> How do people not understand that some laws only make sense at a certain scale?

100% agree, and the problem is that technology moves a lot faster than law can keep up. Just look at the Flock brouhaha. Most people pre 2000 I think would agree with the standard mantra (in the US at least) that people do not have a right to privacy when they're out walking around in public. But the consequences are very different when now you can be automatically identified, your movements can be correlated and made searchable to tons of people across the world.

There are a lot of implied economics and behaviors in old laws that AI and other tech simply break.