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. Dedication Contents Acknowledgements Part I: Keeping Up: Law as Social Technology 1 Can Law Keep Up? 2 Rates of Change 3 Technology Law Part II: Running on Words: Law as Cooperative Fiction 4 Language, the Human Superpower 5 What Went Wrong with Science? 6 Law’s Fruitful Fictions 7 Shifting How We Think Part III: Law and the Language We Need 8 Why We Fail 9 Jurisgenesis 10 TL;DR Index