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MORATECH
August 25, 2019
September 16, 2019
Kentaro Toyama had a piece up at slate https://slate.com/technology/2019/08/ban-facial-recognition-emerging-technologies-drones.html
"We Need to Ban More Emerging Technologies". https://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/cuz6h8/we_need_to_ban_more_emerging_technologies/
It isn't brilliant, but it hits some subjects
of interest to me... I posted it to reddit's
"Futurology" groups because I hoped it might
annoy them productively. (I got it half right.)
Kentaro Toyama is essentially a former tech evangelist:
he worked for Microsoft, trying to get computers into
schools in India.
He eventually soured on "technological optimism",
concluding that technology tends to amplify conditions
already present: if a society is corrupt and the people
are impoverished, dumping a technology on them is unlikey
to fix the central problems.
He makes the point that in recent decades in the
United States the various information technology
"revolutions" have made no dent in the poverty level, He's done some
which remains rather high for an "advanced" country. Ted/TedX talks
on this.
Kentaro Toyama's piece at slate argues:
"To tame this onrushing tide, society needs dams and dikes.
Just as has begun to happen with facial recognition, it’s
time to consider legal bans and moratoriums on other emerging
technologies. These need not be permanent or absolute, but
innovation is not an unmitigated good. The more powerful a
technology is, the more care it requires to safely operate."
He was suggesting some sort of social evaluation process
should be applied before new technologies are rolled out:
"Technology has its benefits. But slowing the
pace of its advance would give society more time DRAG
to think through the consequences and debate
which aspects of new technologies are desirable,
and which should be outlawed."
In particular, he applauded
recent bans of facial Banning facial recognition
recognition technologies, and technology doesn't sound
argues we should consider more like a bad move to me.
such bans.
That anyone would even
It would be an understatement to say consider doing something
that the people at /r/Futurology were like that is remarkable in
critical of this piece-- they were the "post 9/11" era, which
only barely capable of reading it. often seems hellbent on a
It violates the local religious precepts. 1984 police state approach
to every problem.
In particular, on every point where Toyama
mentioned a potential negative feature of a
technology, "mhornberger" made the point that
it also has positive aspects, as though this Reasonably, I think you'd
somehow refuted Toyama in some way-- but need some way of estimating
Toyama doesn't ever say there are *no* the relatively liklihood of
positive aspects to new technologies. upside and downside, to get
some idea of whether a
proposed new set of
Toyama: "New technologies always restrictions on technological
have unintended consequences-- development would be more
often negative" likely to do more harm than
good.
mhornberger:
But then: just as the
"Doing nothing also costs and benefits a new
has consequences." technology are difficult
to evaluate, it's also
That would be a relevent comment difficult to evaluate a
if Toyama was recommending new social process.
zero innovation-- he's literally
recommending *slower* innovation. Innovations in social
institutions are
That could be argued against essentially just another
in various ways, but you'd type of "technology".
have to be capable hearing
what's actually being said.
Fighting the
last war?
FLORID
Quoting bits of this dicussion,
starting in the middle
(I'm "doomvox", of course.):
https://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/cuz6h8/we_need_to_ban_more_emerging_technologies/ey1p0sk/
mhornberger wrote:
This point of his:
it’s time to consider legal bans and
moratoriums on other emerging technologies.
Is untenable. You can mention specific technologies if
you like, such as facial recognition, but it cannot be
applied in a general sense.
doomvox wrote:
Perhaps not, but you hadn't really made that point. You
keep making the point there's good effects as well as bad,
but it's not like Toyama says there aren't.
mhornberger wrote:
doomvox wrote:
he wants to see some sort of social evaluation process
applied before new technologies are rolled out.
"Good luck with that. With many things people's initial assessment
is dismissive, and it's only over time that they come to like and
depend on it. And only through adoption does the price come down
and it become economically viable. And also, the ill effects are
generally not known for some time. I mean, not many would predict
that WhatsApp messages could lead to vigilante murders, but it
happened. People have warned of the dangers of technology
forever, whether it be writing, the printing press, television,
etc. All of which have caused some harm in the world. No
technology is an unmitigated good. That alone is not enough of a
reason to block any specific technology."
"You also have to decide how much harm is allowable, and how to
balance that against the benefits you're foregoing. Self-driving
cars might cause some problems down the road, but will also pose
considerable benefits. You can't know ahead of time how things
will pan out."
doomvox wrote:
It's not at all clear Kentaro Toyama is trying to call
for a moratorium on all emerging technologies. I think
literally he's just saying we should consider it for
some others.
If we were to look at the more extreme claim, though, I
think you're correct that it's difficult to imagine what
sort of social institutions we could set up that would be
up to the task of evaluating the costs and benefits of a
technological advance before they're rolled out.
Taking it from the other side though, if the idea that
every new product should be regarded as innocent until
proven guilty seems more than a little dubious. Technical
fads can spread remarkably fast these days, and if the
benefits take some time to become clear, that's also true
of the potential downsides. You can argue we've been
rolling the dice repeatedly and thus far we've just
(mostly) lucked out.
"And also, the ill effects are
generally not known for some time."
Sure. And the situation can
remain murky for decades
afterwards. Consider say, the
rapid adoption of the car after
WWII. Did the benefits out weigh This though, may be a bad example:
the damage?
The idea that "new technology" is
What about, say, just the use *just* putting a product on the
of leaded gas? There's a market is completely wrong:
tenable theory this caused suburbia wasn't *just* a market
tremendous human damage, e.g. phenomena, it was enabled by policy
the crime wave of the 60s-90s. decisions favoring highways and low
density zoning, and abandoning much
"You also have to of public transit.
decide how much harm is
allowable, and how to It's *always* like this: An
balance that against "uber" isn't a market phenomena
the benefits you're that exists in isolation: it
foregoing." rests on legal judgements that
they're not cabs operated by
That's indeed the kind of employees.
problems we'd be up against.
(And the complex of changes
that led to the explosion of
suburbian sprawl may have been
full of mistakes, but *now*
what do we do about it?)
(But: I don't know why
I thought that question
was relevant here.)
(mhornberger repeatedly argues along the
lines "it would be difficult to do this,
therefore we shouldn't try"-- you could just
as easily say "we might need to do this, so
we should start thinking about how we might
do it". He's not so pessimistic about
research programs into more conventional
"technological" ideas...)
"Self-driving cars might
cause some problems down the
road, but will also pose
considerable benefits. You
can't know ahead of time how
things will pan out."
It's hard to say what will happen, so
let's roll the dice again?
"He swept up a lot of other things in that
net too. He complained about kids' faces
being stuck to screens as if that itself is
one of the problems he's railing against."
The faces glued to screens strike me as
prima facie evidence that we're looking
at addictive behavior. A recent study shows that
facebook addiction has
It might not be a problem in itself some negative psychological
(though I'd be surprised if it doesn't impact on young users,
correlate with some problems, if only but perhaps surprisingly
lack of physical exercise). there's no similar effect
from computer games.
(Find the link.)
Consider the case of drug approvals:
We don't just approve all new drugs Only a very unusual extremist
by default and go after specific would try to argue that we don't
ones if we suspect they might have need the drug approvals process,
problems. and that they'd be cheaper if we
just relied on liability law to
It is perhaps a little peculiar go after companies only after
that we would worry about a new they've screwed up.
addictive drug (even if it were
"merely" psychologically This is a case where the general
addictive), but we presume sentiment is that we can't rely on
addictive electronic toys are industry to self-regulate.
benign.
A similar case is food safety.
Or consider the cellphone craze of the 90s:
Microwave repeaters everywhere and half of
the populace suddenly holding transmitters
against their skulls for hours a day-- as it
happens, the (belated) fears that there
might be radiation exposure issues with this
were wrong, but I would make the points:
(1) there was no particular reason to
believe that in advance
(2) the population of cellphone users
seemed completely uninterested in the They were similarly uninterested
possibility-- any evidence that they were
killing themselves trying to drive
It seemed pretty clear to me that the while speaking on the phone.
technology was *literally* addictive
(that's not just a hyperbolic Eventually some legislation
analogy)-- but there was no need to started getting passed that
seek approval from anything like an pretended to address these
FDA because this was an electronic toy issues, e.g. outlawing
not a drug: this seems like a rather driving while using a phone
shallow distinction to base public unless it was hands-free,
policy on... ignoring that the central
trouble was mental distraction.
Cellphone companies
liked that one, because
people would have to buy
new equipment.
The Kentaro Toyama makes the
point that there's a rachet
effect in technological
products that makes it difficult
for the populace to give them up.
Cellphones are a decent example,
I think-- you *could* take it
the other way though. People
gravitated to different
technologies (like "texting")
that ameliorated some of the
problems, and they developed
some new social customs that
fixed some of the annoyances
with the new technology.
(Sep 18, 2017)
So, should we ignore the potential
effects of a technology, secure in https://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=11125847&cid=55218513
the belief that further
technological progress will always
solve any problems?
Allow me to suggest another
possibility: at present, we have no
sensible method of evaluating what
a new product is going to do to us,
and we end up swept along by the
enthusiasm of faddish people who Everyone likes it, it must be good!
can't even imagine a down-side to But what's bad may be that everyone
their latest obsessions likes it.
Might there not be a set of alternative social
institutions we could use to attempt to
anticipate (and perhaps "regulate"?)
potential problems before we encounter them?
The technological optimists are
literally that-- they have trouble in
believing in the reality of possible And I used to be one
downsides, and insist that the of these guys, hence RAT3
potential rewards justify making my interest in arguing
almost any experiment. with them now.
There's an implicit presumption I was reacting to the
that new tech has a very low anti-technology
probability of results that go movement of the 70s
net-negative. which was particularly
crazy, but we need not
veer from that to an
automatic approval of
every new gadget...
It might be worth considering
the analogy to military actions:
It's extremly difficult to sum up the likely
risks and benefits of something like a military
engagement, and yet I don't think there's any
question that it needs to be done in some fashion.
Few of us would say it's reasonble to just go--
"Oh, well there's no way to know what's going to Though that is
happen here. What the fuck, let's just invade indeed the way
and figure it out later." the US reacted
circa the
invasion of Iraq.
If I might play "futurologist" for a moment:
I envision a future where we will look back
on the grip of FANG has on our lives, and
wonder why didn't impose on them the various FANG
regulatory checks and balances that seem so
obvious in our far future present day.
In the world of the future, the Information
Technology Administration will strictly limit
electronic privacy invasions, and take steps
to require full disclosure of conflicts of
interest in online communications.
REGULATING_NEWTECH
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