Rethinking approaches to regulation of the Fourth Industrial Revolution

cointelegraph.com:

Mass adoption of technologies of the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) potentially could trigger an even larger than projected transition to a new taxonomy of regulation concerning various fields of human life, including that of finance and the market itself. New technologies are enabling new concepts, systems and frameworks, such as driverless cars, drone postal deliveries and central bank digital currencies (CBDC). In the foreseeable future, the role of technology in our society would be exceeding the boundaries of an elementary subsystem, where its regulation would be designated to the stakeholders or the market itself. 

A persistent theme of this short submission is the currently changing approaches to the regulation of technological risks following a rapid transition to the wholesale level leveraging and mass adoption of technologies. I tend to believe that effective regulatory design for new technologies embraced by the currently ongoing Fourth Industrial Revolution should, first of all, be considerate of prerequisites as set by the notions of dominant product design, public perception of technological risk and social benefits versus technological risks.

Turning away from a voluntary and fragmented utilization of technologies and more toward their mass adoption on a wholesale level, public perception toward the technologies’ risks, role and impact on society is continuing to evolve, subsequently resulting in changing approaches to regulation. This is better illustrated by an example of systems with organized complexity such as financial markets where technologies and computerization were of concern predominantly for the market itself. In comparison to the past industrial revolutions, which have not had a direct