You can justify almost anything as "progressing society" Tech companies can be "making the world a better place", but that shouldn't give then permission to break laws.
You can justify almost anything as "progressing society" Tech companies can be "making the world a better place", but that shouldn't give then permission to break laws.
The mental model of how the law works that most people have is wrong.
The law does not, by default, prosecute all crimes. There is no country in the world that has even close to the law enforcement capacity to investigate and prosecute all crimes. What tends to happen instead is crimes that to put it colliquially, "piss off the wrong people" get prosecuted. ie, crimes that draw attention of either the general public or specific people in power.
A reasonable approximation is single digit or less of crimes get investigated and prosecuted, with it obviously being high for violent and visible crimes like murder and lower for less violent and visible crimes like stealing the office paperclips.
Another way of looking at this is, in the current system, if your house get burgled, you need to report it to the police if you expect anything to happen, whereas one could imagine another system where the police already know your house has been burgled and you don't need to report it.
I believe with AI we will be able to scale enforcement much better than a single digit percent. This will allow for more fair enforcement and reviews and cleanup of old laws or punishments which don't make sense anymore.