Suddenness, Commodification, and Technology

I just want to quickly back up Lyria's post on the definitional issues here by noting the importance of "suddenness" and commodification to a theory of law and technology. One of the primary rhetorical tropes of opponents of regulation is to put all manner of social change on a continuum and say "See, we've been doing X for years, this new technology just lets us do it more quickly." For example,

Genetic engineering is framed as just a faster version of selective breeding (in the agricultural context) or assortative mating (in the human context).

Cognitive enhancement is viewed as a more efficient version of education. (As Bostrom & Sandberg put it (echoing Balkin), "Much of what we learn in school is 'mental software' for managing various cognitive domains: mathematics, categories of concepts, language, and problem solving in particular subjects.").

Along these lines, I've sometimes heard that the equality-eroding effects of technologies I've focused on are trivial in comparison with social sources of inequality. I like to think of this line of thought as "complacent continuumism" (CC). On the CC view, technology is just one more way of accomplishing ends that would once have been attained via "clunkier" cultural or social methods.

I think the CC view is wrong because technology is often far more sudden, more effective, and more commodifiable than social or cultural methods of accomplishing ends. In the case of cognitive enhancement, many educational institutions have made a point of assuring some kind of equality of access. Have we any guarantees that "smart pills" would come with similar assurances? Moreover, educational gains in ability come very slowly in comparison with potential chemical interventions. There are more opportunities to regulate, more "pressure points," more cultural traditions of access, in the case of educational institutions, than in the case of their potential chemical/genetic supplanters.