Jun 3, 2021
In part 2 of this podcast, Karim Nurani welcomes back Joshua Fairfield of Washington and Lee University School of Law. Professor Fairfield is an internationally recognized law and technology scholar, who specializes in all things digital. His current research focuses on big data privacy protection, cryptocurrencies, and the development of virtual communities to maximize people's potentials and achievements.
In his latest book, Runaway Technology, Prof. Fairfield demonstrates how we can create the kind of laws that are better suited to dealing with the challenges and dangers posed by corporate surveillance, artificial intelligence, deep fakes, genetic modification, automation, and more.
In this podcast, we explore two major
themes:
Law and Technological Change
It's a mistake to claim that the law can't keep up with rapidly-changing technology. Law itself is “linguistic technology”, and the key strategy is to ensure that it evolves “wisely” to stay apace of the latest developments. It's important to look at the lessons from legal history, to see how they should apply today. In feudal times for example, serfs (peasants) couldn't own their farmland and would lose everything when disputes arose among their overlords. Today, we're becoming “digital serfs” since we can't own our own data, and are subject to licenses and terms of service that are imposed by the “digital barons” who rule us.
NFTs and Tech's Democratizing Pedigrees
The evolution of different governmental implementations of technology legislation across the globe is of concern, especially given the worrying expansion of authoritarian nationalism worldwide. This can be countered by decentralized finance and blockchain technologies, which have strong democratizing pedigrees that don't lend themselves easily to centralized command and control. The laws relating to NFTs will need to evolve, in order to make them practical and shovel-ready for use in everyday commerce, and that will happen.
About Our Guest:
Prof. Joshua Fairfield is an internationally recognized law and technology scholar, who specializes in all things digital.
He has written extensively on what he terms “the crisis of digital ownership”, raising the alarm on technology’s annexation of our property and privacy rights, as we risk becoming digital peasants who are owned by software and advertising companies, not to mention overreaching governmental agencies. His latest research focuses on the regulatory oversight of e-commerce and online contracts and the next generation of legal applications for cryptocurrencies.
In his most recent book, “Runaway Technology: Can Law Keep Up?”, Prof. Fairfield calls the bluff of Silicon Valley’s barons and mandarins who claim that the law can never support the pace of rampant technological change. On the contrary, he says, the law can certainly keep up and stay the course, precisely because it is a type of technology - a carefully specified social system constructed by humans out of cooperative fictions like firms, nations, and money.
The ongoing tension between technology designers and lawyers can perhaps be attributed to the fact that they are both tasked with precisely defining how the world is to work, but they use radically different languages to do it. The engineering nuances of Python and VHDL are balanced by the legal precision of pronominal adverbs like whereof and thereafter, and arcane terms of art like promissory estoppel and ceteris paribus.
Joshua is well-placed to straddle the gulf between these two disciplines, having been a software technology entrepreneur in the language-learning field before taking up the law. He has used his unique synthesizing skills to advise the US government on policy matters of digital national security, online civil liberties, and global research ethics for virtual communities.
Prof. Fairfield studied at Swarthmore College and the University of Chicago Law School, and for the last fourteen years has been on the faculty of Washington and Lee University School of Law.
Episode Resources:
About Our Host:
Karim Nurani
Investor and Entrepreneur
Chief Strategy Officer, Linqto
Fearless innovator. Perpetual student. Equal parts irrepressible and curious, always scanning the horizon for a better way. This is how Karim Nurani is routinely described by those who know him best.
This particular handful of traits has served him exceedingly well across three decades as an entrepreneur, investor, and advisor. It’s a journey marked by the formation and successful guidance of over a hundred startups from mining to process manufacturing, leadership in a number of top venture firms, and lucrative forays into markets as diverse as IoT, GreenTech, SAAS, and FinTech. His special power is a rare ability to embrace the multiplicity of perspectives and mindsets that coexist in the business realm—entrepreneur, executive, investor; early-stage, IPO, and established enterprise.
A great believer in the law of mutual attraction, he puts a great stake in relationships with like-minded thinkers across sectors and around the globe—an endless source of inspiration, knowledge, and exciting opportunity.
Find Karim on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/karimnurani/
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