Abstract
Technology regulation is one of the most important public policy issues facing society and governments at the present time, and further clarity could improve decision making in this complex and challenging area. Since the rise of the internet in the late 1990s, a number of approaches to technology regulation have been proposed, prompted by the associated changes in society, business and law that this development brought with it. However, over the past decade, the impact of technology has been profound and the associated issues for government have extremely challenging, ranging across cyber security, artificial intelligence, and many other areas. To that end, this article introduces a Theory of Institutional Technology Actors and Norms (TITAN), a normatively informed and institutionally-based account of technology regulation. It focuses on the moral and legal (including regulatory) rights and responsibilities of the relevant actors and seeks to inform the development of regulation that is both fit for purpose, rights compliant and fair for all concerned. The account incorporates the perspectives of four key categories of groups in society: producers of technology, users of technology, government regulators, and normative policy shapers.
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Notes
A non-rival good is one that can be consumed or used by multiple persons; a non-excludable good is one that it is costly or impossible to exclude others from its consumption or other use.
As mentioned above, many goods that might be thought to be collective goods, in some sense, are not produced, e.g. the atmosphere. Moreover, a good can be a collective god in our sense without being non-rival or non-excludable, i.e. without being public goods in the economist’s sense since collective goods in our sense can be aggregate of goods such as, for instance, the supply of housing in a city.
Here there is simplification for the sake of clarity. For what is said here is not strictly correct, at least in the case of many actions performed by members of organizations. Rather, typically some threshold set of actions is necessary to achieve the end; moreover, the boundaries of this set are vague.
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Curmudgeon Corner is a short opinionated column on trends in technology, arts, science and society, commenting on issues of concern to the research community and wider society. Whilst the drive for super-human intelligence promotes potential benefits to wider society, it also raises deep concerns of existential risk, thereby highlighting the need for an ongoing conversation between technology and society. At the core of Curmudgeon concern is the question: What is it to be human in the age of the AI machine? -Editor.
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Smith, M., Miller, S. Technology, institutions and regulation: towards a normative theory. AI & Soc (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-023-01803-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-023-01803-0