Runaway Technology: Can Law Keep Up?

Description

In an era of corporate surveillance, artificial intelligence, deep fakes, genetic modification, automation, and more, law often seems to take a back seat to rampant technological change. To listen to Silicon Valley barons, there's nothing any of us can do about it. In this riveting work, Joshua A. T. Fairfield calls their bluff. He provides a fresh look at law, at what it actually is, how it works, and how we can create the kind of laws that help humans thrive in the face of technological change. He shows that law can keep up with technology because law is a kind of technology - a social technology built by humans out of cooperative fictions like firms, nations, and money. However, to secure the benefits of changing technology for all of us, we need a new kind of law, one that reflects our evolving understanding of how humans use language to cooperate. Cover......Page 1 Half-title......Page 2 Title......Page 4 Copyright......Page 5 Dedication......Page 6 Contents......Page 8 Acknowledgements......Page 9 Part I: Keeping Up: Law as Social Technology......Page 10 1 Can Law Keep Up?......Page 12 2 Rates of Change......Page 27 3 Technology Law......Page 62 Part II: Running on Words: Law as Cooperative Fiction......Page 98 4 Language, the Human Superpower......Page 100 5 What Went Wrong with Science?......Page 124 6 Law’s Fruitful Fictions......Page 157 7 Shifting How We Think......Page 181 Part III: Law and the Language We Need......Page 222 8 Why We Fail......Page 224 9 Jurisgenesis......Page 257 10 TL;DR......Page 287 Index......Page 293