Blog Post

AEIdeas

A relevant and forward-looking 2016 presidential campaign would have seen Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump talk a lot about technology and its impact on 21st century America. Ideally there would have been a vigorous debate about government’s proper role in a myriad of related issues such as innovation, privacy, the future of work, cyberwarfare, inequality, and antitrust.

I think ignoring technology on that level is unlikely to happen again. Certainly policymakers are becoming more aware of all these issues. For instance: While I still occasionally meet a member of Congress who doesn’t think there will be much public interest in self-driving cars and trucks, I sense that the majority opinion is that the technology will be extraordinarily important and disruptive.

Now this: Axios reports that Sen. Maria Cantwell, a Washington Democrat, is “working on a bill meant to prod the federal government to grapple with the potential impact of artificial intelligence on everything from workers to privacy. . . . The draft of the bill, obtained by Axios, would establish an advisory committee that would counsel the Secretary of Commerce. The committee’s powers appear to be limited, but it is a first step in establishing federal policy in an increasingly important sphere.”

What will be the bias of that “federal policy”? To what extent will government, informed by public opinion, seek to boost technological progress versus retarding it? Over on Twitter, Walter Isaacson points out this snippet from Malcom Gladwell on NBC yesterday morning. Gladwell:

I wonder if we aren’t at the beginning of an extended period backlash in this country … where in the face of overwhelming amounts of change in a very small time what people basically say is, “Let’s stop. Enough. Let’s process through this.”

Indeed, recall that one reason why Bill Gates suggested his recent “robot tax” idea was to “slow down the speed of that adoption somewhat to figure out, okay, what about the communities where this has a particularly big impact?”

And check out this Twitter exchange between tech journalist Greg Ferenstein and Todd Schulte, president of FWD.us, the techy policy advocacy group:

A tech moratorium? Silly, right? From Endgadget earlier this year:

New York’s Upstate Transportation Association and Independent Drivers Guild are both pressing for bans on autonomous vehicles in the state out of concern that they’ll ultimately cost thousands of transportation jobs. The IDG believes that it only needs to preserve existing laws to guarantee a ban, but the UTA is considerably more aggressive — it wants a 50-year ban on self-driving cars. Yes, there’s a real chance you wouldn’t even be alive to see the day when driverless rides hit New York roads.

Look, I would have never imagined how quickly anti-trade hysteria has taken hold in this country. In a slow-growth economy — where we need more tech progress, not less — it’s easy to imagine politicians demagoguing against Silicon Valley and automation.