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A recurring policy trope in technology policy discourse is calling for bans on emergent capabilities on the grounds that new technologies, by lowing skill floors, allow ordinary people to break unwritten on which the social order depends. From iron swords in the late bronze age to generative AI, elites presented with new technology say "we must ban
$NEW_THINGto preserve the social order!". When this agitation succeeds, it leads to technological stasis, and technological stasis reduces the area under the curve of human welfare over time.Smart policymakers should deal with these negative "skill externalities" of new technology by writing down these previously unwritten rules and enforcing them directly, not by attempting to limit the new technology itself.
For example, we dealt with the ability for the general public to operate heavy machinery at 55MPH by creating regulatory and liability systems for automobiles, not by banning automobile disruption of railroads.
If "AI safety" advocates had applied their reactionary policies to automobiles, cars would have been allowed to go no faster than a horse and, in the name of "ethics", been barred from driving trips already serviced by trains.
What was the regulation on iron swords? As I understand it, they propagated out quite rapidly because the military edge, no pun intended, was too great to ignore.
Automobiles are a terrible example. First, there were obvious analogues to the regulatory regime we’d eventually use. It still took decades to notice the skulls and make a fuss. I’m sure smart policymakers complained that wailing mothers were just “reactionaries.” I’m sure they liked their scare quotes, too.
Second, automobiles were more of a material issue than a skill issue. Elites weren’t concerned about losing their monopoly on highway speeds. They were afraid of getting hit by fucking cars.
Compare gun regulation. The buzzkills aren’t a warrior class, complaining that butchering civilians used to take skill. No, they don’t want anyone committing a massacre, and decided not to let any moron have his own machine gun. The ban was born of an overwhelming sentiment that potential for abuse outweighed benefits.
There is a smooth continuum between laissez faire and bans; direct enforcement of unwritten rules is somewhere in the middle. The cries to ban generative AI now surely involve some class interest—all that dark money in furry art has to go somewhere! They also represent a sentiment, a vibe, that the promise of endless art or smut isn’t actually worth all that much. That maybe, just maybe, the technology is worth more to scammers than to reasonable people.
So we end up with knee-jerk reactions. Negotiating positions from which we try to work out just which unwritten rules need to make it to the page. How else are we supposed to figure it out?
It was not uncommon for swords to be banned in urban areas or when walking around in public. Sometimes broader attempts were made: the Qin dynasty (ever the innovator in methods of social control) mass confiscated weapons more generally and only allowed agents of the state to own arms. That was comparatively rare, even in China: if you have hordes of barbarians always testing the reach and authority of your state, you need peasants to be able to defend themselves.
I’m not seeing any suggestion that those bans arose from technological instability. Link?
Arguably the Japanese policy mentioned in @Ioper’s link, where relics and art pieces are allowed, but mall ninja shit is banned…except that comes at it from the complete other direction. We disarmed Japan at gunpoint, and they kept to it after we left, but added an exception for cool artifacts.
Driving down the cost of something that used to be expensive to near-zero is itself a destabilizing force- you make iron working cheap, you make swords cheap, and the distribution of swords is the definition of "balance of power". It's why the usual suspects are also terrified of 3D printers (because you could create scary guns with them) and drones (see Ukraine), though they seem to be more distracted by the fact that blasphemous imagery is now cheap as free at the moment.
Which doesn't appear to have happened with swords.
The timing is all off. Western Europe didn't have the state capacity to ban La Tene weapons, and I haven't seen evidence they tried. Qin China may have done so, but they existed right as iron supplanted bronze; hardly a too-cheap-to-meter situation. Then the Japanese sword hunts are centuries after their metallurgy developed.
Those are all bad examples for someone trying to argue that elites are Luddites.
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Arms control is quite common and not inherently or even generally a response to new technology.
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"Sword hunts" was a fairly common occurrence in Japan as well.
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I agree that this is ridiculous, but I'm also not sure how I'll make a living when machines can do everything I can cheaper, better, and more reliably.
By owning the machines, evidently.
I'm sure some TekLord will allow you to enter his service in the model training mines. After all, can't trust the machines with important things like "click the squares that contain an enemy combatant".
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This comes very close to what was actually done in the UK. Common sense eventually prevailed, (edit:) but it set back automobile development in the UK by probably half a century.
Wow:
It’s a tragedy that the closest we have to “road locomotives” are Australia’s road trains.
That's what they called steam cars and steam tractors when they were just invented, which makes sense given that rail locomotives were first.
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Oh don’t worry they’re working hard on that. Automakers are already proposing Saudi Arabia style GPS systems to auto-ticket anyone for driving above the speed limit. And lawmakers are discussing mandatory interlock breathalyzers for all drivers.
I have often wondered if we will eventually reach a state where you can only navigate to destinations you can enter into your car's navigation computer; so that if you wanted to go off road or to somewhere you aren't authorized to go, you simply could not do it with the car.
That would be a huge problem for people with long driveways.
The sorts of people who would implement this are likely new urbanists who will also try to force you into a tiny apartment in a high-rise in a blighted urban core. Driving your car to your single family home with a long driveway would be strongly discouraged.
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I want to thank you for writing this, sincerely.
I had never considered that very logical end state.
And it makes my blood fucking boil.
This is how they actually take the wilderness away from us. Not through arbitrary laws that wouldn't survive challenges (and that people would willfully violate anyway) but by making it impossible to do on machine/electrical assisted physical level. They'll double down by making it illegal to own an "analog" machine that you can still control on your own (gas or diesel engine without any electronics). Everything will have GPS to the point that a lack of GPS will look like a "hole in the ocean" on a highway or other road and they'll send the police drones to investigate.
This is how they take it all away.
Not only are "they" not interested in taking the wilderness away from you, "they" make billions of dollars a year thanks to you visiting the wilderness. This post is just doomporn.
I don’t think that true. They want you to visit The Wilderness(tm) not go off wherever you want. I don’t think they’d prevent you from leaving the city entirely, but you’ll be directed towards nearby designated parks and nature preserves. And I think the bigger concern for me is that a car that’s entirely electric and hooked up to GPS alongside electronic currency sets up a situation easily controlled by a social credit score. Maybe your electric usage was too high and your car refuses to go anywhere but work and home.
Unfortunately unless you live in one of a small number of countries with "right to roam" you already can't go wherever you want.
I'm an American. BLM land is my place to roam where I want.
As an American, you should know that not all land is BLM land.
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If the managerial state was interested only in doing things that benefit it rather than things that give it the appearance of control it would not be the managerial state.
If you don't think they could mandate something this stupid you need to spend more time reading random EU guidelines for whatever industry you work in.
Administrative pettiness has no bottom. Believe me.
It's amusing to read this, then flick down to the discussion about how the handmaid's tale doomposting is obviously totally ridiculous. "They want to take away the wilderness from us" is the handmaid's tale for dudes.
Do you guys even have any wilderness left in Europe besides the alps? I kind of thought it was all farms and pastures.
There are other mountains in Europe, forests of Scandinavia and Russia, some deserts in Spain. But you're broadly right, Western/Central Europe is like the US east of the Mississippi.
East of the Mississippi still has a tremendous amount of wild land, I don’t think there’s really any analogy there.
I’m not sure anywhere in the USA is analogous to western & Central Europe where the type of intensive cultivation that completely blankets the land has been going on for nigh near a millennia.
We have had such an abundance of land since our inception that the type of clear cutting and terraforming that leads to the kind of landscape of endless cultivated or formerly cultivated land you see from Spain to Czechia was simply not needed or economically viable.
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Laugh it up, while you still can.
Is it really extrapolating much to assume that the system in your car that's mandated by the State to know and record your position, speed and have the ability to turn off the engine could also prevent you from doing other things that are not in the interest of the State that aren't specifically mandated by the bill? Are slopes ever slippery?
I'd attempt to fix the analogy with HT to make it more accurate, but that book's setting never really made any practical sense. Patriarchal theocracy already exists and it doesn't really look like that bourgeois rape fantasy. It's just Islam. Women are right to be afraid of its resurgence in the west, but the way the story frames it misses too much about the reasons that make that sort of society arise to be of any use except as agitprop.
Would be tyrants of both theocratic and modernist flavors do exist.
Meanwhile, on reddit, a conversation like this is happening:
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Yep. I think it'll also eventually be illegal to raise a kid without allowing your parenting to be scrutinized in detail. I think the main reason it isn't today is because it'd be too expensive, not because it'd be politically untenable.
It's already illegal; more a question of degrees now.
Yes, I agree.
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