The Collingridge Dilemma

When technology is new, it’s relatively easy to change the design, but hard to see the impacts or risks that should guide design decisions.

When technology is mature, broader impacts and risks are clearer, but it’s costly and difficult to significantly change it.

This creates a fundamental timing problem for technology governance: the window when intervention is easy doesn’t overlap with the window when you know what to intervene on.

The Internet’s Domain Name System is a case in point. Designing DNS differently from the start might have made Internet censorship by authoritarian governments less tractable. But that wasn’t visible as a concern when DNS was designed.

Related: 05-molecule—ai-governance-analogues-comparison, 05-atom—physical-vs-nonphysical-governance