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April 9, 2004 — As I write this on a laptop computer while on a plane at 30,000 feet, I’m thinking about my first “portable” Smith-Corona and the IBM memory typewriter we had at the Virginia Journal of International Law office — which held a whole page of text in memory! Then I begin to wonder how long it will be before the brain activity creating these words can be transcribed without a keyboard or a laptop as intermediaries.
Wouldn’t it be cool if the neurons firing in my brain could be captured electronically? But then … what about the guy in the next seat? Will his laptop, cell phone or Blackberry be able to record my thoughts?
My father and grandfather were engineers, and if women had been allowed to take drafting classes at my high school, I probably would have been one, too. Personally, I love technology for the sake of technology. As a policy-maker, though, I focus on advances in technology because they can improve people’s lives.
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Our ability to use DNA has transformed our criminal justice system by making it more likely that the right person will be convicted. We can check the standing of a contractor’s license after the state agency closes at 5 p.m. You can e-mail me instantly if you hate this column. And that’s only the beginning!
California has been home to countless technological innovations, and nanotechnology is one of the most interesting. What role should government play in the creation and deployment of new technologies like nanotech? The immediate reaction many researchers would have is government shouldn’t have any role. Over and over, though, we’ve seen the need for a legal framework to address the social and ethical consequences of advances in technology.
The debate rages on about cloning. We still confront public safety issues stemming from the development of nuclear weapons. As the volume of spam in our e-mail boxes has risen from a trickle to a flood, many netizens have demanded that government “do something” about the problem. And you don’t have to be a card-carrying member of the ACLU to want some constraints on how government can use technology to watch what were private activities before the creation of affordable thermal imaging, cell phone cameras and remote listening devices.
Government plays a significant role in how technology is deployed, and most people believe it’s appropriate for government to set some rules to reflect the consensus of society about how certain technology applications should be limited.
Typically, government’s involvement has come at the back end of the deployment, often triggered by an unintended consequence or the specific use of a technology. I’ve come to believe we should address the social and ethical implications of emerging technologies in a systematic way much earlier — so government isn’t constantly running to catch up by passing laws, for example, dealing with identity theft and fraud on the Internet.
There’s no question we have to be thoughtful about well-intentioned efforts that stifle technological innovation. Let me offer a few examples of technology that would have benefited from such a process.
When the federal government’s “Internetting” project began to expand from a military communications network to what is now the Internet, there was an opportunity to spot some drawbacks in its open structure. If privacy and security features could have been built into the structure of the Internet at the outset, would the Internet be more secure today?
In 1990, oil companies were required to add oxygenates to gasoline to cut tailpipe emissions and improve air quality. Refiners turned to methyl tertiary-butyl ether (MTBE) to comply with the law, but no one looked at how MTBE interacted with water. MTBE is soluble in water, travels quickly through soil, contaminates drinking water, is tough to clean up and is a suspected carcinogen. The use of MTBE has shut down water supplies, contaminated drinking water wells and has led to hundreds of lawsuits across the country.
Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags are expected to replace bar codes as a tagging tool within the next decade, saving businesses millions by automating shipping and inventory. However, privacy advocates fear RFID will become as omnipresent as video surveillance, giving marketers another way to track people’s movements and shopping behaviors.
Aggravating those concerns is the potential that nanotechnology will allow businesses — and government — to embed nanoscale RFID sensors in just about anything without people’s knowledge or consent.
I’m constantly awed by advances in technology, but I’m also mindful that one person’s valuable e-mail is another person’s spam. We can and have learned from our mistakes, and we need to continue to do so.
We have a responsibility to think about the consequences of our innovations. Legislators need to spend the time it takes to understand the technology. Scientists, policy-makers and technology users need a process for getting together earlier in the development of new technologies, so issues can be identified before it’s expensive and disruptive to make changes.
We will undoubtedly miss some issues, because foresight is never perfect — but we can and should collaborate to make the possible co-exist with the socially responsible. I invite you to join the discussion about the best way to meet that challenge.