The days of being able to restrain people’s actions through the use of laws has been effective since the very first laws, but what happens when these laws meet with the evolving digital age that we are living in today? Napster and Limewire (peer to peer file sharing) brought into light the illegal file sharing of music, movies, shows, and just about every possible program, or media that you could buy online. To this day, almost 99% of all data that passes through P2P is copyrighted, and a little under a quarter of the worlds bandwidth is used for illegal downloads. Clearly the laws that are supposed to prevent these actions are not working, so what are we to do? Economists would tell you that the best way to control someone’s actions would be through incentives. By rewarding someone for behaving the way you want, everybody wins. The people will get rewarded for their good behavior, and the government or companies don’t have to worry as much about people misbehaving in the first place.

Switching gears to the topic of autonomous vehicles since they are not even commercially available, there really aren’t regulations on what you can or cannot do. I had a discussion with one of my friends about the pros and cons of autonomous vehicles, and we came up to a terrifying paradox. The scenario is that the car will swerve out of the way of an incoming collision to protect the driver (and passengers), but what happens when the only possible path to save the driver is into a pedestrian on the street? No matter what happens, someone will die. What laws do we have to figure out who is at fault if something like this ever happened? In this case, incentives would not work at all and it brings up the question that if there isn’t an obvious way to contain society’s behavior with technology or technology itself, it might come to a point where we will simply have to accept positional consequences for the greater good of overall society and that the people who disagree with whatever happens would eventually just leave. These new technologies and our lack of ways to control them might turn our society into a real life version of “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas.”