My perspective is that our technological advancement has well outpaced our ability to adapt to the changes or bring our legal and social tools effectively to bear on them.

A decade or two of stagnation would be frustrating for those in the field but probably overall a good thing. Plus I don't think this would affect research at all so not even.

> A decade or two of stagnation would be frustrating for those in the field but probably overall a good thing.

Is a decade or two of a head start given to high-tech totalitarian regimes like China overall a good thing?

> Plus I don't think this would affect research at all so not even.

Limiting use of AI reduces interest of the public and young researchers and engineers, contributes to brain drain and limits availability of large datasets that are an important asset for AI development.

>> Limiting use of AI reduces interest of the public and young researchers and engineers, contributes to brain drain and limits availability of large datasets that are an important asset for AI development.

I disagree. As a senior-year PhD student, I am relieved that the EU is taking a stance on this matter and hope that others in the West will follow suit (it's probably too late for China). I am relieved because I personally have grave concerns about the uses of AI in society and have thought for some time that some kind of formal and official framework is needed. AI researchers haven't yet managed to establish such a framework, so legislators have stepped in. The framework still seems pretty "green" and like it will take a lot of development and improvement, but that a first step was made is important.

So in fact you might say that having a legal framework in place makes AI research more attractive, because the student is not left to wonder about the ethics of her research on her own.

As to the availability of large datasets- how do you see that this would be affected by the legislation being considered?

I should also point out that the reliance on large datasets is a bug, not a feature, of the currently dominant AI techniques and that an alternative is sorely needed. If large datasets became less easily available, that would give a good incentive to researchers to go do something new, rather than throw a ton of data to an old benchmark to improve it by 0.2%.

Agreed 100%. I appreciate the hacker mindset, but when things approach society-altering scale, "just because you can doesn't mean you should" should be the mantra, not "move fast and break things".

Reminds me of this clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_oNgyUAEv0Q&t=52s

That being said.. I don't trust the gov to decide what should be on the internet. I have to resist all attempts to do so, while acknowledging some gov suppression is probably beneficial. It's a duality and despite being no one side of it you can acknowledge the importance of the other side.

And who decides when that "should" condition is met? Over the past few years, I've seen far too many activists react to algorithms that notice true but politically inconvenient things by trying to shut down the algorithms, to pull wool over our eyes, to continue the illusion that things are other than what they are. Why should we keep doing that?

I have zero faith in the ability of activists or states to decide when it's safe to deploy some new technology. Only the people can decide that.

> to algorithms that notice true but politically inconvenient

I don't know that I agree that there exists an algorithm that can determine what is factually true, so I'm not sure I agree that an algorithm can "notice a true thing".

Do you have an example of when an algorithm noticed something that was objectively true but was shut down? Can you explain how the algorithm took notice of the fact that was objectively true (in such a way that all parties agree with the truth of the fact)?

I can't think of a single example of an algorithm determining or taking notice of an objective fact that was rejected in this way. But there are lots of controversies I'm not aware of, so it could have slipped by me.

For example gender stereotyping for jobs or personal traits, that is politically incorrect but nevertheless reflects the corpus of training data. (He is smart. She is beautiful. He is a doctor. She is a homemaker.)

> nevertheless reflects the corpus of training data

I don't think "reflects the corpus of training data" gets entails "is therefore an objectively true fact". In fact, I think a lot of people that complain about AI gender stereotyping for jobs or personal traits would _exactly describe the problem_ as AI is "reflecting the corpus of training data".

I don't think anyone disagrees that the AI/ML learns things reflected in the corpus of training data.

My request for an example is one where the AI/ML is reflecting an "objective truth" about reality and people then object to that output. But "the AI/ML is reflecting an objective truth about the training data" fails to satisfy my request for an example, because it falls short of demonstrating that the training data was an accurate and objective reflection of reality.

"Handsome lady/woman/girl" vs "Beautiful gentleman/man/boy". Try in Google Search.

We're just using different adjectives based on gender.

I think you're assuming that if it's in the data, it's "factually true" as the OP puts it. It doesn't work that way. There is such a thing as sampling error, for example.

Decisions like these need to made slowly and societally and over time.

Tension between small-c conservatism that resists change and innovators who push for it before the results can be known is very important!

No one person or group needs to or will decide. Definitely not states. "Activists" both in favor of and opposed to changes will be part of it. The last few decades in tech the conservative impulse has been mostly missing (at least in terms of the application of technology to our society lol) and look where we are. A techno-dystopian greed powered corporate surveillance state.

We're not going to vote on it. Arguments like the one happening in this comments section _is_ the process for better or worse.

We also don't have to make the same decision for all use of AI.

For example, we should be much more cautious about using AI to decide "who should get pulled over for a traffic stop" or "how long a sentence should someone get after a conviction". Many government uses of AI are deeply concerning and absolutely should move more slowly. And government uses of AI should absolutely be a society-level decision.

For uses of AI that select between people (e.g. hiring mechanisms), even outside of government applications, we already have regulations in that area, regarding discrimination. We don't need anything new there, we just need to make it explicitly clear that using an opaque AI does not absolve you from non-discrimination regulations.

To pick a random example, if you used AI to determine "which service phonecalls should we answer quicker", and the net effect of that AI results in systematically longer/shorter hold times that correlate with a protected class, that's absolutely a problem that should be handled by existing non-discrimination regulations, just as if you had an in-person queue and systematically waved members of one group to the front.

We don't need to be nearly as cautious about AIs doing more innocuous things, where consequences and stakes are much lower, and where a protected class isn't involved. And in particular, non-government uses of AI shouldn't necessarily be society-level decisions. If you don't like how one product or service uses AI, you can use a different one. You don't have that choice when it comes to hiring mechanisms, or interactions with government services or officials.

Reading the article, it sounds like many of the proposals under consideration are consistent with that: they're looking closely at potentially problematic uses of AI, not restricting usage of AI in general.

Not 100% sure what the parent is talking about, but my first thought is the predictive policing algorithms used in some jurisdictions to set bail and make parole decisions. My hazy understanding of the controversy is that these algorithms have "correctly" deduced that people of color are more likely to reoffend, thus they set bail higher or refuse release on parole disproportionately. At one fairly low level this algorithm has noticed something "true but politically inconvenient", but at a higher level, it is completely blind to the larger societal context and the structural racism that contributes to the racial makeup of convicted criminals. I'd argue that calling this simply "true" is neglecting a lot of important discussion.

Of course, perhaps the parent is referring to something else. I'd also like to see some examples.

> completely blind to the larger societal context and the structural racism that contributes to the racial makeup of convicted criminals

What happens if you and others have conflicting views on the "larger societal context"? Who wins, obviously you because you are right?

AI has become political football now and everyone with an issue finds an AI angle. In all this game few are actually interested in AI itself.

> true but politically inconvenient

Wanna give some examples or are you just dog-whistling?

> My perspective is that our technological advancement has well outpaced our ability to adapt to the changes or bring our legal and social tools effectively to bear on them.

> A decade or two of stagnation would be frustrating for those in the field but probably overall a good thing. Plus I don't think this would affect research at all so not even.

I agree. And frankly, technological "progress" for its own sake reeks of technopoly [1]. Technology should serve society, not the other way around.

[1] A term coined in a very good book by Neil Postman: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technopoly:

> Postman defines technopoly as a "totalitarian technocracy", which demands the "submission of all forms of cultural life to the sovereignty of technique and technology".

In an arms race it's not the best strategy to take a step back and look at angles. In AI there's an arms race going on and one likely outcome of this might be increased brain drain and even less likelihood of great companies rising in the EU.

I mean I don't think the damn NSA or whatever the EU has for that is going to stop doing whatever they're already planning to do with AI.

And I absolutely could not care less about "great companies rising" either now or hypothetically in the future.

Some applications of AI tech are very clearly MORALLY WRONG and cause harm. Currently that harm is limited because the reach of these tools is limited and that is the only thing holding them back from doing worse.

If companies need that dynamic to rise and be great then they can just not as far as I'm concerned.

>A decade or two of stagnation would be frustrating for those in the field but probably overall a good thing.

Won't they just leave? They could just go somewhere where this isn't banned.

I agree but I’m not so sure society has that much control. Maybe technology itself (or/and the economy) is in the driver’s seat now. Pun intended!

Laws aren’t immutable and right now this is just a proposal. We’ll have to see what its final form ends up being.

> will likely just result in technological stagnation.

Nothing in this stops any kind of research nor does it ban its use. It just limits how effortlessly you can invade people’s privacy and discriminate against them. It may very well help research in underinvested areas of AI, and it’s ethical consequences.

>Laws aren’t immutable

You could've fooled me. About the only thing that seems to change laws in places like the EU is when the courts decide to strike something down. Everything else seems to just go ahead the way the EU politicians envisioned. Consequences be damned.

It's a good thing that it is brought into the light and discussed though, because most people probably don't realize how much power "automated decision making" already has over their lives, and it will only get worse if tech giants and oppressive governments have their way.

But, what good is technology for the sake of technology if it’s detrimental to people’s well-being? Technology to conquer ills, yes. Technology which alienates people, no.

It’s kind of like the goths vs the romans or the inuit vs europeans. Is the value of progress more than the value of self-worth?

I'm more concerned about these two aspects of it from the reporting:

> Experts said the rules were vague and contained loopholes.

> The use of AI in the military is exempt, as are systems used by authorities in order to safeguard public security.

Sounds like it's keyed to build stagnation in public tools, but state-actor tools can go right on ahead becoming more sophisticated (and harder to understand or predict).

There are almost always these exemptions for military/law enforcement use cases in EU Directives and Regulations, because while the constituent countries in the EU have miltary and law enforcement co-operation, they would veto new legislation that impacts their independence in those areas.

That’s a different question. Even if you think certain technologies are overall negative, you may be forced to adopt them in order to remain competitive with other nation states. Nuclear weapons are probably the classic example here. AI seems similar to me.

Nuclear weapons are a huge net positive for humanity. Have we had another big industrial war since WWII? No. Why not? Because the combatants understand that nowadays total war means total annihilation. Now we resolve our disputes in other ways. Nuclear weapons gave us an age of peace.

There’s a survivorship bias here. If nuclear weapons did totally annihilate society we could not have this conversation.

Their point is that anyone who can develop a nuclear weapon also is aware of this. It might be a survivorship bias, but it is also self-fulfilling.

The biggest threat, as I can see it, is a truly irrational actor. Luckily they're hard enough to build that this prerequisite has so far filtered out anyone truly irrational.

> Is the value of progress more than the value of self-worth?

Why is self worth put in antithesis with progress? Was past progress a cause of loss of self worth?

Progress brings good: vaccines, decreased infant mortality, etc. But we also get to live in cities, disconnected from some realities, like food and self sufficiency. In civilization you are counting on other people doing things for you. Farming, housing, transportation, care, education, etc. Yes it’s fancy and advanced and most of us will choose modern life, but not everyone has gone that route (goths in roman times, inuit in present times). Some people see value in being connected to nature, not necessarily in some artificial romantic way, but more visceral ways and forgoing modern progressive life.

How do you know that these technologies are detrimental to people's well-being?

Some activists claim that things like facial recognition, ad targeting, and personalized risk scoring are detrimental, but are these activists correct? I don't think so! All these technologies give us new capabilities and allow us to more precisely understand and shape the world.

Every single time humanity has gained new abilities --- from the Acheulean stone ax to the modern deep neural network --- humans in general have benefited and prospered, because any increase in our ability to understand and manipulate the world is a boon.

There is no such thing as a net-negative technology.

> There is no such thing as a net-negative technology

Explain to me the benefits of a gatling gun, other than being a more effective tool for killing humans. Is all of humanity really better off for all those that have been killed by this invention?

That's a lot of deaths that start out as a massive negative balance against. Tell me the overall improvement to society that the gatling gun brought us that was "worth" those deaths.

Lethality of weaponry has a significant impact on how battles are fought, where increasing lethality generally means fewer participants and, counterintuitively, fewer deaths: https://acoup.blog/2021/02/26/fireside-friday-february-26-20... is a decent discussion.

There's obviously some lag (the bloodiness of WWI) but overall yes, in a weird way, the Gatling gun and other weapons like it are part of why you're a lot less likely to die as a draftee today than in the Napoleonic era.

WWII was even bloodier then WWI.

The obvious difference between current draftee and Napoleon one is that Napoleon set up to conquer other coutries. The peace time draftee is going to have lower mortality.

Napoleon was literally the aggressor.

WWII's civilian/military casualty ratio was way higher than WWI's (~2:1 vs. very very roughly 1:1 or lower), which would affect how the lethality hypothesis affects casualties. When more of the dead are civilians and civilians predominantly die from famine and disease, higher overall death counts in a more-global conflict don't necessarily mean that conflict killed more soldiers per-capita, though some nations definitely suffered higher per-capita military losses due to factors beyond increasing weapon lethality - mostly thinking of Russia there. For instance, furiously crunches Wikipedia numbers in the UK it looks like WWI had a higher proportion of military deaths to population (~2% vs. ~.8%) even though it also suffered significantly more civilian deaths in II, though not enough to outweigh the decrease in military losses as a function of total population.

There might be an argument that increasing weapon lethality can decrease the number of battlefield combatant deaths but also could increase the likelihood of mass civilian atrocity. That said, high-lethality weapons definitely aren't necessary for mass civilian atrocities either.

And sure, I intended a wartime/wartime comparison regarding draftees: even if we go back to WWII as the last real great-power hot war, a French Napoleonic draftee (looking at France as Britain apparently didn't actually conscript in the Napoleonic wars) is significantly more likely to die in battle than a French WWII (or even WWI!) draftee: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napoleonic_Wars_casualties#cit...

The mere threat of its awesome killing power made an adversary think twice. In one of the most bizarre episodes Ms. Keller recounts, on July 17, 1863, during the draft riots, the New York Times (which supported conscription) mounted three Gatling guns on the roof of its headquarters, with the editor in chief at the trigger, and successfully cowed an angry mob without firing a single shot.

Armies are smaller because drafting ten million half-trained teenagers to carry rifles is no longer the best way to win a war.

> All these technologies give us new capabilities and allow us to more precisely understand and shape the world.

Allow who to shape the world, exactly? Because it's not me, and it's probably not you. Technology gives power to those who control it, and control over face-recognition tech, personalized risk-scoring and ad tech is in the best cases behind several layers of bureaucratic abstraction. Our world is being shaped by megacorporations and governments, not those whose lives these technologies have the potential of having the most negative impact on.

Our lives are being shaped by powerful organizations so we should shun progress because it helps them too! Let's all burn our phones and dismantle the internet, it's the root of all evil, I tell you.

After we destroy AI we should make sure nobody does any data analysis by hand or other means. Just to be sure. Because there are people who would justify the exact same decisions even without AI. They just use data to do what they want. So let's destroy data too, and math so nobody can do anything biased or wrong.

> There is no such thing as a net-negative technology.

OK, but no one is actually arguing that. The problem starts when the technology gets abused. We need safeguards against abuse of AI in much the same way as we need it for nuclear weapons and energy and, more recently, social media (eg GDPR protections).

> And if Switzerland goes its own way and allows citizenship for AIs.

I'm pretty sure not being a member of the EU, Switzerland will go its own way.

> will likely just result in technological stagnation.

I believe that is the goal of the legislation. By stagnating the field of AI within the EU one can encourage any negative effects to happen in other countries, so they can suffer and discover the potential downsides.

The limits are a convenient way to escape the challenge. By opting out, nobody can ask why European companies don't have state of the art AI technology.

If Europe cannot offer more than €6.7 billion to create an alternative infrastructure to AWS, GCP and Azure then they better prepare an excuse for why they haven't managed to create AI.

[1] https://ec.europa.eu/digital-single-market/en/european-cloud...

I don’t believe in BDUF:ing even regulations too much, better to get a toothless first version out in the wild and then tweak it when in place.

Am-I the only one that finds is odd how the British government brags about Alan Turing after what they did to him?

The man saved women, men, children, of all races and orientations from an horrible end. I wish the British government had extended the favor to Turing himself.

That is literally what happens with historical figures everywhere. Americans now celebrate Martin Luther King for example.

Or to that extent Oscar Wilde and many, many others.

Nobody's above being cancelled, that's what happens when righteous people set to work. They know best and are willing to educate society by example.

" will actually be effective"

Effective in doing what?

Everyone is caught up in ridiculous AI mythology, and misunderstanding the nature of the tech.

AI is just one approach to solving a problem, and will invariably make up just a small part of more complex systems involving mostly classically approaches.

Not only is AI not hugely special, nothing we do or use is mostly 'AI' to begin with.

From the article:

"AI systems used for indiscriminate surveillance applied in a generalised manner"

So does this mean as long as we're not using Deep Learning, we can indiscriminately surveil?

And what if the 'surveillance system' doesn't use AI, but the cameras themselves have AI embedded within to adjust focus? Does that count?

What if the system doesn't use AI, but the supporting services do?

It's basically ridiculous.

If the government wants to regulate 'mass surveillance' - that sounds like a good thing so do that.

If they want to ensure privacy in certain domains - great - but it has nothing to do with 'AI'.

Edit:

Futhermore:

"Mr Leufer added that the proposals should "be expanded to include all public sector AI systems, regardless of their assigned risk level".

"This is because people typically do not have a choice about whether or not to interact with an AI system in the public sector.""

This is laughably bad, because again, there is not such thing as an 'AI System'.

A broad ban on on AI in the public sector would almost guarantee European stagnation in every sector, for no good reason at all.

Will they ban Google Search in public service? Google assistant? Google navigation? Those use AI.

Will they ban AI signal processing for anything related to government?

They'll have to ban Tesla as well, there's a ton of AI in every unit.

Will there be a single automobile in 10 years that won't have AI components? The EU is going to ban all of them from use in public service?

Even today, AI is almost universal in every day systems, that is only going to increase quite a lot.

In 5 years, you literally won't be able to use any tech without it touching some form of AI.

Mr. Leufeur has no understanding of what he is talking about.