Move Fast and Break Things: Law, Technology, and the Problem of Speed

Since computers entered into the mainstream in the
1960s, the efficiency with which data could be processed has raised regulatory
questions. This is well understood with respect to privacy. Data that was
notionally public—divorce proceedings, say—had long been protected through the
‘practical obscurity’ of paper records. When such material was available in a
single hard copy in a government office, the chances of one’s acquaintances or
employer finding it was remote. Yet when it was computerized and made
searchable through what ultimately became the Internet, such practical obscurity
disappeared.

Today, high-speed computing poses comparable
challenges to existing regulatory models in areas from securities regulation to
competition law, merely by enabling lawful activities—trading in stocks, or
comparing and adjusting prices, say—to be undertaken more quickly than
previously conceived possible. Many of these questions are practical rather
than conceptual. Nevertheless, current approaches to slowing down such
decision-making—through circuit-breakers to slow or stop trading, for example—are
unlikely to address all of the problems raised by the speed of AI systems
currently in use.

My article considers the regulatory challenges posed by speed. Many of the transformations in the digital economy—breathlessly referred to as the ‘fourth industrial revolution’—are more accurately linked to the speed and efficiency of data processing rather than true cognitive ability or ‘intelligence’ as such…

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