Should governments just STOP socially disruptive technologies being implemented?
Future with technology is here whether you like it or not. In fact, it is making strides faster than anyone in the society thought or the governments anticipated. Governments have always been slower to respond to technology challenges and that is understandable. It takes a lot of hard yakka to design and develop policies that stand the test of time and still be relevant. But with Moore’s Law making technology development faster and cheaper and with 5G promising internet speeds that have the potential to change the way the world operates, can we afford to have regulation and government policies play the catch-up game? or should the government have the big red button that says, STOP?
The World Economic Forum recently published an article on how governments around the world struggling to keep up with emerging technologies. This is not a new phenomenon as governments have been grappling with this issue for a long time. In the 19th and early 20th century, governments struggled to envision and regulate transportation such as railways and automobiles. In the new millennium, social media companies challenged governments with privacy laws and continue to challenge on ethical issues and most importantly on fundamental issues such as freedom of speech. We have ridesharing companies challenging governments on regulatory policies and e-cigarettes on health policies and regulations. Most of these lapses in anticipating technological developments have had a comparatively lesser impact on social fabric than that of the political and economic one. The social fabric here is meant as the ‘glue that holds the society together’ so, in essence, it is education, employment, livelihoods, health, etc. The ridesharing disruption mostly adversely affected the taxi industry, social media privacy breaches did not affect the daily lives of the majority of citizens and e-cigarettes did not add substantially to the already known harmful effects of tobacco. However, there are a few examples of disruptive technology, that changed or are capable of changing the social fabric of society. The Cambridge Analytica saga that led to disrupting political outcomes and in turn the outcomes for the society. 3D printing technology leading to printing weapons, and the most recent announcement by Facebook to launch a cryptocurrency called Libra, which has had governments thinking hard about regulation. But Artificial Intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT) and Blockchain on the horizon are capable of transforming society and the impacts will alter the fabric of society. These will require a wholesale look at regulation and law across the globe.
Cryptocurrencies have been around since the late 1990s and governments have almost ignored them as they have had little or no impact on one of the most fundamental government functions, to control economic policies. The difference this time though is the numbers associated with cryptocurrency users. A 2017 study conducted by Cambridge University suggested that there are between 2.9 million and 5.8 million users of cryptocurrency wallets. This is between 0.04% to 0.08% of the world population. Compare this to the number of current Facebook users, which stands at 2.4 billion, which is 32% of the global population. So cryptocurrencies or digital currencies until now were accessible to a minuscule population but now with Facebook entering this arena, one can imagine their impact given the reach of Facebook in the society. This has the potential to create an alternative communal currency that spans across the globe and disrupt the age-old norm. This concerns the governments as it disrupts not only its policies but the social fabric that is based on the economy and national currencies.
Governments need to start envisioning and anticipating the future to develop forward-looking policies and regulations. In most technologies, the future doesn’t arrive overnight and technologies have a lag time between development and implementation. The internet was developed in the 1960s but only became mainstream in the 1990s. Digital currencies have been around since the 1990s but only really made their impact in the 2010s. AI has been talked about since the late 1950s but it took other technologies to develop for it to be scaled. IoT and smart connected devices were first discussed in the 1980s but with enabling technologies such as 5G are going to transform it on a large scale in 2019. There are plenty of such game-changing or life-changing technologies one can list whose origins can be traced back for at least 10 if not 20 years in the past. That is more than enough time for governments to anticipate their application and develop policies and regulations to strategically, safely and ethically implement them. But these steps are for future technologies and the problem of existing technologies without regulations still need to be dealt with.
So what choices do the governments have now, in a socially disruptive scenario? It could rush through some regulation to control the technologies such as cryptocurrency or it puts a complete stop to the whole digital currency market. Well, the first option sounds enticing but given how long it takes for governments to develop regulation and then get the legislation passed, it could be too little too late. So should the governments completely stop or pause their implementation for a while? Well, if this is the chosen option, no single government can do this. It has to be a collective effort, one that must be dealt with by G20 or at least the G7+. For one, I am glad that the Ministers of G20 in Osaka this month had the digital economy on their agenda. The questions are, can they all agree on hard stop or pause (temporary or permanent) on socially disruptive technologies until thoughtful regulation is implemented? And, can governments utilize technology’s history and genealogy to be proactive in developing regulation?
About the Author
Hrishikesh Desai is a progressive leader currently a student at 3A institute at the Australian National University. Hrishikesh has experience in the federal government in regulation, Intellectual Property and you can connect to him on LinkedIn and Twitter.
Published at Sat, 22 Jun 2019 02:08:15 +0000
