Four legal approaches may be followed in attempting to channel technological development in socially useful direction: specific directives, market incentive modifications, criminal prohibitions, and changes in decision-making structures. Specific directives involve the government’s identifying one or more factors controlling research, development, or implementation of a given technology. Directives affecting such factors may vary from administrative regulation of private activity to government ownership of a technological operation. Market incentive modifications are deliberate alterations of the market within which private decisions regarding the development and implementation of technology are made. Such modifications may consist of imposing taxes, to cover the costs to society of a given technology, granting subsidies to pay for social benefits of a technology, creating the right to sue to prevent certain technological development, or easing procedural rules to enable the recovery of damages to compensate for harm caused by destructive technological activity. Criminal prohibitions may modify technological activity in areas impinging on fundamental social values, or they may modify human behavior likely to result from technological applications—for example, the deactivation of automotive pollution control devices in order to improve vehicle performance. Alteration of decision-making structures includes all possible modifications in the authority, constitution, or responsibility of private and public entities deciding questions of technological development and implementation. Such alterations include the addition of public-interest members to corporate boards, the imposition by statute of duties on governmental decision-makers, and the extension of warranties in response to consumer action.
