original thought
this thought was organically produced
Someone asked me recently why I decided to go to law school. I said it is because I feel passionate about the way technology is developing, and want to work at the intersection of technology and law to ensure that technology develops humanely. This I’ve known and have articulated before. But then they asked me what “humanely” means to me, and, when I imagine technology actually getting it right, what that world looks like.
At a high level, humanely, to me, means technology that is thoughtfully designed to respect humans and human life. That isn’t intentionally designed to compete for and monetise our attention. At a practical level, this is manifest in product feature reasoning and growth metric incentive shifting on the one hand, and stronger regulation and accountability on the other.
A world in which we get this right is a world where when we learn that something isn’t good for us, we change course. And where those who become aware of a danger and don’t take steps to mitigate it are held accountable. We’re beginning to see this with the recent rulings in the Meta cases1, but this is just the beginning. And I really hope that the movement towards the humane development of technology gains greater traction from here, and I have to believe that it will.
It is a world where connection means something real and tangible again. Where young children’s minds can develop without this uncontrollable, unrelenting fog of ethernet that tells them what they should want and what they should have and what they should think. A world where original thought is reached at originally.