dotlah! dotlah!
  • Cities
  • Technology
  • Business
  • Politics
  • Society
  • Science
  • About
Social Links
  • zedreviews.com
  • citi.io
  • aster.cloud
  • liwaiwai.com
  • guzz.co.uk
  • atinatin.com
0 Likes
0 Followers
0 Subscribers
dotlah!
  • Cities
  • Technology
  • Business
  • Politics
  • Society
  • Science
  • About
  • Science
  • Technology

Don’t Ban New Technologies – Experiment With Them Carefully

  • August 23, 2019
Total
0
Shares
0
0
0

For many years, Facebook’s internal slogan was “move fast and break things.” And that’s what the company did – along with most other Silicon Valley startups and the venture capitalists who fund them. Their general attitude is one of asking for forgiveness after the fact, rather than for permission in advance. Though this can allow for some bad behavior, it’s probably the right attitude, philosophically speaking.

It’s a mess, but is it all bad? EHFXC/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA

It’s true that the try-first mindset has frustrated the public. Take the Lime scooter company, for instance. The company launched its scooter sharing service in multiple cities without asking permission from local governments. Its electric scooters don’t need base stations or parking docks, so the company and its customers can leave them anywhere for the next person to pick up – even if that’s in the middle of a sidewalk. This general disruption has led to calls to ban the scooters in cities around the country.

Scooters are not alone. Ridesharing services, autonomous cars, artificial intelligence systems and Amazon’s cashless stores have also all been targets of bans (or proposed bans) in different states and municipalities before they’ve even gotten off the ground.

What these efforts have in common is what philosophers like me call the “precautionary principle,” the idea that new technologies, behaviors or policies should be banned until their supporters can demonstrate that they will not result in any significant harms. It’s the same basic idea Hippocrates had in ancient Greece: Doctors should “do no harm” to patients.

The precautionary principle entered the political conversation in the 1980s in the context of environmental protection. Damage to the environment is hard – if not impossible – to reverse, so it’s prudent to seek to prevent harm from happening in the first place. But as I see it, that’s not the right way to look at most new technologies. New technologies and services aren’t creating irreversible damage, even though they do generate some harms.

Environmental pollution is so harmful and hard to clean up that precautions are useful. imrankadir/Shutterstock.com

Precaution has its place

As a general concept, the precautionary principle is essentially conservative. It allows existing technologies, even if new ones – the ones that face preemptive bans – are safer overall.

This approach also runs counter to the most basic idea of liberalism, in which people are broadly allowed to do what they want, unless there’s a rule against it. This is limited only when our right to free action interferes with someone else’s rights. The precautionary principle reverses this, banning people from doing what they want, unless it is specifically allowed.

The precautionary principle makes sense when people are talking about some issues, like the environment or public health. It’s easier to avoid the problems of air pollution or dumping trash in the ocean than trying to clean up afterward. Similarly, giving children drinking water that’s contaminated with lead has effects that aren’t reversible. The children simply must deal with the health effects of their exposure for the rest of their lives.

But as much of a nuisance as dockless scooters might be, they aren’t the same as poisoned water.

Managing the effects

Of course, dockless scooters, autonomous cars and a whole host of new technologies do generate real harms. A Consumer Reports investigation in early 2019 found more than 1,500 injuries from electric scooters since the dockless companies were founded. That’s in addition to the more common nuisance of having to step over scooters carelessly left in the middle of the sidewalk – and the difficulties people using wheelchairs, crutches, strollers or walkers may have in getting around them.

Those harms are not nothing, and can help motivate arguments for banning scooters. After all, they can’t hurt anyone if they’re not allowed. What’s missing from those figures, however, is how many of those people riding scooters would have gotten into a car instead. Cars are far more dangerous and far worse for the environment.

Yet the precautionary principle isn’t right for cars, either. As the number of autonomous cars on the road climbs, they’ll be involved in an increasing number of crashes, which will no doubt get lots of media attention.

It is worth keeping in mind that autonomous cars will have been a wild technology success even if they are in millions of crashes every year, so long as they improve on the 6.5 million crashes and 1.9 million people who were seriously injured in a car crash in 2017.

A look at the precautionary principle in environmental regulation.

Disruption brings benefits too

It may also be helpful to remember that dockless scooters and ridesharing apps and any other technology that displaces existing methods can really only become a nuisance if a lot of people use them – that is, if many people find them valuable. Injuries from scooters, and the number of scooters left lying around, have increased because the number of people using them has skyrocketed. Those 1,500 reported injuries are from 38.5 million rides.

This is not, of course, to say that these technologies and the firms that produce them should go unregulated. Indeed, a number of these firms have behaved quite poorly, and have legitimately created some harms, which should be regulated.

But instead of preemptively banning things, I suggest continuing to rely on the standard approach in the liberal tradition: See what kinds of harms arise, handle the early cases via the court system, and then consider whether a pattern of harms emerges that would be better handled upfront by a new or revised regulation. The Consumer Product Safety Commission, which looks out for dangerous consumer goods and holds manufacturers to account, is an example of this.

Indeed, laws and regulations already cover littering, abandoned vehicles, negligence and assault. New technologies may just introduce new ways of generating the same old harms, ones that are already reasonably well regulated. Genuinely new situations can of course arise: San Francisco’s ban on municipal use of facial recognition technologies may well be sensible, as people quite reasonably can democratically decide that the state shouldn’t be able to track their every move. People might well decide that companies shouldn’t be able to either.

Silicon Valley’s CEOs aren’t always sympathetic characters. And “disruption” really can be disruptive. But liberalism is about innovation and experimentation and finding new solutions to humanity’s problems. Banning new technologies – even ones as trivial as dockless scooters – embodies a conservatism that denies that premise. A lot of new ideas aren’t great. A handful are really useful. It’s hard to tell which is which until we try them out a bit.The Conversation

 

Ryan Muldoon, Associate Professor of Philosophy, University at Buffalo, The State University of New York

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Total
0
Shares
Share
Tweet
Share
Share
Related Topics
  • Innovation
  • Liberalism
  • Regulation
majulah

Previous Article
  • Science

Black Holes Are Simpler Than Forests And Science Has Its Limits

  • August 23, 2019
View Post
Next Article
  • Lah!
  • Technology

GeoWorks Presents Asia’s First Geospatial-Focused Week In Singapore

  • August 23, 2019
View Post
You May Also Like
oracle-ibm
View Post
  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Technology

IBM and Oracle Expand Partnership to Advance Agentic AI and Hybrid Cloud

  • Dean Marc
  • May 6, 2025
View Post
  • Software
  • Technology

Canonical Releases Ubuntu 25.04 Plucky Puffin

  • Dean Marc
  • April 17, 2025
View Post
  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Technology

Tokyo Electron and IBM Renew Collaboration for Advanced Semiconductor Technology

  • Dean Marc
  • April 2, 2025
View Post
  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Technology

IBM contributes key open-source projects to Linux Foundation to advance AI community participation

  • dotlah.com
  • March 22, 2025
View Post
  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Technology

Mitsubishi Motors Canada Launches AI-Powered “Intelligent Companion” to Transform the 2025 Outlander Buying Experience

  • Dean Marc
  • March 10, 2025
View Post
  • Technology

New Meta for Education Offering is Now Generally Available

  • Dean Marc
  • February 26, 2025
View Post
  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Technology

Deep dive into AI with Google Cloud’s global generative AI roadshow

  • dotlah.com
  • February 18, 2025
View Post
  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Technology

How the UK’s plans for AI could derail net zero – the numbers explained

  • dotlah.com
  • February 9, 2025


Trending
  • 1
    • Cities
    • Lah!
    Changi Airport In focus As East Coast GRC Grassroots Organisations And Advisors Acknowledge Aviation Frontliners
    • August 31, 2021
  • 2
    • Cities
    DBS And STB Forge Three-year Partnership To Stimulate Tourism Demand And Digitalise Local Businesses To Ensure Future-readiness
    • October 14, 2020
  • 3
    • Technology
    DBS Launches Industry-first Solution To Transform B2B Payments And Collections Landscape In Singapore
    • January 22, 2020
  • 4
    • Lah!
    PUB Appoints Sembcorp To Build Singapore’s Largest Floating Solar Farm On Tengeh Reservoir
    • February 11, 2020
  • 5
    • Cities
    How To Use Your City To Manage Your Finances
    • February 2, 2020
  • workplace-office-employees-pexels-photo-3182773 6
    • Business
    • People
    7 Ways To Decrease Your Employee Turnover Rate
    • June 21, 2021
  • video call remote work videoconferencing covid19 7
    • Features
    • People
    Tips and Resources from BetterHelp to Take Care of Your Mental Health During Shelter in Place
    • October 10, 2020
  • plant sprout 8
    • Cities
    The Rise And Significance Of Urban Agriculture
    • November 10, 2020
  • 9
    • Cities
    • Lah!
    CapitaLand Sustainability X Challenge Unveils Greentech Startup Finalists To Pilot Their Innovations At CapitaLand Properties
    • May 24, 2021
  • 10
    • People
    • World Events
    Coronavirus: The Latest Disease To Fuel Mistrust, Fear And Racism
    • February 13, 2020
  • 11
    • Lah!
    Virtual Support And Activities To Help More Seniors During Circuit Breaker
    • May 6, 2020
  • 12
    • Technology
    Singapore To Offer The World’s Fastest Patent Application To Grant
    • April 28, 2020
Trending
  • 1
    Trump’s global trade plans are in disarray, after a US court ruling on ‘Liberation Day’ tariffs
    • May 29, 2025
  • 2
    315,000 Singaporeans have used new career and skills planning tool by SkillsFuture Singapore
    • May 23, 2025
  • college-of-cardinals-2025 3
    The Definitive Who’s Who of the 2025 Papal Conclave
    • May 8, 2025
  • conclave-poster-black-smoke 4
    The World Is Revalidating Itself
    • May 7, 2025
  • oracle-ibm 5
    IBM and Oracle Expand Partnership to Advance Agentic AI and Hybrid Cloud
    • May 6, 2025
  • 6
    Conclave: How A New Pope Is Chosen
    • April 25, 2025
  • 7
    Canonical Releases Ubuntu 25.04 Plucky Puffin
    • April 17, 2025
  • 8
    Mathematicians uncover the logic behind how people walk in crowds
    • April 3, 2025
  • 9
    Tokyo Electron and IBM Renew Collaboration for Advanced Semiconductor Technology
    • April 2, 2025
  • 10
    Tariffs, Trump, and Other Things That Start With T – They’re Not The Problem, It’s How We Use Them
    • March 25, 2025
Social Links
dotlah! dotlah!
  • Cities
  • Technology
  • Business
  • Politics
  • Society
  • Science
  • About
Connecting Dots Across Asia's Tech and Urban Landscape

Input your search keywords and press Enter.