I don't really understand how we got to a place where literally every industry has to follow extensive regulations in literally every aspect of what they do but somehow the tech industry gets a pass to do whatever the fuck they want?
Like, the tech industry has been able to do whatever it wants and get away with some of the worst fucking shit imaginable with almost no regulation at all and I don't know how we got here. The internet and AI are being used to facilitate sexual trafficking of children and adults. It is being used to falsify reality, to allow for revenge porn, allow for gambling on the likelihood of a nuclear holocaust, surveil people on an unimaginable level, etc. And we know that if they wanted to regulate this shit, they could because look at how easy it is to shut down images from Gaza, Sudan, etc.
For example, Tesla. It makes cars. But because it's a "tech" company somehow Elon Musk gets to make cars that meet no safety regulations at all. They have doors that will chop your fingers off, they will drive you into other cars, they blow up spontaneously and will auto lock the doors so you can't get out of the fucking car if it's on fire doesn't have to respond to or honor product recalls because their cars blow up (remember the reddit user who has a literal bombed out Tesla sitting in his driveway because it blew up and hasn't been able to get Tesla to respond/replace it for literal years).
Meanwhile, every other car maker has to meet rigorous standards surrounding safety and environmental regulations. They have to undergo extreme testing for airbags, crumple times, child locks, ensuring the trunk won't chop your fingers off by having multiple sensors everywhere, that the brakes fucking work, crash testing dummies, etc. So why does Tesla get to make unsafe vehicles simply because it's considered part of the "tech" industry and not the auto industry? If I was an auto company I would be pissed that Tesla gets to sell its shitty unsafe cars while your cars have to go through 8 million hoops to be approved for sale.
Another example: A lot of AI billionaires want to test psychedelics on people just to fucking see what happens to the point where this administration signed an executive order to expedite this through the FDA. Elon Musk wants to test putting microchips in people's brains for the fuck of it. If actual doctors wanted to do this it would take literal years to get it through ethical board reviews and safety reviews and even then probably would never get there because you have to show what the benefits of studying these things would be and how you would put safe guards in place to ensure no one is being abused and the technology can't be used for harm. So why do these people get to suggest these things and try to do these things in Elon's case with zero fucking oversight simply because they are in the "tech" industry?
I just completed a study on a medical device. This medical device started being tested in humans in 2004. It received FDA approval for postoperative pain control in 2019 after numerous study after study after study showed it reduced opioid use postoperatively. The amount of studies that were done showing its efficacy and safety in order to get FDA approval took FIFTEEN YEARS. The reason I did this study is because there aren't any looking at its use for postoperative pain after c-sections, specifically. And you can't use a medical device for a standard of postoperative pain control in every surgery. You have to show its efficacy for it, hence our study. The IRB approval (and ethical review board to ensure safety and that the study is ethical) for our study took two years and required our team to do a QI initiative followed by a retrospective study to justify why the study was needed despite this medical device being FDA approved for the very purpose we were using it for.
So Elon Musk just...being able to put fucking microchip in monkey brains and recruit people online for one is fucking insane.
Like why is the tech industry somehow this darling that doesn't have to have any fucking regulations at all? And this isn't even getting into the fact that AI is just allowed to build data centers with zero regard whatsoever for the environmental or ecological impacts.
An industry that requires no ethics education, has no regulation, has no oversight whatsoever just gets to do whatever it wants to people and the environment. I genuinely think that part of this is because congress is full of old people who don't understand technology and think the internet is just this nebulous thing that doesn't exist "in real life" so anything connected to it also isn't a tangible thing that can impact our actual lived lives. But I don't think that's the sole reason for all of this. I also think our government has been so ineffectual for literally decades that it hasn't been able to achieve anything that would've led to regulation of the tech industry and now we have an industry that just gets to do whatever the fuck it wants regardless of the impact it has on our lives, the environment, our psychological wellbeing, our privacy and has no ethical obligations guiding what it does.
It' so fucking disgusting.
