Free will is going away. Time to redesign society to take that into account.

In response to the Edge question of the year, Clay Shirky wrtoe

Consider laws concerning convicted pedophiles. Concern about their recidivism rate has led to the enactment of laws that restrict their freedom based on things they might do in the future, even though this expressly subverts the notion of free will in the judicial system. The formula here -- heinousness of crime x likelihood of repeat offense -- creates a new, non-insane class of criminals whose penalty is indexed to a perceived lack of control over themselves.

But pedophilia is not unique in it's measurably high recidivism rate. All rapists have higher than average recidivism rates. Thieves of all varieties are likelier to become repeat offenders if they have short time horizons or poor impulse control. Will we keep more kinds of criminals constrained after their formal sentence is served, as we become better able to measure the likely degree of control they have over their own future actions? How can we, if we are to preserve the idea of personal responsibility? How can we not, once we are able to quantify the risk?

Criminal law is just one area where our concept of free will is eroding. We know that men make more aggressive decisions after they have been shown pictures of attractive female faces. We know women are more likely to commit infidelity on days they are fertile. …

Conscious self-modulation of behavior is a spectrum. We have treated it as a single property — you are either capable of free will, or you fall into an exceptional category — because we could not identify, measure, or manipulate the various components that go into such self-modulation. Those days are now ending, and everyone from advertisers to political consultants increasingly understands, in voluminous biological detail, how to manipulate consciousness in ways that weaken our notion of free will.

In the coming decades, our concept of free will, based as it is on ignorance of its actual mechanisms, will be destroyed by what we learn about the actual workings of the brain. We can wait for that collision, and decide what to do then, or we can begin thinking through what sort of legal, political, and economic systems we need in a world where our old conception of free will is rendered inoperable.