Re-imagining Tomorrow: A Technology, Innovation Law, and Ethics Symposium on Addictive Technology and Children

Re-imagining Tomorrow: A Technology, Innovation Law, and Ethics Symposium on Addictive Technology and Children Margaret Chon* “In the end, the tech world of today was built on the foundation of what we had fought for—a world where the voices that had been silenced for so long were finally heard. The battle wasn’t easy, but in the end, we had won. And the world was better for it.” Created in response to a prompt that I provided to ChatGPT 4 recently,1 the story’s “happily ever after” ending is a recurring feature of my recent experimentations with chatbot-aided creative writing. Each of the fictional stories that I may have “co-authored”2 with ChatGPT 4 ends on an optimistic note on which all differences are resolved smoothly. Here’s an earlier part of the same short story: * Faculty Director, Technology, Innovation Law, and Ethics (TILE) Program and Donald and Lynda Horowitz Endowed Chair for the Pursuit of Justice, Seattle University School of Law. Many thanks to my research assistants Arthur Guilford and Jaren Wilburn as well as to the editorial boards (past and present) of the Seattle University Law Review, for their support. 1. I prompted the chatbot to write a short fictional work that featured someone like me debating various prominent billionaire technologists about the benefits and harms of technology. OpenAI, Response to a Series of User Queries, CHATGPT, (Feb. 15, 2025), https://chat.openai.com/. 2. U.S. COPYRIGHT OFF., COPYRIGHT AND ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE PART 2: COPYRIGHTABILITY—A REPORT OF THE REGISTER OF COPYRIGHTS 10 (2025), https://www.copyright.gov/ai/Copyright-and-Artificial-Intelligence-Part-2-Copyrightability-Report.pdf (“Although an AI-generated output cannot be considered a joint work with respect to the user and AI system, joint authorship provides a helpful analogy in assessing whether a party contributed sufficient expression to be considered an author.” (footnotes omitted)). 605 606 Seattle University Law Review [Vol. 48:605 Technology was not a neutral force—it was always going to reflect the values of those who created it. With this lens, we began shaping the laws that governed algorithms and artificial intelligence. We built laws that ensured algorithms were transparent, explainable, and accountable. We held tech companies to the fire, requiring that their AIs be checked for biases, that their data collection practices were strictly regulated, and that their impacts on vulnerable populations were considered and mitigated. ... We focused on collective growth rather than individual egos. When the people spoke, we listened. In this new world, the conversation about technology was not about what was possible, but who it was possible for. We began to ask questions that had previously been overlooked. Who were the creators of this technology? What values were embedded in the code? Who benefited from its success? Who paid the price for its failures?3 As this additional excerpt indicates, chatbot-generated stories possess a remarkable ability to mimic actual human ideas and interests as well as predict concerns expressed by those who are deeply worried about some of the directions in which digital technologies seem to be sweeping us all without adequate and meaningful input or consent. It also demonstrates that machine learning models can predict possible changes in legal regulation of themselves, while also foreseeing that those in control of developing them can and will probably ignore these suggested paths forward, unless they are held “to the fire.” Outside of the realm of chatbot-generated fiction, how exactly would these directions in law reform take place? The machine’s story did not go into much detail, but the articles and essays published in this special symposium issue of the Law Review do. They explore interesting, perhaps even provocative, ways to steer technology toward more ethical directions. And their proposals are consistent with a core mission of the Technology, Innovation Law, and Ethics (TILE) program at Seattle University School of Law, which aims to expand our understanding of the intertwined ethical and legal dimensions of innovation and technology. The law school formed the TILE program in part to address the glaring gap between what technologies currently offer and the even more wondrous achievements possible if innovation was re-imagined, deployed, and deliberately centered around the values of human dignity, human flourishing, and human rights. As two recent Nobel Prize-winning economists 3. OpenAI, supra note 1 (emphasis added). 2025] Re-Imagining Tomorrow 607 recently reminded us: “Debates on new technology ought to center not just on the brilliance of new products and algorithms but also on whether they are working for the people or against the people.”4 Digital technologies have brought many welcome conveniences “for the people,” from online shopping to creative fiction writing. Yet they have also worked “against the people” in ways both obvious and insidious. For example, our technology explosion has contributed to the rise of severe inequality within and between countries, with consequent political and social unrest due to glaring differences in the distributions of income, wealth, and social esteem across societies.5 The “E” in TILE stands for ethics, aligned not only with the professional ethical codes to which all active lawyers are bound, as well as the longstanding humanistic traditions of Jesuit higher education, but also with our law school’s aspiration to influence and build legal frameworks and systems so they more actively support ethical development and uses of innovation and technology (“ethical technology”). What is ethical technology? One of Amazon’s earliest investors, a highly successful Seattle lawyer and venture capitalist, posited that many of the same innovation drivers that have led to our current onslaught of disruptive and transformative technologies could also, if those in control were interested, address pressing issues pertaining to livability of cities, privacy, homelessness, education, transportation, and the environment.6 Indeed, those aforementioned Nobel Prize-winning economists, while warning against indiscriminate worship of technology for its own sake, fully acknowledge the benefits of technology as complements to human autonomy, productivity, and creativity.7 In addition to the important lodestar of human well-being, ethical technology also favors meaningful employment, market creation, and economic growth to lift all (rather than just a relatively small number of) boats. Even the person famous for coining the term “disruptive innovation” cautioned in overlooked follow-up work that innovation per se should not be the beginning or end of the story. Distinguishing between efficiency innovations and market-creating innovations, they urged business schools to educate their students to prioritize the latter type of 4. DARON ACEMOGLU & SIMON JOHNSON, POWER AND PROGRESS: (...truncated)