Greetings, Future Tensers,
If you’ve been following along with this month’s Futurography course, you’ll probably agree that self-driving cars are well on their way. The trouble, as Kevin C. Desouza shows in a recent article, is that they aren’t going to show up all at once, which means we’ll need regulations and protocols for the time period in which operator-controlled vehicles share the road with fully autonomous ones. We may, for example, have to develop new licensing standards for drivers, but we’ll also have to rethink much of the received wisdom about urban planning and street design. As Desouza suggests, working through such challenges means acknowledging that we’re now living in an “era of human-machine relations.”
Accepting that truth doesn’t always come easily, as the vagaries of many recent attempts to regulate technological show. The Federal Election Commission, for example, has struggled to figure out how it should best regulate paid political speech online. Similarly, Eric Null writes that the Federal Communications Commission has yet to successfully impose strictures that would keep internet service providers from abusing their customers’ data. And it took years of pressure to get the Federal Aviation Administration to issue rules for commercial drone pilots, a decision that finally went through this week.
It’s tempting to blame all these difficulties on governmental incompetence or partisan gridlock, but even in the best circumstances hard to make clear, broadly beneficial decisions about such issues. That’s clearly not going to change as we cede more control of our lives to automated systems.
Here are some of the other stories that we read while contemplating jobs on Mars:
- Cybernetics: While prosthetics are getting more and more advanced, neuroscientist Patrick McGurrin argues that it’s important to keep more traditional functionality in mind as well.
- Photoshop: ModCloth has thrown its support behind an anti-Photoshopping bill, but who would the legislation really benefit?
- Environmentalism: Six Flags is cutting down a whole forest at a New Jersey park to put up some solar panels. Is that really environmentalist?
- Intellectual property: Weak IP protections may actually help countries develop. Are we holding other nations back when we try to impose our own standards on them?
Jacob Brogan
for Future Tense
