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Runaway Technology
Can Law Keep Up?
JOSHUA A. T. FAIRFIELD RUNAWAY TECHNOLOGY
CAN CAN LAW LAW KEEP KEEP UP? UP?
9781108444576 Paperback AUD $30.95 / NZD $33.95 Available February 2021
Joshua A. T. Fairfield, Washington and Lee University School of Law
About
In an era of corporate surveillance, artificial intelligence, deep fakes, genetic modification, automation, and more, law often seems to take a back seat to rampant technological change. To listen to Silicon Valley barons, there’s nothing any of us can do about it. In this riveting work, Joshua A. T. Fairfield calls their bluff. He provides a fresh look at law, at what it actually is, how it works, and how we can create the kind of laws that help humans thrive in the face of technological change. He shows that law can keep up with technology because law is a kind of technology - a social technology built by humans out of cooperative fictions like firms, nations, and money. However, to secure the benefits of changing technology for all of us, we need a new kind of law, one that reflects our evolving understanding of how humans use language to cooperate.
Reviews
‘Professor Fairfield has given us a critically important and engaging book. It is urgent, yet has timeless wisdom. It is erudite, but also highly accessible. It is consequential yet still laced with commendable levity. Runaway Technology is a must-read not just because of its insight into whether the law can keep up with modern technology, but because of its perspective on the law itself as a tool for human flourishing.’
Woodrow Hartzog, Northeastern University
‘Fairfield’s Runaway Technology offers a powerful argument for the centrality of law to our efforts to tackle a range of contemporary threats through organization and cooperation. Recent decades have seen a shift in power away from legal institutions and towards private actors and the technologies they control.’
