Systemically Preventing Externalities

The ultimate goal should not be to have companies pay to mitigate the harms their products create—it should be to avoid creating harm in the first place.

To understand why, consider the case of fact checkers. It takes many orders of magnitude more effort to verify a fact than to invent a lie. It takes an army of fact checkers to keep up with a small number of dedicated people generating disinformation. Even a company spending billions on fact checking will always have their team outnumbered by those creating disinformation. For this reason, creating structural changes to disincentivize disinformation will almost always be more effective than hiring fact checkers to address the problem, even though fact-checking is an important part of the solution.

Technologists must build the skill of mitigating harm in the short term while still having an eye on enabling broader systems of change that doesn't incentivize the creation of negative externalities in the first place.

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These posts are meant to be conversational. Let me know what you think on Twitter @joshpitzalis

Found the ideas above in the Foundations of Humane Technology.