Does Society Have Too Many Rules? When regular people seem burdened by bureaucracy, and the powerful act as they choose, it's worth asking whether we've forgotten what makes rules effective. I live in a three-generation household. Our place is big, but crowded: all of us have hobbies, and so every shelf or surface contains toys, books, art supplies, sporting goods, craft projects, cameras, musical instruments, or kitchen gadgets. Before the table can be set for dinner, it must be cleared of a board game or marble run. My desk, where I aim to write in the mornings, has been repurposed as a drone-repair workshop. The property includes two broken-down sheds and a garage.

When a phalanx of the top Silicon Valley executives--Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and Google's Sundar Pichai--aligned behind President Trump during the Inauguration in January, many observers saw an allegiance based on corporate interests. The ultra-wealthy C.E.O.s were turning out to support a fellow-magnate, hoping perhaps for an era of deregulation, tax breaks, and anti-"woke" cultural shifts. The historian Janis Mimura saw something more ominous: a new, proactive union of industry and governmental power, wherein the state would drive aggressive industrial policy at the expense of liberal norms. In the second Trump Administration, a class of Silicon Valley leaders was insinuating itself into politics in a way that recalled one of Mimura's primary subjects of study: the élite bureaucrats who seized political power and drove Japan into the Second World War. "These are experts with a technological mind-set and background, often engineers, who now have a special role in the government," Mimura told me.

As ChatGPT's first birthday approaches, presents are rolling in for the large language model that rocked the world. From President Joe Biden comes an oversized "Executive Order on the Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Development and Use of Artificial Intelligence." And UK prime minister Rishi Sunak threw a party with a cool extinction-of-the-human-race theme, wrapped up with a 28-country agreement (counting the EU as a single country) promising international cooperation to develop AI responsibly. Before anyone gets too excited, let's remember that it has been over half a century since credible studies predicted disastrous climate change. Now that the water is literally lapping at our feet and heat is making whole chunks of civilization uninhabitable, the international order has hardly made a dent in the gigatons of fossil fuel carbon dioxide spewing into the atmosphere.

Narender Modi has shown the people of India that he is the only leader who can lead India to become a developed country. The first thing he did in his reign was to eliminate the corruption that was rampant all over India. The corrupt bureaucrats were fired and the black money that was stashed away was brought back to India. The people were fed up of the scams that were taking place in the country. Modi has made sure that the corrupt people are punished and put behind the bars.

What would you do if you had a machine to catch a thief? If you were a corrupt Chinese bureaucrat, you would want to ditch it, of course. Resistance by government officials to a groundbreaking big data experiment is only one of many challenges as the Chinese government starts using new technology to navigate its giant bureaucracy. According to state media, there were more than 50 million people on China's government payroll in 2016, though analysts have put the figure at more than 64 million – slightly less than the population of Britain. To turn this behemoth into a seamless operation befitting the information age, China has started adapting various types of sophisticated technology.

The fourth industrial revolution stands out from its predecessors in a critical way: rather than making it easier for humans to use their surroundings more effectively for their own benefit, technology is displacing humans in the workplace. The question is who will benefit now. Automated or otherwise technology-enabled services can increase profit margins for companies, while representing for users cheaper, more convenient or more reliable options than those produced exclusively by humans. But, of course, this comes at a high cost for the humans who previously filled those roles. People all over the world have embraced ride-sharing and transport services such as Uber, to the detriment of traditional taxi drivers. In stock trading, 79 per cent of market transactions are now performed by software, according to Frank Zhang of the Yale School of Management, reflecting the hope that machines will be able to identify patterns more effectively than a human could – a hope that may have contributed to the recent stock market correction.

One doesn't need to read the work of rehabilitated Health Insurance Corporate Executive Wendell Potter (wendellpotter.com) Insurance companies physically ration access for-profit by limiting the number physicians and hospitals in a community which can care for a patient contracted with that insurance plan. Reimbursement rationing to physicians via underpayments or refusing payment to physicians relative to contracts is a profit method unique to the health insurance industry. Withholding or delaying pay as insurance companies do with doctors occurs on a large scale daily has not been seen in America since the days of slavery or sharecropping where risk and work was not reimbursed by their corporate employers or landowners. Another common and incredibly effective rationing tool to enhance insurance company profits is'prior authorization'.

You may remember Avis and Hertz as places where you arrive in a shuttle bus, waste time in line, then hand someone a few hundred dollars in exchange for a cheap car. You know, exactly the kinds of companies slated for obsolescence in the coming shift to autonomous driving. Ah, but those old-fashioned companies know a few things about managing and maintaining fleets, skills Silicon Valley upstarts don't have--and desperately need as they roll out their self-driving cars. That explains why Avis just announced a deal to take care of Waymo's fleet of autonomous minivans in Phoenix, and Hertz will reportedly play a role in keeping Apple's robocars running. Both deals signal that, when it comes to the nascent autonomous car industry, some old things can indeed be new again. Yes, self-driving tech promises to fundamentally change how people get all around and shake up the industries that exist to help them do it.