The Enquirer’s Dan Horn recently turned himself into a two-month lab experiment, immersing himself in online gambling to find out how it might change his life.
It did.
Horn was not a gambler when he began. But soon a basketball game between teams he did not particularly care about mattered because he had money riding on it. Events that once had value of their own − a sporting event, a movie, even politics − could suddenly become another financial proposition.
By the end, Horn had had enough. He understood the attraction and had even enjoyed some of it, but he was ready to stop.
Horn seems to have found online gambling destabilizing to the life he had been living. But the world
around him does not seem to be quitting.
That may be the larger story.
The world isn't closing the app
Online gambling is no longer some distant social phenomenon. It is on our phones, advertised during our games and woven into the way millions of Americans experience sports. Whatever one thinks of it, or of the social consequences that may follow, it is hard to imagine the country simply putting it back in the bottle.
And sports books may be only the introductory course.
Prediction markets now allow people to put money on whether future events will occur. The subjects can include sports, elections, economic developments and countless other outcomes.
The legal questions are still being debated. Are these financial contracts or gambling? Should they primarily be regulated by the federal government or by the states?
But while government debates what to call them, the markets continue to grow.
That sequence is becoming familiar.
Capability comes before consensus
First comes the capability. Then the customers. Then the investment and businesses built around it. Only afterward does society begin seriously asking what rules should apply.
Artificial intelligence may be the clearest example.
We did not first conduct a national debate about how AI should affect education, employment, journalism, medicine and our personal lives. The technology arrived. People began using it. Businesses began reorganizing around it. Schools and governments began trying to catch up.
Autonomous vehicles pose another version of the same question. For more than a century, driving meant a human being sitting behind a steering wheel making the decisions. We are now gradually transferring some of those decisions to machines.
Genetic technology may eventually present even more consequential choices as our ability to identify, select, or alter genetic characteristics advances.
These things are not morally equivalent. Gambling, artificial intelligence, autonomous driving and genetics present very different benefits and risks.
What they share is something more basic.
Regulation isn't reversal
We increasingly acquire the capability to do something before we have decided whether we should do it, how far we should go, or what rules should govern it.
That does not mean government is powerless. We can regulate gambling and protect minors and problem gamblers. We can set safety standards for autonomous vehicles and ethical boundaries for genetic technology.
But regulation is different from reversal.
Once millions of people use a technology, billions of dollars are invested in it and businesses are constructed around it, returning to the world that existed before it arrived becomes increasingly difficult.
An individual can close the app. A society cannot so easily undo what it has normalized.
We are living through a period when remarkable new capabilities are arriving faster than our ability to decide what we want to do with them − or to understand what they may do to us.
The challenge is not simply deciding whether we like the future that is coming.
It is learning how to govern it before it begins governing us.
Dennis Doyle lives in Anderson Township and is a member of the Enquirer Board of Contributors.
This article originally appeared on Cincinnati Enquirer: We keep building the future before deciding if we want it | Opinion
