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SF to Establish Office of Emerging Technology

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Re: SF to Establish Office of Emerging Technology

#71

Post by shuckles »

BurningFrog wrote: post #61
shuckles wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No the purpose of this legislation is to provide a one stop shop for businesses that would have to interact with city departments anyways: scooters with SFMTA, rental startups with DBI or planning. It is not in theory supposed to be a gatekeeper for businesses that can operate independently of local regulation, though Mar has written bad legislation before. The Hacker News outrage is non-sensical. These are businesse…

I'm not ruling out that you're right. Only time will tell, I guess. Though, if this is such a reasonable, common sense idea, there must be other cities that have also implemented something like it. What are their track records?

This is a great question, and I wish it were the direction the larger discussion took instead of hysteria. I'm not sure about other examples, and the USA's office of emerging technology was more of an advisory body to Congress than a regulatory invention. I'm not certain that any city has had quite the mix of bureaucratic morass and eager solutionism of San Francisco. A single point of contact with latitude to interpret existing law for new use cases is, per many, the advantage of more authoritarian governments. It would maybe behoove our community to capture this office and use it to preempt more conservative city departments.

This is coverage of the proposal from a year ago. It is the outcome of a process to actually _improve_ what everyone can agree was a totally disastrous rollout of scooters in SF, with blame to be assigned to both the city and operators: https://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/news/2019/01/11/eme...

Furthermore, the above makes it even more clear that the proposal only applies to people who are trying to test products that use sidewalk and road spaces.

Re: SF to Establish Office of Emerging Technology

#73

Post by DrScump »

SkyMarshal wrote: post #54
aphextron wrote: post #8

Just one more nail in the coffin for SF/bay area as an innovation center. It's been really sad to see that rent seeking and bureaucracy have completely choked that place out. I'm not sure if there will ever be another time and place like existed in silicon valley from the 70s-2000s where forward thinking creative individuals can come together in a critical mass, with an environment that allows risk taking and innovat…

Silicon Valley proper (Palo Alto to San Jose) is still alive and well. All sorts of cool things happening in the corridor between Stanford and Santa Clara, as they have since radar and transistors were invented there a half century ago. Startups locating in SF was done more recently because young startup employees wanted more of a city-based, young adult social life, vs the more college student or family-oriented one…

  since radar and transistors were invented there a half century ago.
Radar was not an SV invention. There were many attempts at radar worldwide, but I (an SV native, BTW) would credit the UK first, especially with their invention of the cavity magnetron.

Re: SF to Establish Office of Emerging Technology

#74

Post by pfletcherhill »

SkyMarshal wrote: post #62

One problem with this is that's ex-ante, not ex-post. Eg, it asks a bunch of bureaucrats to evaluate a technology before it's deployed, before they and the public get to see how it actually works, as if they have some insight into the relative pros and cons and public reception of an innovative new thing in its formative stages. Not very empirical. A better ex-post structure would be to blacklist/regulate something a…

This is a great take.
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