Neil Richards, the Koch Distinguished Professor in Law and co-director of the Cordell Institute for Policy in Medicine & Law. (Photo: Kevin Roberts)

From Washington Magazine, Washington University in St. Louis.

Privacy expert Neil Richards says the path to surviving the ‘Information Revolution’ is through both education and the law.

When I was a little boy in England in 1979, my parents bought me a picture book about technology and the future. The book described an imminent technological paradise where we would all have video phones and shop on our televisions, computers would recognize speech, and there would be robotic helpers in our homes.

Forty years later, we are living in a version of that future. We have video phones in the form of FaceTime and Zoom. We shop on our TVs — or at least on computer screens that let us order from Amazon and thousands of other merchants. We talk to our computers in the form of Alexa and Siri, and we can have sophisticated conversations about almost any topic with generative text AIs like ChatGPT. And while Rosie of The Jetsons has yet to appear in our homes, robotic vacuum cleaners, lawnmowers and pool cleaners have been on the market for years. What’s more, in the form of our smartphones, we have pocket-sized devices that let us instantly obtain information or communicate with virtually anyone in the developed world. We are living in the future.

But that future is not quite so rosy…

Read the rest on the Washington Magazine website.