We don't legislate emergent technologies into existence. We almost never do. They just emerge, dragged forth by Adam Smith's invisible hand. Then we have to see what people are actually going to do with them, and try to legislate to take account of that.
William GibsonI feel like I've been very fortunate in that I've stuck like a burr to the dog-leg of the next generation of nerdism. I've been carried into the XXIth century on Bill Gates' pants-cuff.
William GibsonAll my life I've encountered people who were obsessed with one particular class of object or experience, who were constantly pursuing that thing. Since I was a little kid, I hadn't afforded myself the opportunity, I guess, to have a hobby.
William GibsonOne of the things I have taken for granted, in terms of how technology works in the world, is the people that develop it and get it out there don't really know what we are going to do with until we have really gotten ahold of it and it has become ubiquitous. And then we wind up doing things that its inventors never dreamed of and those things become the real change drivers. That is actually where the whole technocracy thing falls apart for me, because the people who invented it can't predict what we're going to do with it.
William GibsonIn effect, I grew up in a sort of timewarp, a place where times are scrambled up. There are elements of my childhood that look to me now, in memory more like the 1940s or the 1950s than the 1960s. Jack [Womack] says that that made us science fiction writers, because we grew up experiencing a kind of time travel.
William Gibson