In general I disagree (but would agree with you in certain cases, like something that was doable but gatekept due to cost).

Alot of X's aren't a problem until they can scale. It's not pragmatic to outlaw everything that might be a problem at scale but might never be able to achieve that scale.

We're in an era where we are discovering alot of abuses that could only be classified as an issue due to scale and efficiency.

The problem is that many problems are so because of their scale. For instance, you have billions of harmful bacteria in your body, but are (presumably) not afflicted because they can be handled by your immune system. It would be bad to eliminate all the bad bacteria (even if this were possible without killing good bacteria) because your immune system would become more fragile in future infections.

For many things, the scale is the problem.

> What I'm against is this idea that if X is okay as long as X is expensive, but the moment X becomes cheap, or democratized, or accessible, all of a sudden it's a problem, and we need a ban.

These kinds of things tend to increase attention given to issues, yes. I don't think it's unreasonable to think that people care more about things that are easily and practically abused, because, well, those are the things that are more likely to actually affect them. Plus it's a lot harder to argue against some formless "maybe people could be watching me" threat, but a lot easier to reason about a specific example.

> Example: it's already legal to keep tabs on people in public. There are businesses build on this idea, private investigators. A little sleazy? Expensive? Sure. But legal. If you want to be consistent, you should ban them too.

I'm not really a fan of private investigators, to be honest, but I haven't really given it as much thought as I should before I argue my case online.

Some things are actually acceptable, not necessarily good, if only done/available on a small scale. But get problematic once done on a large scale.

Good example is paper records, lots of sensible stuff is recorded on paper records. Access to those is often less than perfectly secured. But, because accessing hundreds of them is tedious, and stealing them might require an actual truck, this is not a real world problem. The moment we digitize this data, it get‘s so easy to access, copy, etc that the old level of access protections is no longer enough.

Similar problem with scaling up face detection. Lot‘s of jerks would surely like to harass other people by following them around everywhere, spying on them and generally make their life’s miserable. Until know, this was really expensive - time and money wise - so it did happen only rarely. But once this gets automated, it also gets cheap.

There are a near infinite number of things that we could pass laws against but don't because it isn't currently an issue. We pass the law when it becomes an issue.

Should we bother passing a law saying it is illegal to teleport across international borders, thus evading immigration checkpoints? Should we set tax rates for the sale and import of time machines? Or does it make sense to wait until either is remotely possible?