Regulatory Philosophy Reflects Trust in Authority

Regulatory frameworks for emerging technology reveal deeper assumptions about where society places its trust, in centralized institutions or decentralized markets.

The EU’s top-down AI regulation reflects trust in coordinated governmental expertise to anticipate and prevent harm before it occurs. The US’s distributed approach reflects trust in market competition and existing legal frameworks to identify and correct problems as they emerge. China’s hybrid model reflects trust in centralized goal-setting combined with decentralized experimentation to achieve those goals.

These aren’t just policy preferences, they’re expressions of where each society believes wisdom and judgment reside.

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