Are Some Technologies Beyond Regulatory Regimes?

TL;DR

This paper investigates the challenges of regulating rapidly evolving and potentially chaotic technological domains like cyber, suggesting traditional regulatory approaches may be ineffective and proposing the need for new paradigms informed by game theory.

Contribution

It introduces a game theoretic learning model to analyze strategic stability in democratized technology domains, highlighting their potential inherent chaos and the limitations of existing regulation.

Findings

Many-player games in these domains may lack Nash equilibria.

Traditional regulation approaches may be unsuitable for chaotic technology domains.

The chaotic nature could inspire novel regulatory strategies.

Abstract

Regulatory frameworks are a common tool in governance to incent and coerce behaviors supporting national or strategic stability. This includes domestic regulations and international agreements. Though regulation is always a challenge, the domain of fast evolving threats, like cyber, are proving much more difficult to control. Many discussions are underway searching for approaches that can provide national security in these domains. We use game theoretic learning models to explore the question of strategic stability with respect to the democratization of certain technologies (such as cyber). We suggest that such many-player games could inherently be chaotic with no corresponding (Nash) equilibria. In the absence of such equilibria, traditional approaches, as measures to achieve levels of overall security, may not be suitable approaches to support strategic stability in these domains. Altogether new paradigms may be needed for these issues. At the very least, regulatory regimes that fail to address the basic nature of the technology domains should not be pursued as a default solution, regardless of success in other domains. In addition, the very chaotic nature of these domains may hold the promise of novel approaches to regulation.