The hands-off tech era is over

Better laws or ad disclosures probably wouldn’t have prevented hostile foreign actors from abusing Facebook to wage information wars in the United States or other countries. But the hands-off conventional wisdom most likely contributed to a sense that people in charge of tech should be left alone to do what they wished.

‘We realised that we unleashed these powerful forces and failed to create appropriate safeguards.’

Jeff Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy

That made it harder for governments to wade in once it was clear that social media was being abused to hurt democracy, that unproven driver-assistance technologies might be dangerous, and that consumers have no control in the land grab for our digital information.

“We realised that we unleashed these powerful forces and failed to create appropriate safeguards,” said Jeff Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, a nonprofit consumer advocacy group. “We simply could have said in the beginning, every technology needs to be regulated in a common-sense way.”

Now regulators are feeling empowered. Politicians have waded in to make rules for law enforcement’s use of facial recognition technology. There will be more laws like those in Texas to take power away from the handful of tech executives who set rules of free expression for billions of people. More countries will force Apple and Google to remake the app economy. More regulation is already changing the ways that children use technology.

Again, not all of this will be good government intervention. But there are more signs that people who create technologies want more government oversight, too — or at least pay lip service to it.

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Any discussion about emerging technology — including cryptocurrency and the artificial-intelligence illustration software Dall-E — regularly includes deliberation about the potential harms and how regulation might minimise them.

That doesn’t mean that people agree on what government oversight should look like. But the answer is almost never no government intervention at all. And that’s different.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.