Runaway technology : can law keep up?

Table of Contents: 1. Can law keep up? 2. Rates of change 3. Technology law 4. Language, the human superpower 5. What went wrong with science? 6. Law's fruitful fictions 7. Shifting how we think 8. Why we fail 9. Jurisgenesis 10. TL;DR.

A Conversational Method Law should be understood as a system for adapting human social technology to human physical technology. Law runs on language, and it upgrades according to the rules of language. So as we discuss those rules and the role they play in the development of law, I would like to do so at the same time. My aim is for this book to be an example of this method. This book tries to develop language we can use to talk about how to develop the kind of language (law) that will help us survive the future. I will try to state my understanding of how things are and how things ought to be straightforwardly. It is important to me to be clear enough to be understood where I am right, and identifiably wrong where I am wrong. But even if stated forcefully, everything I say here is to be taken provisionally, as an introduction to a conversation. That is because a book is only half a conversation. A book is only paper until read, and the reader brings more than half the meaning to the table. If I mean to say-as I do mean to say-that life-giving language arises from community and context, then I must admit that I am missing your half of the conversation. I wish that this book were closer in form to a conversation, such that you could respond to what I say here, and I could accept your criticism, and we could develop more precise and better language for talking about the issue. That is how we would make progress