The fast-moving new technologies have caught off guard lawmakers and regulators over the past few years and it is expected to continue doing so if they do not plan accordingly. Genetically modified glowing plants, 3D printed guns, robots taking more and more of our jobs, drones and new business models for sharing economy companies have changed the world we live in.
One of the biggest challenges, as the pace of technological innovation accelerates, is to ensure that regulation and enforcement keep up with the new technologies development in a balanced way between safety and expediently implementing new technologies on products available on the market.
The solution to this challenge may lie in building larger external agencies to monitor and review the ever-increasing number of new technologies. Another option consists in streamlining the regulatory process. However, at least a part of the solution, if not a key part of it, might actually consist in recognizing how technology can lead to a decrease of the needed amount of regulation and enforcement.
Deloitte University Press published recently one of the first overviews on how enforcement and rulemaking are changing and the ways regulation and enforcement can evolve. Many of the suggestions exposed in their paper focused on better harnessing technology in order to improve the process. For instance, regulators can make use of the online digital platforms in order to better capture market and citizen concerns when developing and implementing new rules rather than relying on limited and slow “notice and comment” or “town halls” processes that can even take up to a year.
While much of regulation enforcement still relies today upon timely and costly inspections, these attempts to monitor everyone for every possible violation are not efficient anymore. The enforcers of the future could utilize instead data sharing, open data, citizen reporting and improved data analytics to spot violations more efficiently.
In the health care field, as medical chips are able to monitor reactions to pharmaceuticals, the future pharmacies could start dispensing prescriptions depending on live data collected from communities and patients. Real-time data about the safety of medications will be certainly available in the near future. This will help doctors and pharmacists to make safer and quicker personalized adjustments as needed, as well as allowing regulators access to data that may have previously taken months or even years to gather.
Industries or companies that will use blockchain databases will have all transactions happen in a transparent way. There will be less need for regulators to enforce through specific target inspections since automatic “inspections” will be happening by everyone and all the time. Even the regulation itself will be disrupted in the near future due to the fast pace of technological advances.
