RECENTLY, something so dystopian occurred that it seems worthy of a cyberpunk novel. A woman who was blind was given an implant that allowed her to see again – and then, a few years later, . Because the firm that invented the implant hit financial troubles and stopped supporting its products, there was no one to help. She still carries the dead implant in her eye, as surgery to remove it would be too risky.
How this happened is simple enough: tech companies sometimes stop supporting their products. Who is then responsible for the devices embedded in people’s bodies? No one.
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The question we should ask about someone being suddenly rendered blind again by a firm’s decisions isn’t “How did this happen?”, but “Why would any government allow this to happen?”. Some new technology can’t be predicted, but much of it can. Cutting-edge medical implants, and the high stakes that would follow for people’s bodily integrity, certainly weren’t unpredictable.
Here are a few more examples: we knew for years that machine learning might infringe on the copyright of artists by snatching up and blending anything available on the internet, but nobody framed out a way to compensate creators for the theft of their intellectual property. And despite the fact that social media companies have become de facto communications utilities, often serving as the only method for broadcasting atrocities occurring in places that are hard to reach for traditional journalism, they have been allowed to decay into the unstable personal fiefdoms of attention-seeking billionaires.
Foresight from law-makers could have prevented many of these issues. To avoid them in the future, legislative bodies must learn what we writers of speculative fiction already know: predicting the near-future for technology is relatively easy, but the real job is more complicated than that. We must, then, imagine the worlds that come as a result.
The focus of speculative fiction isn’t on science or tech itself. It is wider: it is on what effect a change will have on society. My novel The Mountain in the Sea examines what trying to communicate with a highly evolved octopus species on Earth might be like (spoiler: it is difficult), but also explores the impact of technological developments on real issues.
Governments should borrow from the speculative fiction playbook. “Parliaments of the future” – groups of technologists, social scientists, economists, legislators and perhaps even writers – should be formed to game out the effect of emerging technological developments and to prepare framework legislation ready to ensure better protection of human and consumer rights, as well as civic freedoms.
It isn’t that governments aren’t trying to predict the future – they are. It is that these predictions aren’t linked back to creating better legislation, lack transparency and are over-reliant on the false promises of quantitative data and artificial intelligence. The future can’t be “solved for”. It isn’t a mathematics problem. Predicting the impacts of change demands human creativity.
In an era of continuous technological change, it isn’t enough for states to cobble legislation together after it is too late to stop, or at least help alleviate, the negative impacts of the “next big thing”. We need to have legislation ready for the technology of 10 years from now.
You will be thankful for that when your neural implant stops functioning and you learn that a parliament of the future developed legislation ensuring your implant’s proprietary technology became open source following its parent company’s failure, and there are now a dozen ways to fix your cyborg brain.
Ray Nayler is author of the speculative fiction novel The Mountain in the Sea
