Sam Altman, the CEO of artificial intelligence lab OpenAI, told a Senate panel he welcomes federal regulation on the technology "to mitigate" its risks. The panic to regulate artificial intelligence (AI) came almost immediately after last fall's release of ChatGPT popularized the technology with the public. Some industry insiders themselves called for a pause on development, highlighting that expertise in a field doesn't translate into proficiency in the perils of regulation. That appeal was followed by a White House AI Bill of Rights and an educational effort by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y. Fears about AI include job displacement, data security and privacy, misinformation, autonomous defense systems mistakes, discrimination and bias, and an existential threat to humanity itself. It's imperative to prove actual market failure before regulating and to make sure the costs of doing so don't outweigh the benefits.

The web accessibility market has undergone a tremendous amount of upheaval over the past five years. Most recently, the societal aftershocks of the coronavirus pandemic have reminded everyone of the importance of universal access to digital services. Since 2015, there has also been an explosion of litigation, including class-action lawsuits filed under the ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act) against organizations that have failed to make their websites accessible to disabled people. In 2018, the number of web accessibility lawsuits in the U.S. increased by 177% from the previous year to 2,258. Up to 20% of the population have a disability, be it visual, auditory, or motor, requiring a computer access intervention.

There are 40 million people in slavery today. SDG 8.7 is a commitment to end modern slavery, with the ambition to reduce that number by 10,000 people every day. James Cockayne, Director, Centre for Policy Research, United Nations University, is confident that we are "nowhere near" that target. The reasons for this systemic and enduring failure are the result of the "mispricing" of labour, where true social costs are not quantified. Worse still, companies are rewarded for driving down their labour costs.

Most people talk too much about values relative to facts, as they care more about showing off their values than about learning facts. So I usually avoid talking values. But I'll make an exception today for this value: expanding rather than fighting about possibilities. On the x-axis you, or your group, get more of what you want. On the y-axis, others get more of what they want. The blue region is a space of possibilities, the blue curve is the frontier of best possibilities, and the blue dot is the status quo, which happens if no one tries to change it.

Last year, on October 21, your digital video recorder -- or at least a DVR like yours -- knocked Twitter off the internet. Someone used your DVR, along with millions of insecure webcams, routers, and other connected devices, to launch an attack that started a chain reaction, resulting in Twitter, Reddit, Netflix, and many sites going off the internet. You probably didn't realize that your DVR had that kind of power. This has as much to do with the computer market as it does with the technologies. We prefer our software full of features and inexpensive, at the expense of security and reliability. That your computer can affect the security of Twitter is a market failure. The industry is filled with market failures that, until now, have been largely ignorable. As computers continue to permeate our homes, cars, businesses, these market failures will no longer be tolerable. Our only solution will be regulation, and that regulation will be foisted on us by a government desperate to "do something" in the face of disaster. In this article I want to outline the problems, both technical and political, and point to some regulatory solutions. Regulation might be a dirty word in today's political climate, but security is the exception to our small-government bias. And as the threats posed by computers become greater and more catastrophic, regulation will be inevitable. So now's the time to start thinking about it. We also need to reverse the trend to connect everything to the internet. And if we risk harm and even death, we need to think twice about what we connect and what we deliberately leave uncomputerized. If we get this wrong, the computer industry will look like the pharmaceutical industry, or the aircraft industry.