Tim Wu

They've gone from being somebody who did checkout with me and asked me how my day was and I asked them how their day was, and now they get called over.

because the three apples I put on the weighing machine didn't weigh in correctly.

And it seems dehumanizing to them, dehumanizing to me.

I also get it.

How do you think about weighing that?

There's the stuff that is genuinely grim and dystopic, and maybe we should just outlaw.

And then there is stuff like...

the just generalized automation in which there genuinely can be a consumer surplus from that.

Like time is a surplus for me.

Things moving faster is a surplus for me.

More checkout stations is a surplus for me.

And there's a cost on the other side of it.

Well, the first thing I'd say is we should be making more of these kind of decisions about what we really care about and what world we want to inhabit.

I mean, one of the things that I think happens is by default, we don't pass any laws or have new ethical codes.

I mean, ethics does a lot of work.

And we just sort of...

allow a trump card to new stuff because it's new and you know i i get that you don't want to ban everything new that shows up but i feel that we have over the last fifteen years or so sometimes just taken a position that you know the people don't get to vote on this i mean a good example is everything to do with children

I don't think there's a lot of people who think it's a great thing to surveil children and have targeted ads for children and try to create addictive technologies for children.

You know, when I worked in government, we tried to pass just basic, even child privacy laws.

We couldn't get a vote ever.