulations do need to be in place for new technologies. If there are not any regulations, then innovation would happen rapidly. I feel like this could cause technologies to have the potential to impact people’s lives. For example, there are autonomous robots that are used in war. These robots are programmed to kill people. But how will it tell the difference between an enemy, an ally, or an innocent person? Could it have the capability to bomb a city without a human telling it to? I wonder about these things because if they get into the wrong hands, then the destruction can be inevitable.  We do need innovation to advance human life. As long as there are some regulations in place, I feel like innovation can happen as long the technology is being thoroughly investigated. But it is going to come down to how many regulations will need to be in place and who’s deciding on these rules?

I would like to specifically address Jacob Well’s closing comment, “with complete freedom and no restrictions human ingenuity shines.” This struck me as confident and true. I feel like I have been institutionalized to believe that with limitless innovation, the world would end, and robots would eradicate human life. However, no law says that this will happen. There could be many outcomes to limitless innovation, and Jacob has pointed out many of them. I would support the idea of limitless innovation for the positive possibilities, which I think would eclipse the negative possibilities.

I do not believe that regulation can stop innovation. The government has regulations on many different things, but people will create technology anyway. These people might be breaking the law, but I bet the government wouldn’t mind taking this technology and using it for themselves after making it legal. When the first nuclear bomb was made, there really was no regulation. First, it was developed in secret to prevent people from figuring out our plans or receiving public outrage. This furthered nuclear technology pretty far. Regulations should be used if the technology has a high chance to hurt others on its own. Depending on the circumstances, regulation should be avoided somewhat or should be put in place even stronger. In the Halo universe, children were kidnapped at a very young age and transformed into super soldiers. The government acted this way to help combat a threat of insurrectionists. This action came in handy when aliens tried to eliminate humanity. It isn’t easy to know how things will turn out until you see the effects. Medium levels of regulation would be a decent in-between to help continue progress and protect humans.

Where in our history has regulation stopped… anything really? If we were to get regulations on technology, who would enforce it? The first answer I thought of was President Trump’s space force! Which I thought was funny!

I am all for innovation! That’s going to come with the good and the ugly. The good being advances in medical technology and the ugly being… well, killer robots that want to take over the world… Hopefully not!