Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

Just because something could go wrong doesn’t mean it will. Perhaps we should let well-meaning try it.

Look what is possible with the new AI, robots, machines, chemicals, etc. Yes, but, I have found a way to turn the good possibilities into bad possibilities. I have devised a test that the new whatever-it-is will fail. See? Harmful.

Let’s form a group of half-a-dozen people to monitor this. In a few years we have grown from four to four hundred and our budget has boomed some multiple of a thousand percent. We are succeeding and need to bust out of the basement of some agency into our own four-letter government agency. Then it’s just a few years until we are a three-letter agency. We are regulating the world!

Okay, perhaps a bit farfetched, but not by much. I have seen it happen. There is risk (potential problems) and there is reward (potential good). Perhaps we are a bit too pessimistic and see more problems than good. We need to regulate to prevent the potential problems.

Enough politics. We don’t have to be inside government agencies to regulate. We can do this in business and not-for-profits as well. Kids must wear expensive gear to protect themselves while playing soccer. Those five-year-olds can play pretty rough, you know. Okay, that was farfetched, but not as far as a “reasonable” person might go.

Let’s allow the kids to play and wear t-shirts with Gumby on them (yes, there are elementary schools that ban cartoon characters at school). Let’s allow someone to try delivering medicine to the infirm via an autonomous ice chest with wheels. Yeah but someone could…yeah, and some well-meaning person could do the opposite. How about giving the well-meaning persons among us a chance? We can do better.