The next of the social constraints, I want to talk about is social control, and how social control is exerted, asserted you know in societies. Social control are really about these guiding behaviors. How do we guide the behaviors of people? How do we hold members accountable? When things are done according to our values, like we talked about, we just talked about values. Like, so things go against our values or according to our values, what happens then? How do we hold members accountable for their behaviors in the society? in the 1700s Jean-Jacques Rousseau, he said, you know, man is free, but everywhere, he's in chains. And what he meant was that we have freedom of choice that we have volition and we can choose to do all sorts of things. I can choose to drive down the street on the wrong side of the street, I can run around hitting people, there's all kinds of things I can do. But some, for some reason, the vast majority of us, we accept the yolk of society, that is, we agree that we're going to play by the rules that society sets. And that's the kind of social control that we want to think about, that we actually we willingly adopt the yolk, in order to be able to live a more productive and more functional society. because think about if we had the kind of anarchy where everyone's running around doing whatever they wanted to, it would be very difficult to conduct the society. It would be very difficult to have a culture in that world. The social control is a way that society maintains order, right? That, that we, we, maintain order and, and through that, long term survival. We do it through politics, we have norms, morality, we have ethics, laws regulations, and all kinds of other forms of social control that's asserted over people. And sometimes people, you know, they, they push back against that, but nonetheless, it is in reaction to assertion by society. The society tries to control them, even if there is a rebellion about it they still, it still is in response to that social control. So, really at the heart of this is the problem of social control. Social control takes two forms. We'll just talk first about explicit controls. So, these are the very things that are written down, the things that are very obvious and clear, the kind of controls that come in the form of laws and, and regulation. So music sharing, early on, it was not clear that it was illegal, it was not really sure. society made it explicit, you can't do that. And that was the DMCC, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. it was a way of ensuring that people weren't doing this thing called music sharing. And so, what was before not completely clear, was clarified, this very, very, very specifically. And what some of the record companies, the RIA, the, the Record Industry, Association, went around suing people to make sure that they understood that, explicitly, this is not legal. And we'll put you in jail if it is. So, society is asserting this kind of control. In the, to earlier, go back to the cloning example, in the early 2000s cloning was, was unethical. It was, it's been unethical. But it was not illegal. Not until Brigitte Boisselier, the doctor, French doctor, claimed that she had done this, did all of the sudden the laws come out to do it. So, there's something about this, this kind of explicit control that maybe sort of backwards looking. Alright. And so, there was, she did this thing. It was not illegal. But then, all these laws came out to say hey, that thing is illegal. In fact, there are lots of civil laws against it. So, there's the United Nations' banned it, the United States Congress, lots of states banned it. every country that I know of that I was able to find, has actually, has actually banned human cloning. And also, some religious organizations banned it as well. The Roman Catholic Church said this is a grave offense, unto the dignity of the person, the person being cloned, and is also a problem for all people. there is an Islamic Fatwa issued against it, to say, you know, in effect, basically just because you can do something, it doesn't mean you should do it. Unless it serves the interest of mankind. Unless it makes us, protects us from harm and makes us better. So, again here is that the social control is asserted because someone is engaging in an act that is not considered helpful, it's not considered to make us better. And it's, in fact, considered something that potentially harmful to us all. Now, what's the harm, well there's this fear of what could go wrong. We don't understand enough about cloning to be able to do it in a way that makes sense. Let alone that we don't know what a good use of human cloning would be. So, regulatory constraints these, these kinds of regulations, I think really, the goal is to stabilize society, so you keep things sort of stable, and then also, to protect the vulnerable. these are really noble aims, these are important things, these are good things. These are the things that have to be in place, in order for us to have society. Things that what, basically by Jean-Jacques Rousseau was saying. Still, they can be controlling, they can be distracting. they require some legitimized ideas. So, I have an idea of doing something, and then I have to put, test it against the law. You know, this legal, this is, you know, regulated, this is not regulated. And in the end, what this does is the regulatory constraints, they force new tests, old tests for new concepts. So, I may have some new way of thinking about things, and I have to push that against old tests. Again, it's a good test to have to do to make sure that I'm not going to harm society. But nonetheless, we need to consider it when we think about pushing our innovations forward. That is getting our innovations implemented adopted in the world. The other kind of social control is or tacit. These are like norms, morals, ethics traditions, things that were generally not written down. They're not, sort of, explicit. They're not, it's not clear that we know why or how we know them, but we just know them. And so these are things like read this funny, I don't know if it's funny, but I read this interesting example of a there's was a store in Virginia and three or four young men, African American men. They had their pants down around their waist, their underwear is showing. Now, one of the men, in fact, had a holster and was carrying a nine millimeter pistol. In Virginia, there's an open carry law, so you're allowed to carry a firearm on the outside. Don't ask me about that. but an old woman in there, saw the boys and she started yelling at them, hey, you guys, you guys look awful. I can't believe you're doing that. You're bringing down the race. You're making us look bad. Like, pull up your pants. And she started berating them, despite the fact that, that one of them had a pistol. Eventually, apparently, the, the police came. But still, this kind of control, she was making explicit what was normally tacit. People should know not to wear their pants like that. People should know not to behave in that way. And so, she was trying to remind them that, in fact, there are social norms about how it is we dress. There are reasons that these, you know these things we wear are called underwear and not the outerwear. So, how do we overcome these social control constraints? And again, here the question is, do we, is it about overcoming them or really just about understanding them? So. I'm not proposing that we subvert these constraints, because I think it's important that society have control, the society be able to, to step into innovations in measured ways, in considered ways. But still, we want to consider them and understand that sometimes we may need to be able to see what's going on. So, three things we can do, we can watch for impending regulation, we can show society a better way, and we can put the idea before the pad. And let me tell you what I mean by those three things. There's an interesting story about monitoring rules and regulations where Sir Richard Branson, the CEO of Virgin Galactic. He was also Virgin Record, Virgin Airlines and now Virgin Galactic. He's trying to form a space tourism business. And the space tourism business is kind of interesting. It requires lots and lots of technical development. So, think of this as an innovation, where you have to create the, a new rocket, create a new rocket engine formulation. They're not doing it the same way. There's, there's two wing, there's two fuselage thing here takes the space ship up. And then, it goes up from there. Lots and lots and lots of technical innovations. Really important things developed and invented and created in the, in the spirit of, of getting this space craft to work. So, as you're working on this, one thing that happened was in the US Congress started debate, debate a bill, a, a law that would make it. So that if you did space tourism, that is if you took a tourist up into space and you crashed or the thing crashed coming down that the company would, Virgin Galactic, in this case, would be fully liable. Would be 100% liable for that. They would not be able to waive any, any liability. So, it's just to say basically if, if, you're driving a car, and it was a Ford car and you got in a crash, then Ford would be liable. That would be pretty problematic. And he saw immediately, that would be the end of this business. Right, it would be the end of the industry in the United States. And so, what did they do, what he did was he got all of his astronaut buddy, friends together, they all went to Washington, they started a really big campaign of lobbying, of trying to get the rules and regulations changed to make sure that they didn't pass a law that made this business that they had, this idea that they had impo, impossible. And in fact, they were able to defeat the legislation. They had Buzz Aldrin and a bunch of people like that, who came out and said, you know, if you do this, you're going to kill this industry. And so, you think about what the active innovation is lobbying that is monitoring rules and regulations and, and you know, basically asserting your interest with your, your local politician is not sound like innovation. But in fact, in this case, it was a critical thing to do, in order get the innovation passed. And so, this is not about out, outwitting or, or subverting society's role, but really it was sort of saying, hey, there's another way to look at this. This rule and regulation they're going to put in, the social control, is actually harmful to society. And actually, not going to help us as much as having a private space industry that will help us. Showing a better way. I remember working with some people who would run, would run clinical trials. And they were telling me about that they had developed a way to think about the statistics for clinical trials. And so, what they figured out was that there was a way to do the math, so that the, the statistics of each clinical trial. So that they could basically understand how to understand if a patient on the drug, you know, sooner or later they would have people on the drug and people like a control group, and would have them go along and they would look for symptoms and things. How they could do this statistics in a way that would allow them to say much earlier to see whether it's working or not working. And if people, if it's working, put the people in the not drug, on the drug, right? To help them. And if it isn't working, then take people off the drug. Because maybe it could be doing further harm. And so, this new way of doing the statistics, they proposed to the FDA and the FDA said, hey, wait a minute, this is not in our protocol. This is not the way that we accept it. You have to put this in a different form, in order for us to understand. So, you need to do it the old way, in other words. And these researchers were saying no, but we have a better way. And so what they ended up doing was actually teaching the FDA. They had to show the FDA how it is we do this thing. How we do this math. And, and teach them, in order to be able to get the innovation done. So again, here, it's really the innovation was not doing the math understanding how to do statistics. The innovation was convincing other people that, in fact, this was a legitimate way to do it. And then, therefore change the administrative procedures required in order to allow this new way to be accepted and to be legitimate in the way in the, in the administrative mechanism of the FDA. Another thing about distracting the, the distractions that are caused by regulations and rules is an interesting story about VisiCalc. I don't know if you know what VisiCalc was? VisiCalc was the predecessor of Excel. So, the guy who invented, actually there's two guys that invented VisiCalc. Never patented it. And, and, and the one of the inventors, the guy with the, the beard here Dan Bricklin, has a website where he talk about why they didn't invent it. And they think the headline of the website is something like, you, you know, were we stupid for not patenting it? And so, it turns out, at the time, the early, late 70s or early 80s, you couldn't patent software. Patents were considered a, a law of nature, there were algorithms, things like that. You couldn't patent plants. You couldn't patent m, software. And so, what they learned was that, basically they had about 10% chance of patenting it. Even if they lied about what it was and claimed that it was a software. They would still only had about 10% chance of getting a patent on that. So, they could spend a lot of time in their business trying to get that patent, work on the patent, paying their lawyers. You know, subverting this thing. ending up with a document that's barely defensible because once it's out that it's actually is software will be worth nothing. Or they could spend all that energy and time working on the business. You know, getting their business plan together, work on their marketing, getting the technology to work. And so, in that case, this kind of you know, the patent, the patent, the patent, that people are distracted by that. That actually doesn't add any value to have a patent without a product, that you have to have a product to market, and that way of creating value to make a patent worth something. Otherwise, it's not worth anything at all. And so, patenting VisiCalc had implications in the long run because the companies were able to copy what they did. But still, they had, they would not have been able to get a patent anyway. And they probably would have been out of business because they were so distracted by what was going on, that they actually wouldn't be able to bring this thing to market at all. So, social control is about guiding behavior, it's about holding people accountable for the things that happen in the society. And for keeping us functioning in a way that actually, protects the vulnerable and makes society work as a whole. So, in the next lecture, we're going to talk about history constraints. And what is the role of what came before in terms of creating an obligation for what comes next.
