7 - Shifting How We Think

Summary

Can law keep up with runaway technology? In an era of runaway corporate surveillance, artificial intelligence, deep fakes, election hacking, social media disinformation, do-it-yourself biology, genetic modification, automation, and three-dimensional printed medical implants, law has seemed to take a back seat to rampant technological change. To listen to Silicon Valley barons, there is nothing any of us can do about it.CAN LAW KEEP UP? calls their bluff. The book provides a fresh look at law, at what it actually is, how it works, and how we can create the kind of laws that help humans survive and thrive in the face of technological change. It shows that law can keep up with technology because law is a kind of technology – social technology built by humans out of cooperative fictions like firms, nations, or money. To survive the challenges of the future, we need a new kind of law, and a new way of understanding how humans use language to cooperate, to build an ever-growing and ever-changing system of understandings about how we can secure the benefits of changing technology to all.