Comment by carls | Hacker News Reader

Comment by carls | Hacker News Reader

It seems to me that there's a natural tension in emerging fields of science and engineering between establishing clear guidelines and regulations early on to minimize harms, or instead allowing practitioners to experiment, tinker, build and create outcomes that may be potentially harmful.

What are some frameworks for how to think about navigating this tension in emerging scientific or engineering fields?

Some ones I'm mulling over:

1. Rate of innovation: In rapidly evolving fields, imposing strict regulations too early can hinder innovation and progress. In such cases, it might be better to minimize restrictions early on to allow practitioners to explore new ideas. Then, as the field matures, regulations and standards can be gradually introduced.

2. Adaptive regulation: Implement a flexible regulatory framework that can be updated as new information becomes available.

3. Self-regulation: In some cases, maybe we should expect and encourage the industry to use self-regulation via developing guidelines and codes of conduct. This may be one way to try and strike a balance between responsible innovation while minimizing bureaucratic obstacles.

What do others think?

I think Nassim Taleb does a good job of identifying the core issue, which is “skin in the game”. A key problem with regulation is that it diffuses responsibility, in the sense that an engineer adhering to some regulatory scheme is partially absolved of personal responsibility for the outcome as long as they check the regulatory boxes. This point is raised by Brunel as well.

In other words, the harm of regulation is not that it trades progress for safety, but that it stifles both. See also Frederic Bastiat, The Seen and the Unseen.

The modern counterargument might be that engineered systems have become so dense and complex, and in some cases capable of catastrophic consequences for failure, that we simply can’t afford to let practitioners figure it out on their own.

I’d nominate degree of irreversability and timescale for damage to become apparent as drivers for differences on how fields need to be regulated

I think if I want to write some software, and I have the knowledge and compute power to do what I want, then I really don't care whether you or some authoritarian committee tells me I'm allowed to run my software. I'm going to do it anyway.

Now think of synthesizing and distributing novel chemical compounds, or using novel medical devices.

Or performing gain-of-function research on pathogens.

What kind of chemical compounds? Drugs? Fine. You can only hurt yourself with those. Same goes for medical devices. Explosives? Now that's a different matter.

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