Driving off the public health cliff – driverless cars and 3D printers are coming, you can't stop them, and you need to get involved in their regulation right now

Recent decades have seen remarkable advances in technology and disastrous trends in chronic disease, such as obesity. The public health community – advocates, scholars, attorneys, and professionals – largely failed to get involved in the regulation of the most recent paradigm-shifting advance, the Internet, at an early stage. That technology, as a result, evolved in ways that did not take into account public health. Now, the Internet contributes to some of these disastrous public health trends. For example, accretion of personal information on the Internet and the proliferation of screens for content enable advertisers to personalize advertising and to deliver it to specific persons, increasing its effectiveness. Much of this advertising is for unhealthy foods and drink, contributing to the obesity epidemic. Two new technologies – driverless cars and 3D printers – promise to be widely available within a decade and, like the Internet, to shift paradigms. The public health community has an opportunity now to insert itself into the discussion of how these technologies should be regulated. Failure to do so would compound the mistakes of past decades with earlier technologies and have untold consequences for the public health. This presentation will introduce these technologies and ways that they could affect public health. I will then talk about what entities could or should logically regulate them and propose reasonable, public health-minded regulations. I will also discuss the public health community's past failures to participate in the regulation of important, emerging technologies and how those failures have impacted public health.