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Runaway Technology: Can Law Keep Up?
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.
306 pages, Hardcover
Published February 25, 2021
1 person is currently reading
55 people want to read
About the author
Joshua A.T. Fairfield
3 books4 followersJosh Fairfield is a legal scholar, author, and professor of law at Washington & Lee University in Virginia, where he also directs the university’s AI Legal Innovation Strategy.
He writes and teaches about the intersection of law, technology, and society — including how emerging technologies like artificial intelligence and blockchain are reshaping privacy, property, and power in the digital age.
Josh is the author of:
Runaway Technology: Can the Law Keep Up? Owned: Property, Privacy, and the New Digital SerfdomHis third book — currently in progress — explores how law can help preserve authenticity and human connection in an AI-driven world.
Josh is fascinated by how technology rewires our social systems — and convinced that the rule of law is one of the most powerful tools we have to guide innovation toward the public good.
He is a passionate advocate for the democratisation of knowledge, a dedicated teacher, a trusted expert witness, and a global consultant who has advised governments, universities, and organisations in the United States, New Zealand, and beyond.
More about Josh’s work and upcoming projects at: joshfairfield.com
Join the conversation: joshfairfield.bsky.social
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
December 2, 2020
Thank you to both NetGalley and Cambridge University Press for providing me an advance copy of Joshua A. T. Fairfield’s nonfiction work, Runaway Technology, in exchange for an honest review.
Oof…I do not envy anyone who is assigned to a class taught by this author. In fact, I may even empathize with them after completing this behemoth of a novel, which in reality, is actually a law school textbook (check the price if you don’t believe me).
There were so many brilliant nuggets of information peppered throughout the text. Unfortunately, most of them had nothing to do with laws or technology. The best way to describe this book is as a historical account of sociology, anthropology, scientific theory, and various random facts about the world, which in an extremely long-winded way, somehow eventually form the basis of his premise on how law advances technology.
In reality, many of the sections could have used a substantial amount of trimming. The content is so chaotic and widespread that the section headings barely serve as a guide. He could have written a well-researched book about laws and technology (I am absolutely positive that he is more than qualified to do so, judging by the endless stream of footnotes), but as the current copy stands, insightful tidbits get lost among unnecessary facts and redundant words or ideas.
For example, the term “eusocial” is used at least umpteen times in a single chapter. Why are we discussing zoology? You made your point about 17 analogies ago.
He also proposes too many vague plans of how to move forward. Readers could have benefitted from a concrete thesis rather than a general recap of hypotheticals or entire summaries of other authors’ completed works.
In culminating all of the facts that the author reproduces throughout the text, one and only one conclusion can be drawn: he must be insufferable at dinner parties.
For anyone thinking, who is this dim halfwit pissing all over this masterpiece? Newsflash: I completely understand how and why the author is attempting to build a bridge from A (i.e., law) to B (i.e., technology), but there is a much simpler and exponentially clearer way in which he could have done that; sans his obsession with the word and concept of “iteration.”
All in all, I’m not really sure whether to recommend reading Runaway Technology or not. On the one hand, it does equip the reader with an immense amount of trivia knowledge that could be applied to say, winning a round of Jeopardy!
On the other hand, if you had your heart set on reading a nonfiction novel that strictly focuses on the law and technological changes, then I will summarize it in two sentences for you to save you the trouble of slogging through tedious and largely irrelevant facts:
Law is a language that we use to understand how to better integrate new technology into our society. Thus, laws that apply to archaic forms of technology must be revised to incorporate a forward-looking view that anticipates the next advancement in technology along with any potential issues before it is released for general consumption.
Oof…I do not envy anyone who is assigned to a class taught by this author. In fact, I may even empathize with them after completing this behemoth of a novel, which in reality, is actually a law school textbook (check the price if you don’t believe me).
There were so many brilliant nuggets of information peppered throughout the text. Unfortunately, most of them had nothing to do with laws or technology. The best way to describe this book is as a historical account of sociology, anthropology, scientific theory, and various random facts about the world, which in an extremely long-winded way, somehow eventually form the basis of his premise on how law advances technology.
In reality, many of the sections could have used a substantial amount of trimming. The content is so chaotic and widespread that the section headings barely serve as a guide. He could have written a well-researched book about laws and technology (I am absolutely positive that he is more than qualified to do so, judging by the endless stream of footnotes), but as the current copy stands, insightful tidbits get lost among unnecessary facts and redundant words or ideas.
For example, the term “eusocial” is used at least umpteen times in a single chapter. Why are we discussing zoology? You made your point about 17 analogies ago.
He also proposes too many vague plans of how to move forward. Readers could have benefitted from a concrete thesis rather than a general recap of hypotheticals or entire summaries of other authors’ completed works.
In culminating all of the facts that the author reproduces throughout the text, one and only one conclusion can be drawn: he must be insufferable at dinner parties.
For anyone thinking, who is this dim halfwit pissing all over this masterpiece? Newsflash: I completely understand how and why the author is attempting to build a bridge from A (i.e., law) to B (i.e., technology), but there is a much simpler and exponentially clearer way in which he could have done that; sans his obsession with the word and concept of “iteration.”
All in all, I’m not really sure whether to recommend reading Runaway Technology or not. On the one hand, it does equip the reader with an immense amount of trivia knowledge that could be applied to say, winning a round of Jeopardy!
On the other hand, if you had your heart set on reading a nonfiction novel that strictly focuses on the law and technological changes, then I will summarize it in two sentences for you to save you the trouble of slogging through tedious and largely irrelevant facts:
Law is a language that we use to understand how to better integrate new technology into our society. Thus, laws that apply to archaic forms of technology must be revised to incorporate a forward-looking view that anticipates the next advancement in technology along with any potential issues before it is released for general consumption.
March 15, 2021
Thanks to Netgalley and Cambridge University Press for providing an advance copy in exchange for an honest review.
This is the type of book I simply adore: thought-provoking, multi-disciplinary and somewhat off the beaten track. Based on the title and subtitle, I had expected the book to constitute a warning about the unfair battle being waged between two vastly unequal opponents. In the one corner, Technology, which progresses at a speed resembling that of Moore's eponymous law, where advances are made weekly, daily maybe, where computing power is cheap and (privacy) regulation is lax. In the other corner, Legislation, which seems, to put it euphemistically, not entirely up to its task when it comes to legislating for technology. This was superbly and hilariously exemplified by the occasion of Mark Zuckerberg being called to testify before a Senate Committee in 2018 and basically needing to explain to septuagenarian legislators what internet is. But even on terrains where these legislators are not as clearly out of their depth, todays laws seem to be nothing but the solutions to issues from at least 10 years ago.
Bearing this is in mind, I was most happily surprised by Mr Fairfield's resolutely pitched defence of Law as a social technology, as an organic construct which humans have created in order to define the world they not only live in, but wish to live in. The author defends the "soft sciences "such as law and anthropology as interpretive approaches which can hold their own against the logic and falsifiability of "the hard sciences". Mr Fairfield takes us on a voyage back in time to the early development of human societies. This journey touches upon the philosophy of Wittgenstein, the economic mechanics of the new surveillance capitalism in which we find ourselves living today. It tackles the pitfalls of depending too much upon artificial intelligence, before coming to an end dissecting the inherent weaknesses of the political system, which has evolved from its initial outset of "one man, one vote" to "one dollar, one vote". So that's anthropology, philosophy, political science, economics and so much more all in just one book. Though by no means always a leisurely read, it is interspersed with witticisms and eureka moments. I like to think that a non-fiction book is an opportunity for an author to take full command of my attention for the duration of a book, and provide him or her with a chance to convince me of an opinion I didn't hold before. In this aspect, the author has definitely succeeded: I am convinced that Law is alive and kicking and well and truly up to the task of keeping up with Technology.
To finish this review with the author's own final words: Let's talk
#RunawayTechnology #NetGalley
This is the type of book I simply adore: thought-provoking, multi-disciplinary and somewhat off the beaten track. Based on the title and subtitle, I had expected the book to constitute a warning about the unfair battle being waged between two vastly unequal opponents. In the one corner, Technology, which progresses at a speed resembling that of Moore's eponymous law, where advances are made weekly, daily maybe, where computing power is cheap and (privacy) regulation is lax. In the other corner, Legislation, which seems, to put it euphemistically, not entirely up to its task when it comes to legislating for technology. This was superbly and hilariously exemplified by the occasion of Mark Zuckerberg being called to testify before a Senate Committee in 2018 and basically needing to explain to septuagenarian legislators what internet is. But even on terrains where these legislators are not as clearly out of their depth, todays laws seem to be nothing but the solutions to issues from at least 10 years ago.
Bearing this is in mind, I was most happily surprised by Mr Fairfield's resolutely pitched defence of Law as a social technology, as an organic construct which humans have created in order to define the world they not only live in, but wish to live in. The author defends the "soft sciences "such as law and anthropology as interpretive approaches which can hold their own against the logic and falsifiability of "the hard sciences". Mr Fairfield takes us on a voyage back in time to the early development of human societies. This journey touches upon the philosophy of Wittgenstein, the economic mechanics of the new surveillance capitalism in which we find ourselves living today. It tackles the pitfalls of depending too much upon artificial intelligence, before coming to an end dissecting the inherent weaknesses of the political system, which has evolved from its initial outset of "one man, one vote" to "one dollar, one vote". So that's anthropology, philosophy, political science, economics and so much more all in just one book. Though by no means always a leisurely read, it is interspersed with witticisms and eureka moments. I like to think that a non-fiction book is an opportunity for an author to take full command of my attention for the duration of a book, and provide him or her with a chance to convince me of an opinion I didn't hold before. In this aspect, the author has definitely succeeded: I am convinced that Law is alive and kicking and well and truly up to the task of keeping up with Technology.
To finish this review with the author's own final words: Let's talk
#RunawayTechnology #NetGalley
March 1, 2021
I hate doing it, but this book deserves only a star. I was provided it in the real world, as a potential review for a column. Since I don't make money off of that column, I don't write negative reviews there; but here it's necessary.
This is, seemingly, an exercise in "publish or perish". It purports to be about technology and law, but it really isn't. For a view of AI and law, read The Reasonable Robot: Artificial Intelligence and the Law, by Ryan Abbott, which I reviewed last year.
It starts off ok, but the first chapters are about it. Then, by page 76, he's whining that legislators can't legislate technology because academics and jurists are the only real lawyers. He then spends chapters talking about the history of language, not about either law or technology. Following that, he has a view of science that can only be described as "a little knowledge is a dangerous thing."
The capstone is the lack of of an understanding of AI shown by the foolish concept of viewing the "Terminator" and "AI will have other goals than humans" as the only threats of AI. Nope, the largest is "governments and business will use AI to implement their goals, which are inimical to most humans."
I wanted to give this two stars, but I couldn't even rationalize a way to move it up to that.
This is, seemingly, an exercise in "publish or perish". It purports to be about technology and law, but it really isn't. For a view of AI and law, read The Reasonable Robot: Artificial Intelligence and the Law, by Ryan Abbott, which I reviewed last year.
It starts off ok, but the first chapters are about it. Then, by page 76, he's whining that legislators can't legislate technology because academics and jurists are the only real lawyers. He then spends chapters talking about the history of language, not about either law or technology. Following that, he has a view of science that can only be described as "a little knowledge is a dangerous thing."
The capstone is the lack of of an understanding of AI shown by the foolish concept of viewing the "Terminator" and "AI will have other goals than humans" as the only threats of AI. Nope, the largest is "governments and business will use AI to implement their goals, which are inimical to most humans."
I wanted to give this two stars, but I couldn't even rationalize a way to move it up to that.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews