Starting point- failure to account for social norms causes serial policy failure

(Daron , Institute Professor at MIT , 5-20)

Some of these objectives need robust regulation—a point underscored by Crawford and Reich, as well as by Rediet Abebe and Maximilian Kasy in their discussion of actors outside the AI industry. I should have been more emphatic on this point. But there was a reason for my focus on attitudes and norms: the policy prescriptions highlighted by these authors will not be effective without a change in social norms. Short of such changes, there will be myriad ways for tech companies to avoid or circumvent regulations, and they can do so without suffering sufficient blowback from their employees or customers to force them to change course (in the same way that, without pressure from their customers or employees, banks circumvented regulations before the financial crisis). I thus stand by my conclusion that the first step has to be securing a broad recognition of what current digital and AI technologies are doing to the labor market and democracy, and building general agreement about the responsibilities of the technologists and leading firms in this area.