From the Gatwick Incident

The London airport, Gatwick, has been closed for more than a day because of the “drone chaos”. Several drones flew very close to the airport and created threats to airplane safety. A comment from the authority is that the technology is developing at a faster than the legal system is. This comment is very true indeed that the authority cannot create laws and regulations for something that does not exit yet as they do not have the ability to foresee the coming new technology, and it takes time for regulators and lawmakers to create appropriate laws while the technology is still advancing. I do not think that people would have thought drones could cause such trouble a decade ago.

In the future, other technologies will appear in our real life and some will cause problems like this one. There are several new technologies which are highly likely to cause this kind of problem. The first one is AI. When an AI does something wrong, who should take responsibility? Especially when the AI is unsurpervised, the designers should be blamed since they create the AI that misconducts; however, the users should also be blamed since they might know how the AI works and purposely train the AI to misconduct. Under such circumstance, who should take the responsibility? The second one is on the Internet. Who should take the responsibility to stop misleading information? The general public believe that social media should take the responsibility to stop misleading information from spreading; however, there are so many ways to spread misleading information, and social media is only one of many ways. Moreover, even social media is the main way to spread misleading information, it is impossible for social media to stop all misleading information. The third one is also on the Internet. Open information can benefit many of us, and since it is open, the cost of accessing to the information is extremely cheap. However, not all knowledge is good knowledge, when some knowledge falls in hands of some bad people, the knowledge itself would start to create negative impacts. For example, someone posted an open guidance about how to 3D print a pistol online; though the post was pulled off from the website, as it existed on the Internet, it is very hard to guarantee that there is absolutely no copy existing on the Internet right now.

Overall, when the technology world is developing rapidly, it is definitely a huge challenge for all regulators and lawmakers.