The Abundance Institute on their website states that they are “a mission-driven nonprofit focused on creating space for emerging technologies to grow, thrive, and have a chance to reach their full potential.” The institute is focused on techno-optimistic approaches and combatting techno-pessimism and technophobia. A current focus seems to be on assuring that AI and machine learning are not over-regulated. Oddly, an article on the site lists Dr. Norbert Weiner, an early AI pioneer and developer of Cybernetics, cites Weiner himself as an early detractor. Weiner gave a speech in 1959 to the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In early 1960 it would be adapted and published as a paper titled ‘Some Moral and Technical Consequences of Automation." The paper expressed concern that the rapid pace of machine development could result in machines eventually being able to outwit humans and perhaps somehow develop consciousness and will. Weiner cited Samuel Butler from 1863. Now 65 years later, similar concerns are being expressed about improving AI capabilities. And yet, there is no evidence that machines are any closer to consciousness or will than they were in 1863.
Adam Thierer,
author of the book Permissionless Innovation: The Continuing Case for
Comprehensive Technological Freedom argued in an article opposing the
Precautionary Principle that:
“Risk analysts and legal scholars have also criticized
the precautionary principle because they argue it “lacks a firm foundation” and
is “literally incoherent.” They argue the principle is in essence, a
non-principle because it fails to specify a clear standard by which to judge
which risks are most serious and worthy of preemptive control.”
He argues further that the Precautionary Principle shows a
clear preference for stasis, or the status quo, and a preference to avoid non-stasis or dynamism. A change to the status quo. Risks are often not well known. Often,
it is trial-and-error that reveals unforeseen risks or alternatively reveals
that risks are not as bad as originally perceived. Thierer argues that
trial-and-error progress is a net beneficial feature of innovation. Trials and
experiments give us more insight into risk and how to reduce it. Do we have an
innate preference for stasis? He and many others believe we do. This is a kind
of metabolic issue in that it is simply easier and less energy-consuming to
choose stasis over change. Change takes more work. In psychology and behavioral
economics, this is known as the endowment effect, also known as divestiture
aversion. This is when someone prefers things to
stay the same rather than change due to a fear of some kind of loss. This
tendency of ours to favor keeping what we have may be evolutionary. In cost-benefit analysis this idea compares willingness
to pay (WTP) with willingness to accept (WTA). The question of what someone is
willing to pay and/or willing to accept to arrive at a certain outcome is
explored as it is realized in a sense that change has an energy cost, but stasis
is free.
Virginia Postrel argued
in favor of dynamism in her 1998 book, The Future and Its Enemies. She viewed
dynamism as a “decentralized evolutionary process.” She mentioned two
types of people who prefer stasis: reactionaries who value stasis and
technocrats who value control. Reactionaries tend to be more politically conservative
while technocrats prefer central planning and tend to be more politically liberal
and tend to favor the precautionary principle. Both are motivated by fear of
the unknown. Thus, she argues, both conservatives and liberals can prefer stasis.
She suggests that technocrats stifle innovation. Thierer mentions a 2004 book
by Robert D. Atkinson, The Past and Future of the American Economy, where he
argues that those who prefer dynamism are modernizers and those who prefer
stasis are preservationists. Preservationists are more risk-averse, or more
loss-averse. Change always carries some risks.
Thierer argues
that permissionless innovation powered the information revolution. He also
argues how over-focusing on worst-case scenarios can and does stifle
innovation. While the argument is usually depicted as regulation vs.
deregulation, a better depiction would be the desire to work toward a goal that
seeks smart sensible regulation without hampering innovation. Thierer argues
well that pre-emptive control is the wrong approach and that permissionless
innovation should be the default policy rather than precaution.
Debates about
energy, genetic engineering, nanotechnology, AI/machine learning, and other new
and controversial technologies are rife with detractors preaching doom. Many
other technological revolutions have come and gone without doom manifesting. Bioethics
and technological ethics advocates have usually been opposed to new
technologies, seeking strong regulations. While situations may arise where we
have to make rules for how these technologies are being abused or used for
nefarious purposes, it is clear we can’t ban them or weaken them to the point
where innovation is stifled. Doomsayers are very rarely vindicated. Most of the
time they are just plain wrong. We can simply address individual issues as they
arise. For the last several years there has been a lot of hubbub about ‘deep
fakes’ and fake stories that go viral, mostly in politics. Certainly,
individual instances should be addressed but thus far no major problems have
been caused. There are issues with election interference from foreign
adversaries such as China, Iran, and especially Russia has teams of hackers at
the ready to sow chaos in free and democratic countries. We simply need to drastically
minimize their influence.
Another advocate
for unbridled innovation is Matt Ridley. He argues in his December 2019 blog
essay, The EU’s Absurd Risk Aversion Stifles New Ideas, that the EU’s
dependence on the precautionary principle puts it at odds with much of the
world’s scientific standards as exemplified by the numerous disputes it has
with the World Trade Organization. At issue are tariffs imposed on foreign
grains and produce, often Asian, due to things like pesticide residues. France
and Germany are phasing out two of the least toxic pesticides, neonicotinoids
and glyphosate, which most scientists consider mild. Ridley notes that
glyphosate used with minimal tillage replaces plowing and offers significant
economic and environmental benefits that far outweigh the risks of pesticides. Minimum tillage has quite a few environmental benefits over
plowing: retention of soil structure, moisture, and microbes, less soil
erosion, improved carbon storage, and less greenhouse gas emissions. Glyphosate
is deemed generally safe by nearly all scientific bodies but is considered
probably carcinogenic by only one body in France, one that is often in close
agreement with California Proposition 65 cancer warnings which do not consider
exposure levels so things like coffee, some fruits, and alcohol must be labeled
carcinogenic. Ridley says the result of these overblown regs is more plowing
and worse pesticides like copper sulfate. The older and more imprecise
technology of gamma-ray bombardment of seeds (mutagenesis) to cause crop
mutations is approved but in comparison, precision technologies like genetic
engineering and CRISPR are very highly regulated and rarely approved. There is
no logical reason mutagenesis should be less dangerous than transgenic methods,
but they are regulated far differently. The final result is net environmental
degradation, he says. He also suggests that the EU is using the regs as a
pretext to limit certain food imports and favor domestic sources. For energy issues
especially, I have argued and pointed out many problems with bans, mandates,
and overregulation and given many examples where they have had the opposite to
the intended effect, often more emissions and more pollution, with the intended
effect being less.
I read Matt
Ridley’s 2020 book: How Innovation Works: And Why It Flourishes in Freedom. It
was a good book that championed the importance of innovation. Innovation is how
technology improves lives. It should be encouraged rather than suppressed by
the mere possibility of downsides. Well-placed research and development dollars
have yielded great dividends. R&D investment must consider relative utility
vs. potential harm. Harm mitigation is always ongoing. Ridley writes in the
book that a great truth about innovation is that people often underestimate its
long-term impact. He writes in an article promoting the book:
“… the societies that do the most innovating are the
ones with the most freedom for people to exchange ideas. It was freedom, not
state direction, that caused both Victorian Britain and modern California to be
hotbeds of innovation. It was state dirigisme that prevented Stalin’s Russia,
Mao’s China, Mugabe’s Zimbabwe and to a lesser extent Jean-Claude Juncker’s
European Union from being similar hotbeds. Necessity is not the mother of
invention. Ambition is.”
“… the state rarely deserves the credit for sparking
innovation, in public health and elsewhere: “Far more often inventions and
discoveries emerge by serendipity and the exchange of ideas, and are pushed,
pulled, moulded, transformed and brought to life by people acting as
individuals, firms, markets and yes, sometimes public servants. Trying to
pretend that government is the main actor in this process, let alone one with
directed intentionality, is an essentially creationist approach to an
essentially evolutionary phenomenon”
I think that the bottom line is that we need to develop
an ideological default that favors the potential benefits of innovation rather
than the potential harms. Looking at past technological adoption we can see
that most new technologies have led to far more benefits than harms and when we
discover harms, most often we can mitigate them. The track record of technophobia
is just very poor.
We see this in
politics too, old ideas and ways of running our societies, have been replaced
and improved upon. Often it is people who are xenophobic and nostalgic for
times when there was less intense political division who favor going back. But
we can’t really go back and if we really think about it those times were not really
great. Putin wants to go back to a time centuries ago when he thinks Russia was
great. Trump wants to go back to when the U.S. was still an emerging and developing
economy where manufacturing was king. Islamic extremists want to make people
live in hellish medieval-type societies with strict laws and punishments. There
are fewer restrictions in our societies now than in the past and I don’t think
most people do not want to go backwards into some imagined greatness of the past.
Looking at American politics especially we see that voters are often looking
for change. I guess the status quo gets boring and too predictable. Change and
hope for change seem to be antidotes to that. Perhaps that is why the new
Harris campaign is generating excitement since Trump is also an incumbent and
a much older one at that. Thus, we can see that American voters tend to favor
dynamism over stasis, something new over something old. The human quest for
novelty is important to acknowledge. It is new things that tend to generate
excitement, far more than nostalgia does.
References:
Who decides the future? Technocrats vs.
Innovators. Virginia Postrel. Abundance Institute. July 10, 2024. Who decides the future?
Technocrats vs. Innovators | Virginia Postrel (youtube.com)
Endowment effect. Wikipedia. Endowment effect -
Wikipedia
Thierer, Adam, 2014, 2016. Permissionless Innovation: The Continuing Case for Comprehensive Technological Freedom. Mercatus Center at George Mason University.
Thierer, Adam, Nov.
4, 2019. How Many Lives Are Lost Due to the Precautionary Principle? – by Adam
Thierer, in Human Progress. https://www.humanprogress.org/how-many-lives-are-lost-due-to-the-precautionary-principle/
Entzman, Liz, May
27, 2020. New research on ‘endowment effect’ points to evolutionary roots of
cognitive biases. Vanderbilt University. https://news.vanderbilt.edu/2020/05/27/new-research-on-endowment-effect-points-to-evolutionary-roots-of-cognitive-biases/
The Original AI Doomer: Dr. Norbert Wiener. Louis
Anslow. Pessimists Archive. June 3, 2023. The
Original AI Doomer: Dr. Norbert Wiener (pessimistsarchive.org)
Ridley, Matt, Dec.
9, 2019. The EU’s Absurd Risk Aversion Stifles New Ideas. Blog. http://www.rationaloptimist.com/blog/eu-risk-aversion/
Matt Ridley: How Innovation Works. Human Progress.
May 20, 2020. Matt
Ridley: How Innovation Works - Human Progress
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