The bloom is off Big Tech’s rose. The past few years have borne witness to the downside of social media – especially for conservatives – as they spawn a host of awful tactics from doxing to online bullying to de-platforming individuals who fail to adhere to the bumptious, ever-fluid ethical norms of Silicon Valley tech tycoons. We have lost our privacy, grown increasingly distracted and stood by almost clueless as toxic emotions and poisonous ideas corrupt our public discourse. Glenn Reynolds, writing in the Spectator USA, likens Twitter to a “virus of the mind.” He joins the growing number of critics who argue that it is time for American regulators to invoke antitrust laws and break up the big tech behemoths.
Keeping the AI Apocalypse at Bay
Writing in City Journal, Judge Glock examines legal efforts to control AI and dismisses the current fixation on suing for specific harms, such as bad advice. “The idea that we should treat Big Tech, including AI companies, like we treated Big Tobacco, is exactly the wrong idea,” he observes. A better approach is to assess product liability based on which parties can perform the task at the cheapest cost, as is the case with the regulation of medical equipment. This “has the benefit of putting the onus on companies themselves to game out dangerous scenarios and prevent them,” he advises. For more on AI, see this C2C article.
