How do we regulate the future?

I was thinking of the move from the rotary telephone to the touchtone phone to the mobile phone. Similarly, the upgrade from gramophone to record player to CD and streaming. These things have changed our lives over decades so that we now take them for granted today. But, when watching movies from the past century, I am often struck by how basic things were. A television was an amazing thing, as wifi in those days was a radiogram for most people (wireless music, in case you’re wondering).

This brings us to the questionable thing today, which is two-fold: how reliable are today’s technologies and where is technology going tomorrow?

These should be boardroom discussions in all companies, governments, regulators and financial institutions.

On the first question, the answer is: not very. There are huge questions around the use of social media of people aged 16 and under, and the way that social media firms regulate access to their platforms. More than this, there are huge questions around security and identity on these platforms that are still unanswered. Every day we hear of cyberhacks, romance scams, digital fraud and more and, in the old way of thinking about these things, the challenge is always being one step behind the criminal. Are banks and fintechs keeping up? When systems break, who is liable? If a regulator says it must be done, who must do it?

The list goes on, but the pace of change goes on.

When I posted the latest Chinese New Year celebration of Kung Fu robots, I said that they blew me away. However, when looking forward, how will companies, governments, regulators and financial institutions use and deploy digital and physical robots? How will they be managed? Who will be liable when they go wrong? If a robot harms a human, what do we do?

It reminds me of the ultimate visionary, Isaac Asimov’s, rules for robots:

• A robot may not injure a human or allow a human to come to harm through inaction.
• A robot must obey human orders, unless they conflict with the First Law.
• A robot must protect its own existence, provided this does not conflict with the First or Second Laws.

This is such a wise prophecy, written back in the 1940s, and Zeroth added an extra rule:

• A robot may not injure humankind, or, through inaction, allow humankind to come to harm.

Zeroth is an ordinal number representing the position before first, and is used in mathematics, computing, and science to indicate a starting point of zero.

In other words, when we talk about first principles, we need to start with the Zeroth and build up from there. The trouble is that we already have huge amounts of infrastructure built, so how can we start from zero all over again when we talk about robotics, agentic AI and more? In particular, quantum computing is coming which will reframe everything. How can we reboot Planet Earth?

We are living in an age where the prophecies of the last centuries are now truth. The question for all is: how do we deal with this truth? How do we regulate it? What is allowable and what is not tenable? There are so many questions.

From the use of social media by children to the deployment of robocops on our streets to the criminal attacks using fraud and scams on our financial systems. These are all in play to today, and some feel – me included – that the response by governments and institutions are not keeping up with the pace of change.

What about the changes tomorrow will bring?