Avoiding the coming IoT dystopia

Posted Feb 15, 2019 0:08 UTC (Fri) by felixfix (subscriber, #242)
In reply to: Avoiding the coming IoT dystopia by nix
Parent article: Avoiding the coming IoT dystopia

My apologies for being perceived as an anarchist rant, if I did.

What I meant is that far too many people pass ill-conceived laws in a rush with no thought to consequences, wanted or not, predicted or not. I then listed three ways any such law would go wrong.

I'd rather you answered those three predictions than the perceived-political preamble. But since you thought I went there, and then did go there yourself with a counter-example instead of responding to my three predictions, I will answer your counter-example.

Your last paragraph is as wrong as can be. Car advertising has always had manufacturers touting their safety, and if you look at graphs of vehicle safety per mile traveled, without seeing any years to make it easy, you will be hard-pressed to tell from the graph when government-mandated safety features came into play. Seat belts were available as options long before governments mandated them. Disc brakes, more efficient engines, many many such features were sold before governments mandated them.

Common sense and any reading of history shows that as people become more wealthy, as economies improve and as societies have more spare cash and more free time, they like products which don't blow up, burn them, fall apart, or endanger their children. Pick any product you wish; look at its history over time; and you will see that people demanded better products, always, continuously. When products were new and dangers unknown, people died and were injured; demand brought better products, and cheaper products; more customers meant more demand for safer and cheaper products.

Governments have *always* been late to the game. Maybe you should research saccharine, first declared carcinogenic in spite of all evidence, and finally declared non-carcinogenic 30 or 40 years later. Coffee is good -- bad -- good -- well heck who knows!

To have blind faith in government regs to be either timely or correct is not supported by history.

Now if you please, answer my three predictions with some substance. They may be partly flippant and sarcastic, but that should have made them easier to refute.

Avoiding the coming IoT dystopia

Posted Feb 15, 2019 0:47 UTC (Fri) by sfeam (subscriber, #2841) [Link] (3 responses)

You argue that government certification is not necessary to drive consumer demand for safety because the consumer will in any case choose a safe product in favor of an unsafe product. But this assumes that the consumer has some way of telling whether a product is safe or not. If you want historical examples, look at food safety before and after creation of the FDA. Consumers want, and always wanted, safe food and safe medicine. But "the market" demonstrably failed to provide any way for the consumer to know whether a particular packaged item was safe or not.

Determining the properties of a commodity IoT gizmo pulled from a bargain bin may be more feasible than determining the health benefit or harm of a box of fad diet supplement with no ingredient list, but only for someone with a lot more technical savvy and test gear than any normal shopper. The seat-belt example is not parallel because anyone can see whether they are in fact present, and favor a vehicle with seatbelts regardless of whether that feature was required or voluntarily offered. The recent VW diesel emission scandal is maybe a better parallel, since individuals purchasers had no way to detect that the manufacturer was lying about the behavior of an advertised feature. Yeah they choose the "safer" product, but failure of what was supposed to be a government certification of compliance vitiated that choice.

Avoiding the coming IoT dystopia

Posted Feb 24, 2019 20:27 UTC (Sun) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

Seatbelts in cars may also be a false example. I'm not aware of all the details, but in the UK, rear seatbelts became a mandatory requirement in 1986. But how many people realise that all vehicles SINCE THE EARLY SIXTIES were capable of having rear seatbelts fitted? BECAUSE IT WAS A LEGAL REQUIREMENT. There was no requirement to fit them, but the mounting points had to be there, and they had to be a manufacturer's option.

I don't know what the dates are for front seatbelts, but obviously they're earlier. But those dates mean that, for almost my entire lifetime, rear seatbelts have been an option on new cars. However, until they became mandatory, many cars didn't have them. I know - in my 1985 car - I had them fitted by the dealer before delivery, so they weren't that common.

Cheers,
Wol

Avoiding the coming IoT dystopia

Posted Feb 25, 2019 2:52 UTC (Mon) by nybble41 (subscriber, #55106) [Link] (1 responses)

> Consumers want, and always wanted, safe food and safe medicine.

Not true. *All else being equal*, safe food and medicine are obviously preferable to unsafe food and medicine. However, that condition almost never holds. Safe food and medicine cost more—and given the choice, quite a few people would choose slightly more risky products over safe ones with higher prices. The FDA makes people safer (by some metrics) by forcing them to either pay the higher price or go without, thus trading one highly visible form of harm for another, more subtle kind.

Avoiding the coming IoT dystopia

Posted Feb 25, 2019 7:28 UTC (Mon) by smurf (subscriber, #17840) [Link]

So what's the subtle harm in "forcing" people to not buy unsafe food or drugs?

I've got a more tangible harm of not doing that for you: the same people who are unlikely to buy safe food are also unlikely to voluntarily buy health insurance, therefore (when the unsafe food bites them or the unsafe drugs don't cure their disease) they end up as non-paying customers of the hospital's ER, thus forcing increased healthcare costs on the rest of us.

This is not hypothetical. In countries with mandatory insurance, going to a hospital costs an order of magnitude less than in the US.

Avoiding the coming IoT dystopia

Posted Feb 15, 2019 1:04 UTC (Fri) by karkhaz (subscriber, #99844) [Link]

I think the car example is a poor one.

> blow up, burn them, fall apart, or endanger their children

it's very unlikely that IoT devices will cause these dangers, and certainly not at the scale at which car fatalities would happen without safety features.

The real problem is that IoT devices are dangerous to populations _other than their users_ at massive scale---what in economics is termed a 'negative externality'. Comparable examples are environmental damage by companies, and this is exactly the situation where governmental regulation is required. Companies typically don't regulate themselves for harm caused to their non-customers, except to prevent damage that is so spectacular that it causes them to lose even customers who are not affected.

Consumers don't care that their IoToaster participated in a DDoS attack against a DNS server or whatever, in fact they don't know what that even means. They're not going to pay more money for a product that promises not to do that.

Avoiding the coming IoT dystopia

Posted Feb 15, 2019 15:42 UTC (Fri) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (1 responses)

Maybe you should research saccharine, first declared carcinogenic in spite of all evidence, and finally declared non-carcinogenic 30 or 40 years later.

What on earth does changing scientific understanding have to do with any of this?!

Avoiding the coming IoT dystopia

Posted Feb 15, 2019 16:47 UTC (Fri) by felixfix (subscriber, #242) [Link]

There was no changing scientific consensus, only a changing bureaucratic opinion.