Laws for learning in an age of acceleration.

• Author: McGinnis, John O.

TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION I. TECHNOLOGICAL ACCELERATION II. DEMOCRACY, POLICY CONSEQUENCES, AND SOCIAL KNOWLEDGE A. Creating Social Knowledge B. Encouraging Collective Action C. Voting in the Public Interest III. Two INFORMATION TECHNOLOGIES FOR IMPROVING SOCIAL KNOWLEDGE A. Modern Empiricism 1. The Nature of Empiricism 2. The Rise of Empiricism B. Dispersed and Innovative Media C. A Culture of Social Learning IV. LEGAL REFORM AND DEMOCRATIC UPDATING A. Empiricism and Information-Eliciting Rules 1. Decentralization 2. Randomizing Policy 3. Access to Data B. Rules for Promoting the New Media 1. Resisting Discrimination Against the New Media 2. Requiring Posting of Bills Before Passage and Signing CONCLUSION INTRODUCTION

The twenty-first century's information age has the potential to usher in a more harmonious and productive politics. People often disagree about what policies to adopt, but the cornucopia of data that modern technology generates can allow them to better update their beliefs about policy outcomes on the basis of shared facts. In the long run, convergence on the facts can lead incrementally to more consensus on better policies. More credible factual information should over time also help make for a less divisive society, because partisans cannot as easily stoke social tensions by relying on false facts or exaggerated claims to support conflicting positions. Thus, a central task of contemporary public law is to accelerate a politics of learning whereby democracy improves a public reason focused on evaluating policy consequences.

Government should be shaped into an instrument that learns from the analysis of policy consequences made available from newly available technologies of information. (1) Greater computer capacity is generating more empirical analysis. (2) The Internet permits the rise of prediction markets that forecast policy results even before the policies are implemented. (3) The Internet also creates a dispersed media that specializes in particular topics and methodologies, gathers diverse information, and funnels salient facts about policy to legislators and citizens. (4)

But a public reason focused on policy consequences will improve only if our laws facilitate it. For instance, constitutional federalism must be reinvigorated to permit greater experimentation across jurisdictions, because with the rise of empiricism, decentralization has more value for social learning today than ever before. (5) Congress should include mandates for experiments within its own legislation, making policy initiatives contain the platforms for their own self-improvement. (6)

Creating a contemporary politics of democratic updating on the basis of facts is a matter both of great historical interest and of enormous importance to our future. In the historical sweep of ideas, a government more focused on learning from new information moves toward fulfilling the Enlightenment dream of a politics of reason--but a reason based not on the abstractions of the French Revolution, but instead on the hard facts of the more empirical tradition predominating in Britain. By displacing religion from the center of politics, the Enlightenment removed issues by their nature not susceptible to factual resolution, permitting a focus on policies that could be improved by information. (7) The better democratic updating afforded by modern technology can similarly increase social harmony and prosperity by facilitating policies that actually deliver the goods.

For the future, a more consequentially informed politics is an urgent necessity. The same technological acceleration that potentially creates a more information-rich politics also generates a wide range of technological innovation--from nanotechnology to biotechnology to artificial intelligence. Although these technologies offer unparalleled benefits to mankind, they may also create catastrophic risks, such as rapid environmental degradation and new weapons of mass destruction. (8) Only a democracy able to rapidly assimilate the facts is likely to be able to avoid disaster and reap the benefits inherent in the technology that is transforming our world at a faster pace than ever before.

Every industry that touches on information--book publishing, newspapers, and college education to name just a few--is undergoing a continuous series of revolutionary changes as new technology permits delivery of more information more quickly at lower cost. The same changes that are creating innovation in such private industries can also quickly create innovation in social governance. But the difference between information-intensive private industries and political institutions is that the latter lack the strong competitive framework for these revolutions to occur spontaneously. This Essay thus attempts to set out a blueprint for reform to make better use of some available information technologies.

Part I describes the reality of technology acceleration as the acceleration both creates the tools for democratic updating and prompts its necessity. Technological acceleration is the most important development of our time--more important even than globalization. Although technologists have described and discussed its significance, its implications for law and political structure have been barely noticed.

Part II briefly discusses how better social knowledge can change political results. A premise of the claim is that some political disagreements revolve about facts, not simply values. As a result, better social knowledge can help democracies design policies to achieve widely shared goals. Social knowledge energizes citizens to act on those encompassing interests, like improved public education, because they come to better recognize the policy instruments to advance those interests. Better social knowledge provides better incentives for citizens to vote on these interests.

Part III considers the mechanisms for creating a contemporary politics of democratic updating that begins to meet the needs of the age of accelerating technology. It focuses on two of the new resources that can have substantial synergies in improving social common knowledge and shows how an increase in common knowledge can systematically improve political results by providing better incentives for citizens to work for encompassing social goods. First, Part III considers the improvement in empirical analysis of social policy that flows from increasing computational capacity. It then discusses how specialized and innovative media does much more than disseminate opinions: it widely distributes facts and factual analysis. The combination of these technologies can better discipline experts and representatives, providing stronger incentives for them to update on the basis of new facts.

Part IV discusses the information-eliciting rules that will maximize the impact of new technologies of information. These steps include a program of restoring, where possible, governmental structures that permit appropriate decentralization for experimentation, empirical testing, and learning. Congress and regulatory agencies should structure legislation and regulations to include social experiments when such experiments would help resolve disputed matters of policy. The Supreme Court should generally refrain from imposing new substantive rights for the nation so that it is easier to evaluate the consequences of different bundles of rights chosen by the states. But it should also protect the dispersed media, like blogs, from discriminatory laws, because this dispersed media plays a crucial role in modern policy evaluation. In short, the Supreme Court needs to emphasize a jurisprudence fostering social discovery and the political branches need to create frameworks for better social learning. Constitutive structures encouraging and evaluating experimentation become more valuable in an age where better evaluation of social experiments is possible.

1. TECHNOLOGICAL ACCELERATION

   It is the premise of this Essay that technological acceleration is occurring and that our political system must adapt to the world it is creating. The case for technological acceleration rests on three mutually supporting kinds of evidence. First, from the longest-term perspective, epochal change has sped up: the transitions from hunter-gatherer society to agricultural society to the industrial age each took progressively less time to occur, and our transition to an information society is taking less time still. Second, from a technological perspective, computational power is increasing exponentially, and increasing computational power facilitates the growth of other society-changing technologies like biotechnology and nanotechnology. Third, even from our contemporary perspective, technology now changes the world on a yearly basis both in terms of hard data, like the amount of information created, and in terms of more subjective measures, like the social changes wrought by social media.

   From the longest-term perspective, it seems clear that technological change is accelerating and, with it, the basic shape of human society and culture is changing. (9) Anthropologists suggest that for 100,000 years, members of the human species were hunter-gatherers. (10) About 10,000 years ago humans made a transition to agricultural society. (11) With the advent of the Industrial Revolution, the West transformed itself into a society that thrived on manufacturing. (12) Since 1950, the world has been rapidly entering the information age. (13) Each of the completed epochs has been marked by a transition to substantially higher growth rates. (14) The period between each epoch has become very substantially shorter. (15) Thus, there is reason to extrapolate to even more and faster transitions in the future.

   This evolution is consistent with a more fine-grained evaluation of human development. Recently, the historian Ian Morris has rated societies in the last 15,000 years on their level of...