⭐️⭐️ FREEDOM TO INNOVATE ⭐️⭐️
What does it mean? Why is it important? How should it shape policy in the age of AI?
Read my new
@RSI
essay: "The Policy Origins of the Digital Revolution & the Continuing Case for the Freedom to Innovate"
LOL, I actually attended this 1993 hearing on video game violence and distinctly remember a Hill staffer I was sitting next to whisper, “This is the greatest ad for getting a Sega Genesis ever.” Several of us went to my house after hearing was over & played Mortal Kombat together
Willie Nelson is amazing.
Author of 10 books. Actor. Curates own satellite radio channel. Runs 2 cannabis companies.
2 albums during past year, one became 53rd top-10 album, making him only artist to have top-10 record in 7 straight decades.
He's 87.👑
Justice Neil Gorsuch has a new book out this week, “Over Ruled: The Human Toll of Too Much Law,” which notes that U.S. statutory law:
* runs to 60,000 pages,
* with another 188,000 pages of regulations,
* which delineate 300,000 criminal sanctions,
* while imposing on the
the U.S. has a lawyer problem:
* more than 1.3 Mil lawyers in US
* from 1900 to 2000, number of lawyers rose 793%
* largest increase was in 1970s (+76%)
* over the past decade, the number of lawyers up by more than 80,000 (up 6.6% from 2012 to 2022)
is there any hope of breaking the chokehold that the big 4 players have in the online services marketplace? That's the question I used to always get when people saw this PC Computing "Roadmap to Top Online Services" poster that adorned my office wall 20 years ago. LOL.
while we old farts continue to fuss over yesterday's tech companies, the kids just helped TikTok jump from 7th to 1st place in less than a year.
And TikTok is just 5 yrs old! Next time someone tells you there's no way to compete against "Big Tech," asked them how that happened.
when it comes to apocalyptic book covers, old
#IndustrialPolicy
books from the 1980s are really hard to beat. So much fear & loathing... and sooooo many failed predictions. Someone please go ask these authors: How does America even still exist? LOL. 😂🤡
no treatise has provided me with greater inspiration to do what I do for a living than this one -- just not in the way that Ted K hoped. ‘The Unabomber Manifesto’ is a despicable, anti-human screed that focused my passion to always and everywhere make the exact opposite case:
@calebwatney
hell, I'm so old that I remember that Skype only captured its market lead because the FCC basically screwed US-based Free World Dialup 25 years ago. We wouldn't have even heard of Skype if not for this.
Some might say that progress is policy choice. 😉
"From a long-term perspective, liberalism has seen its ups and downs but has always come back in the end."
Excellent
@WSJ
feature essay by
@FukuyamaFrancis
on "The Long Arc of Historical Progress." Closing paragraph is spot on.
Dear FTC:
I write to you today in an effort to cancel my subscription to your increasingly politicized, anti-innovation agency. But I cannot see any way to do so on your website. Could you please let me know how to and then refund my money?
Thanks!
@Heritage
there are times in my life where I cannot believe that I spent an entire decade working for
@Heritage
. Have you taken down the paintings of Hayek and Friedman in the lobby? I hope so, because they wouldn't want to be associated with the place.
outstanding news! Bob Corn-Revere is one of the greatest
#FreeSpeech
champions of our time & a huge inspiration to me personally. 20 yrs ago, Bob got a posthumous pardon for Lenny Bruce for a 1964 obscenity conviction. And he's litigated so many important
#FirstAmendment
cases.
FIRE is thrilled to announce that leading First Amendment litigator and author Robert Corn-Revere has joined the organization’s litigation department as chief counsel!
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: Claremont Institute’s
@DrJohnEastman
,
@JDVance1
, and D.J. Swearingen File Amicus Brief in Ohio Lawsuit to Declare Google a Public Utility.
hey
@Heritage
, now that you've thrown capitalism under the bus, wondering if I can purchase from you those Hayek and Friedman paintings that hung on the wall & I always admired during the decade I worked for you.
I'll pay a fair price because I still believe in markets. LMK.
A real moment of truth for conservatives. With his latest call to “strongly regulate” social media platforms or “close them down,” President Trump forces conservatives to choose: Do you believe in the First Amendment, or do you favor Big Govt control of private speech platforms?
FYI... This is my last week at the Mercatus Center. I wish my former colleagues all the best.
Not sure what's next for me, but I look forward to continuing the good fight for human progress & the freedom to innovate.
probably the best paragraph in any speech any regulator has ever delivered since Alfred Kahn was in office. This comes from the great SEC commissioner
@HesterPeirce
. Read every word of it. 👏👏👏
It would be a very good moment for the Biden/Harris Administration to release a strong statement in favor of online free speech and opposing global efforts by other governments to censor American speakers and platforms.
Can we expect that soon,
@StateDept
?
⭐️NEW JOB ALERT⭐️ I'm excited to be joining the R Street Institute (
@RSI
) as a Senior Fellow. I look forward to working w their growing tech & innovation team + all the amazingly entrepreneurial people throughout the organization. It's going to be awesome.
been rereading old
#IndustrialPolicy
books from 1980s. Apocalyptic predictions of US decline basically exactly the same then as now. Yet, no one calls these people to ask them how the US survived without the comprehensive planning they said was essential.
This is from 1982...
WSJ columnist Peggy Noonan proposes banning everyone under 18 from YouTube, Instagram & all social media. It's a horrible idea. First, it'd be impossible to enforce and turn every kid into an instant criminal for seeking access to information & culture.
can't believe that it's been almost 20 years since I wrote my first paper about net neutrality regulation and yet this issue is still with us. For two decades now, we've heard an endless string of dire predictions about the sky falling without it. Look at this quote from FCC
astonishing to think that we've reached the point as a country where people would do something as environmentally destructive as this instead of just allowing nuclear power to work its magic.
4,200 Joshua trees are scheduled to be removed are replaced by solar panels for the Aratina Solar Project near Boron, CA in June of this year. They will not be salvaged but funds based on the size of the tree will be placed in a mitigation bank.
Mr. Breton should consider asking himself why Europe does not have a Twitter, Google, Facebook, Amazon, or Apple of their own, but are instead stuck threatening US-based companies.
Innovation culture matters, and all those 🇪🇺 regulations destroyed Europe's a long time ago.
1/ the most surprising thing about the new Fairness Doctrine revivalists is how they seem to believe 5 unelected FCC bureaucrats will somehow be able to achieve a “fair” balance of “truthful” viewpoints. As if the agency is headed by philosopher-kings who can handle that task.
Daily rant: Every single digital tech panel and hearing in DC features a common refrain: We need a lot more regulation to “build consumer trust,“ or else that technology will never take off. But then in the next breath, the very same people decry how all of America's less
this latest move against golden rice by Greenpeace should force us to once again ask, "How Many Lives Are Lost Due to the Precautionary Principle?" Turns out that people have done the math on that...
Comparing private speech decisions to “totalitarianism” is the kind of thing only Marxist lunatics used to do. Now it’s rhetoric in the title of Heritage Foundation papers. A shocking and shameful turn for an institution whose policies toward the Net I helped author 25 yrs ago.
@KevinRobertsTX
@karaafrederick
These powerful corporations’ undeniable service to leftist ideology eerily mirrors oppressive behavior by totalitarian governments to silence opposition and relegate those with whom they disagree to second-class citizens.
The roadmap:
I see that Dan Hendrycks and the Center for AI Safety have put their new textbook on AI regulation online. The chapter on international governance (8.7) contains the usual aspirational thinking about treaties to regulate AI & computation globally (all the while ignoring how to
It remains absolutely astonishing to me how rapidly the online landscape has evolved over recent years. Check out this
@xkcd
comic depicting online communities circa 2007. Man, I spent a lot of time in some of these places! But most are gone or completely forgotten now. The gales
my thanks to everyone who recommended other 1980s & 1990s Japan-bashing books &
#industrialpolicy
apocalyptic volumes. I've started building a slide depicting them all together. Feel free to suggest others I can add. It's worth documenting this history before we repeat it.
wow... A machine learning model helped researchers accurately identify Parkinson’s disease in 79% of individuals up to 7 years before onset of the disease. Will help patients get treatment they need much earlier.
The power of AI at work again.
I regularly fight with people who complain about capitalism giving us too many choices we don't really need. But then I see KFC-scented firelogs and I run the other way to avoid having to defend my position.
Musk was just in Washington two weeks ago begging Congress to regulate artificial intelligence through a new federal department of AI. And he's called for AI regulation many times before.
But whatever, man.
It's been 5 years since I became a cyborg after having my defective eye lenses ripped out of my skull & replaced. I was functionally blind in one eye and going blind in other. 48 hours after robotic surgery, I had the vision of a hawk. Innovation FTW!
Nothing quite signals intellectually immaturity and a lack of confidence in one's own policy arguments like people who feel the need to constantly end Tweets with snarky accusations about either Soros-led or Koch-led conspiracies motivating everything they disagree with.
what does all this mean for innovation & progress in certain fields? J. Storrs Hall provided some perspective in his book, "Where Is My Flying Car?" A mass substitution effect hit us in the 1970s as we started encouraging more "takers" than "makers":
Classical liberalism is increasing being squeezed off the American political spectrum with the ascendancy of authoritarian thinking on the Left & the Right. There've been some important essays on this & the rise of a post-liberal order. Starting a thread to keep track of them...
When people say the U.S. government lacks enough “state capacity” to address important things, I send them this list of 434 federal agencies and ask them to tell me what’s not already covered before we add still more to our $31 TRILLION debt. 😕
Unfortunately, this is exactly what many global policymakers will come to expect of Elon Musk once he controls Twitter. He'll be constantly pressured to intervene personally to address content issues one way or the other. His phone will be ringing all day with political requests.
Meta is absolutely flooding the DC area media market with expensive TV commercials during football games & full-page newspaper ads begging Congress to regulate social media. Of course, they can afford complying with all those new regs they want. Smaller rivals can't. They should
@yaf
@michaeljknowles
@realDailyWire
No one cares about licensing reform?? Is this the same YAF that hosts a Center for Entrepreneurship & Free Enterprise and professes to care about the importance of economic freedom?
It will be interesting to see how this new Harris administration experiment with price controls plays out. It's such a novel idea with absolutely no historical parallel.
Oh, wait a minute, that's right... we have 40 CENTURIES of experience with it! 😂
cc:
@eamonnbutler
@ASI
remember how Google was going to supposedly leverage its core monopoly to promote Google+ and crush all other social media competitors?
10 years ago... 🤔
1/ Here’s my review of “Where Is My Flying Car?,” by J. Storrs Hall. It's the most important technology policy book of the past quarter century. Hall perfectly defines what's at stake if we fail to embrace a pro-progress policy vision going forward.
Every rule being suspended today should force us to ask: Did this rule ever make sense?
ex: CMS declares it will “Put Patients Over Paperwork” by “eliminating paperwork requirements & allowing clinicians to spend more time with patients.” Why only now?
my new listening room is almost complete! Just waiting on a rug & a few more acoustic treatments to arrive. Happy to dive back into my vinyl collection after over a month without anything. Kicking off night one in here with my two favorite albums of all time from Floyd & Miles.
Hard to imagine any digital app has created greater consumer surplus over the last 20 yrs than Google Maps. It’s incredible to think some regulators would just do a Thanos snap and obliterate it all. It'd be one of worst own goals in
#antitrust
history.
Crazy to think how, just 5 years ago, the Net neutrality wars were taking up so much bandwidth (excuse the pun) in the heads tech policy people. The panic was palpable. The sky was going to fall. It was just a matter of time, the critics told us.
And then the world moved on and
At this point, five years later, all we can do is . . . wait some more. Or something.
Fun fact: among Vox's "Guiding Principles" is that "[w]e don't start with foregone conclusions."
The new Biden AI executive order issues broad and quite amorphous calls for expanded government oversight across many other issues and agencies, raising the risk of a “death by a thousand cuts” scenario for AI policy in the US. The EO appears to be empowering agencies to
Here’s a smart
@WSJopinion
essay from Leon Panetta & Mike Gallagher stressing the need for the U.S. to embrace the strength of our nation’s commercial innovation capacity as our leading national security advantage. We’re not going to beat China by becoming China and using
don't worry, once Heritage gets all those new regulations imposed on tech companies that they’ve been calling for, America will jump right back up the economic freedom index. 🤔
for past year I've been basically blind in my right eye w a horrible cataract. Yesterday, had it removed during a 5 minute laser procedure & replaced with a multifocus lens. 24 hrs later I have regained 20/20 vision. Can see the whole world again.
#Innovation
is AWESOME.
1/ Remember when critics were panicking about AT&T's acquisition of DirecTV 5 years ago? Well, now T is already looking to sell at considerable loss.
It's another powerful example of technological change decimating market power. But the weird thing is..
Conservatives owning the libs by calling for the nationalization of private media enterprises. I did not see that one coming.
I guess the argument here is that (conservative) socialism will save us from the (liberal) socialists. BURN THE VILLAGE TO SAVE IT!
"That brings me to the most important piece of advice that I can give to all of you: if you've got a good idea, and it's a contribution, I want you to go ahead and DO IT. It is much easier to apologize than it is to get permission."
- Grace Hopper
so, my wife & I moved out of DC to a little country home out in the middle of nowhere in Spotsylvania, VA. Was initially worried about broadband access. But it turns out we have multiple high-speed providers and I can sit down by the river behind my house and pull 137Mbps up / 17
when pundits say America needs a “comprehensive national strategy” to ensure global success in a new tech sector, they never explain how U.S. became a global leader in computing / digital tech without such a top-down plan or centralized agency.
18 months, 200 pages, 100,000 words, and 1,000 footnotes later, I have finally have completed the first full draft of my next book, "Freedom to Innovate: Evasive Entrepreneurs & the Future of Governance." Hope to have it out later this year.
Increasingly, the hardest part of getting a rocket into space is getting it through the regulatory permitting maze here on the ground first. 🚀
Look at this astonishing image from this new
@DeloitteInsight
report on "Rockets and regulation: Injecting agility into US space
Athulya moved here when she was 5. She competed on her HS debate team, graduated from UT Austin with a degree in journalism and dreams of becoming a lawyer. But because of an unforeseen consequence of immigration laws, she may need to move back to India
@danrothschild
@expensify
Good letter. Also, while I’m no expert on campaign finance laws (and don’t agree with many of them anyway), this would seem to be a pretty massive violation of FEC in-kind contribution rules, no? Perhaps he reported it properly. It sure will make an interesting case study if not!
@BrianRKnight
yeah, several of my inalienable human rights were violated by 3-button Sega controllers and 1-button Atari controllers a generation before that. I think the authorities finally outlawed such barbarous acts of cruelty in an amendment to the Geneva Convention.
NPR discovers
#PublicChoice
#economics
: Montana forces perfectly good milk off shelves 12 days after pasteurization (industry standard is 21-24 days). Tons of milk gets poured out & wasted. Why? To protect milk makers. "This rule shuts out competition."
the current debate over
#Section230
and online content moderation has been dominated by misinformation, bad reporting, and outright lies. Let’s set the record straight with 10 or so must-reads on the topic …
Rep. Jennifer Wexton, who lost the use of her voice due to progressive supranuclear palsy, a disease affecting over 30,000 Americans, today delivered a House floor speech using an AI-enabled text-to-speech tool from
@elevenlabsio
, which reproduced her voice from old clips of past
I spoke on the House floor today to mark Disability Pride month.
I hope I can be a voice—even an AI voice—for Americans facing accessibility challenges & other disabilities.
Too often people only see us for that disability, & in truth we are so much more.
it's always remarkable how few people see the future coming. When Jensen Huang & Nvidia opened up GPUs to software developers in 2006, analysts & journalists barely took notice of the computing revolution that was getting underway. They were all too busy covering yesterday's
"Futuristic visions are often dystopian," notes
@mattwridley
in a recent AMA. [] "Can you recall any Hollywood film in which the future is portrayed positively?"
It's challenging. In my recent two books, I document how techno-dread dominates pop culture
or go back & read former CBS president Fred Friendly’s 1975 book (The Good Guys, the Bad Guys & the First Amendment) re: abuses of the Fairness Doctrine during both Republican & Democratic administrations. This stuff from Kennedy years, which I summarized in old book, is shocking
International comparison:
"When it comes to the number of lawyers per capita globally, the US easily has the lead. There are more lawyers per capita in the United States than in any other country."
1 lawyer for every 248 residents. 🤯
It amuses me that conservatives, who typically scream bloody murder about govt support for NPR, PBS or the Post Office, would support nationalizing Twitter & Facebook. 🤦♂️
Also amusing: The belief that anyone would continue using those services if the govt ran them.
If the mainstream Republican position becomes “let’s nationalize our most successful private companies” then I feel pretty good about Democrats’ chances in future elections.
This essay by Steven Sinofsky [
@stevesi
] is the most cogent, comprehensive and devastating takedown of the Biden
#AI
executive order you will read. A remarkable essay not just on AI policy, but for all modern technology policy. Read every word of it. 👉🏼
an honor to testify today on AI issues today before House Oversight subcommittee on Cybersecurity, Info Technology, & Govt Innovation. Testimony & video on subcommittee's website at the link below. Got a pic w
@jrhuddles
&
@neil_chilson
beforehand.
EU
#AI
Act will do very little to advance its stated objectives, but compliance costs will spell doom for continental algorithmic innovation, just as earlier GDPR mandates did for its data-driven sectors. The academic literature on this is unambiguous.
Yudkowsky is proposing the use of acts of collective violence and even nuclear warfare to shut down
#AI
& computational capabilities globally. The call for "agreements to prevent the prohibited activities from moving elsewhere" + complete GPU tracking
congrats to my amazing wife
@reneedflaherty
&
@IJ
for today winning a monumental case for the right to earn a living in the Georgia Supreme Court. The unanimous decision firmly rejects protectionism as the basis of occupational licensing schemes, in this case, the licensing of
If everything is infrastructure, then nothing is infrastructure.
Impossible to have a meaningful debate about particular policy matters when politicians conflate their priorities to mean whatever they want them to. Words matter.
excellent! Glad to see Sam Altman and OpenAI were able to get this innovation on the market without having to get a formal license to do so from the new federal AI bureaucracy or global regulatory body he testified in favor of on Tuesday. 😜
Second, it would deny kids access to a massive amount of entirely acceptable information & culture found on the dominant medium of their generation. It would be as dumb as saying we should have banned all kids from listening to the radio during Noonan's generation.
1/ I learned so much from William Niskanen during our years working together. I wish he was still with us, especially to help refute pro-industrial policy arguments made in a new paper from an organization that bears his name! After all, Bill had a few things to say on this...
perplexed by people posting pics of momentarily empty shelves & then suggesting "market failure." Each time I see someone post such nonsense, I'm going to run across street and take pic of little immigrant-run Latin grocery store. Their restocking velocity makes my head spin.
um, no. This revisionist history of the "golden age" of broadcast regulation & the Fairness Doctrine ignores the troubling history of FCC speech controls & unintended consequences of regulation. That regime gave us limited, bland choices. We got away from that model for a reason.
@deanwball
Every time, without fail, Breton includes a picture of himself. (
@pat_hedger
&
@JamesCz19
often point out the same thing.)
Breton is completely in love with himself and power. I’m not sure the world has seen a bigger self-aggrandizing narcissist in recent memory.
Many of the people protesting Musk’s potential move to a paid model for Twitter seem to be the same ones who for years have complained about ad-supported social media and claimed "if you're not paying, you are the product." 🤷🏼
Which is is, folks? There is no free lunch.
shopping for new computer when I was in college 30 years ago (Radio Shack ad on left) vs. shopping for new computer when my daughter is off to college now (Best Buy ad on right).
#progress