The world spins faster now. The consumer drones are coming of age right before our eyes and I doubt it will take 20 years for their regulations to stabilize.
The question for me is more about how well the political system can cope with the emergence of new threats as a proxy for existential risk and AI concerns: if political systems have failed to deal with existential threats well in the past, took very long times, or required the threat to occur, that says bad things about our future.
So with that in mind, I wouldn’t date consumer drones’ regulation starting from now. I would date from the first major military use, or possibly the first time that civilian misuse for terrorism or assassination became feasible (something like ‘the first year a civilian could buy for <$3000 a GPS-controlled drone which could carry <1kg and be modified to carry a small bomb or fire a handgun and assassinate the president’). I’m not an expert on drones but military use goes well back into the 2000s at least and I remember consumer drones coming out then too.
The question for me is more about how well the political system can cope with the emergence of new threats as a proxy for existential risk and AI concerns
Not sure it’s a viable proxy because the “threats” that you mention are not threats to that political system (or the general social stability, etc.) They are more like areas over which the state has taken a while to exert effective control, but the reason for the control is not safety but the general political imperative to control all you can. Or, of course, some incumbents decided to throw up barriers to entry and what better tool for that than government (and self-) regulation.
The only serious technological threat to political power in recent memory is the internet. The process of bringing it under control still continues and is not completed. An interesting question is whether it can be completed.
The world spins faster now. The consumer drones are coming of age right before our eyes and I doubt it will take 20 years for their regulations to stabilize.
The question for me is more about how well the political system can cope with the emergence of new threats as a proxy for existential risk and AI concerns: if political systems have failed to deal with existential threats well in the past, took very long times, or required the threat to occur, that says bad things about our future.
So with that in mind, I wouldn’t date consumer drones’ regulation starting from now. I would date from the first major military use, or possibly the first time that civilian misuse for terrorism or assassination became feasible (something like ‘the first year a civilian could buy for <$3000 a GPS-controlled drone which could carry <1kg and be modified to carry a small bomb or fire a handgun and assassinate the president’). I’m not an expert on drones but military use goes well back into the 2000s at least and I remember consumer drones coming out then too.
Not sure it’s a viable proxy because the “threats” that you mention are not threats to that political system (or the general social stability, etc.) They are more like areas over which the state has taken a while to exert effective control, but the reason for the control is not safety but the general political imperative to control all you can. Or, of course, some incumbents decided to throw up barriers to entry and what better tool for that than government (and self-) regulation.
The only serious technological threat to political power in recent memory is the internet. The process of bringing it under control still continues and is not completed. An interesting question is whether it can be completed.