Europe is regulating itself into irrelevance in the digital space. Lead by good intentions to protect consumers safety and privacy as well as promoting fair play between companies, it created a playground nobody wants to play in. Motivated by the frustrating burden of regulation I went to explore what alternatives we could enjoy, and how we as a society have regulated incoming technologies.
A technology survives as long as it serves a solution in a better way than the problems it adds. Digitization has evolved from interesting to crucial in only a few decades. Artificial Intelligence shall experience an even faster adoption and challenges us to form opinions about things we didn’t grow up with and don’t always understand so well. That accompanies our move towards new regulation with panic, a rush for easy answers and inadvertence to complexities at hand.
Reflecting on the automobile technology and its adoption, we recognize that addressing the problems they bring carries responsibilities well beyond the automobile industry itself. We regulate safety standards, but can’t stop accidents. Criminals use cars too, but that is a social and law enforcement problem not a mechanical engineering one. We have speed limits, traffic norms, but we don’t build them into cars.
As a user and IT professional I’ll walk you through the intersection of technology, regulation and society.
Stephanstraße 41, 10559 Berlin
Software archeologist – Recovering Physicist – Dancer
As a scientist I studied the physics of the very small quantum world. As a computer hacker I distill code. Software is eating the world, and less code means less errors, less problems. Millions of lines of legacy code demand attention and have to be understood and simplified for future reliable operation.