Laws and rules in society

In most everyday cases I think it's a simple calculation: the benefit is immediate and the chance of being caught feels close to zero. A motorcyclist who runs a red light at an empty junction saves thirty seconds and has seen a hundred others do the same without consequence. There's also a sense that some rules are merely official, not moral, so people who would never steal will happily park on the pavement. Whether harsher punishment is the answer, I'm doubtful. What changes behaviour is the certainty of being punished far more than the severity. Vietnam offers a clear example: drink-driving had been illegal for years, but it only dropped sharply when police started testing drivers night after night and fines became practically unavoidable. A huge penalty that is rarely applied just makes people gamble. That said, severity does matter for offences committed by companies, because a small fine for polluting a river is simply treated as a business cost. As for future laws, the obvious area is technology. We'll need rules on who is responsible when a self-driving car injures someone, and on how much personal data a company may collect and sell. I'd add fake videos to that list, since it's already possible to make a convincing clip of a real person saying something they never said. The difficulty is that lawmaking is slow and technology isn't, so I suspect governments will always be regulating last year's problem.