Mon, 09/21/2020
Over the past two years, we have been working to establish a new center for the study of technology governance at the University of Nebraska. This Center – the Nebraska Governance and Technology Center – was formally established last February, and formally launched today. Needless to say, I’m excited!
This website contains a lot of information about the Center, which I hope you will peruse – and we hope that it will rapidly grow as we start doing all the things that we plan to do. This post shares some of the thinking about the purpose of this center.
The Nebraska Governance and Technology Center
The purpose of NGTC is to study the changing relationship between law and technology – in particular, how the law can (and should) regulate technology, on the one hand, and, on the other, how new technologies affect what the law is capable of doing.
The law today has developed over centuries and even millennia, largely based around a slowly evolving technology frontier. As technologies have changed, they have affected how people interact – creating both new forms of beneficial engagement but also new forms of harm. This can be challenging for the law during periods of more rapid technological change. One challenge raised by rapid technological change is the pacing problem – how the law keeps up. Another, harder, challenge occurs where technology affects the basic nature of how humans interact with one another.
In important ways, the past 150 years have seen consistent technological change that has been significant in terms of both pace and nature. The advent of modern telecommunications in the late 1800s, for instance, enabled near-instantaneous communications across great distance. In the early 1900s, broadcast radio and television changed the economics and politics of communication. Both of these created challenges for the law – for instance, driving the transition to our contemporary administrative state and rebalancing power between our national and state governments.
Over the past 75 years, the advent of the transistor, the computer, and the Internet have led to further consequential challenges for and changes to the law. Perhaps the most important among these is that we now live in a world in which the architectural design of much of our basic infrastructure is defined by, and can be changed by, a programmer’s will. The only limitations are the programmer’s ingenuity and the sometimes-need for a business model.
That’s our present. The future is CRISPR and low-cost synthetic biology, smart cities and IoT devices that connect to and monitor other IoT devices, swarms of Internet-connected drones that can fly autonomously over hundreds of miles or can stay aloft for years at a time, additive printers and subtractive CNC machines for on-demand small-batch manufacturing, and a society whose laws and norms are adapting to an era of rapid climate change.
This is all to say that we are moving from a human history in which the law regulated human behavior that was fundamentally constrained by the natural world to a future in which law must regulate human behavior that is constrained by a world largely shaped by our own will, ingenuity, imagination, and mistake.
Why a new center?
In academic parlance, a “center” is generally a program that exists between, or draws upon faculty from, multiple colleges or departments. In other words, it’s an interdisciplinary endeavor.
Studying the challenges of technology governance is a fundamentally interdisciplinary endeavor. The traditional, siloed model of study no longer cuts it. This isn’t because these challenges are necessarily harder or require more or more specialized knowledge – this isn’t a challenge for “law and” scholars solve.
Rather, the problems of technology governance are endogenous across multiple silos. The technologists – the entrepreneurs, engineers, and programmers building today’s platforms and the scientists and researchers laying the ground upon which tomorrow’s platforms will be built – are, to borrow Kate Klonick’s phrase, the new governors. The law of tomorrow is already baked into the technology of today. And this law looks, feels, and operates differently than that which we are familiar with.
The engineers building it are ill-equipped to design this new law; so are the entrepreneurs and venture capitalists providing the economic fuel to feed its growth. Lawyers and legal academics have a lot to say on these issues and should play a central role in informing how these new technologies are implemented. But even they are only players in the unfolding drama of technology governance. Journalist and media scholars have as much to add, as well as playing a pivotal role in explaining these changes to those who are affected by them, as do myriad social scientists, philosophers, historians, classicists, and ethicists.
With all of this in mind, the new center will be housed in the College of Law, and legal questions will serve a coordinating function for its research and other academic programming. But it will be an inherently interdisciplinary endeavor, with collaborations with the Colleges of Business, Engineering, and Journalism and Mass Communications. And that’s just to start! These collaborations mean, among other things, jointly hosted events, teaching of classes and sharing of faculty across the colleges, and opportunities for interdisciplinary engagement for both students and faculty.
What’s next?
As best I can tell, the sky is the limit for what’s next. I hope you will take some time to look around the website, or to reach out to me or Elsbeth Magilton if you have questions about the Center or how you can get involved.
Fundamentally, I view NGTC as an opportunity to try new things at the intersection of law and technology. New classes. New collaborations. New forms of scholarly and student engagement. New directions in research. As Josh Fairfield says in an upcoming episode of our new podcast (did I mention we have a podcast? We do!), law is technology – and, like so much of the technology around us, the technology of law has changed rapidly. I look forward to exploring these changes.
Tags: Center News
