This would stop the currently exponential pace of growth from outpacing what society, and regulation, can adapt to. Thus avoiding the inevitable crash that will happen when we lose control of the exponentially accelerating train of technology, and it flies off the rails.
cory doctorov recently wrote about reverse centaurs: instead of you controlling the machine, the machine controls you. (instead of human head on machine body, it’s machine head on human body). they presented it as something that AI brings about and that is especially bad.
in think that we’ve already been living in that world for a hundred years though: every time that a factory owner tells the factory workers what they must do / how they must do it, the worker was effectively the body part of a centaur. just that the head was some other human, instead of a machine. but i suspect that from a worker’s perspective, that would hardly make any difference. so when doctorov complains about reverse-centaurs today, it’s only because he hasn’t been the body part for the last hundred years already. it’s because the higher-up classes are hurting today that they make a whole lot of noise about it, as if this was a completely new and unprecedented phenomenon. meanwhile, large parts of society have already been living like this for generations.
One thing you can’t accuse Doctorow of is a lack of class consciousness or failing to consider the plight of workers in a wide range of fields.
The centaur/reverse centaur metaphor instead is aimed at addressing OP’s misguided suggestion that we need to throttle tech as such, by instead inviting us to reflect which tech empowers people to do what they want and what tech enslaves people to do what someone else wants. We don’t need to “slow down” the former, and we need to smash the hell out of the latter, but most importantly we need to stop lumping them all together in the same bucket as “tech” or “AI” or whatever.