Every technology, at some point, will inevitably bring questions of legal liability and culpability, and AI has a large tendency to do so because of how applicable it is. It’s not the worst idea to try and get ahead of the problem by defining a legal framework.
Examples of how a free-for-all has resulted in legal questions;
* police and the judiciary in the US have come under fire several times for using proprietary AI to determine things like sentencing or traffic stops
* there is currently a class action lawsuit in Washington state about whether or not price recommendations by a third party’s algorithm constitutes collusion on price-fixing if enough corporate landlords use it
In the second case, how is this different from e.g. Kelley Blue Book for car prices?
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The problem with the first case is that we do not have existing case law about AIs, and we also have no laws on the books that clarify what to do in AI cases, so this is making the lawsuits and investigations very messy and time-consuming, since judges have to waffle about to figure out what the correct, legal thing to do is.
Pretty much all Western law systems judge the severity of action using intent, or mens rea; it doesn't absolve you of crime if you didn't mean to do it, but your penalties will generally be lesser. The people using the algorithm can wash their hands of intent by saying "we signed a contract with a third party for their algorithm and didn't reasonably expect biased outcomes." Then you make the third party a defendant, and then the third party claims "trade secrets" because we have no laws about what is and isn't protected trade secrets with AI, etc. and that becomes a whole legal case on its own that takes even more time for the legal system.
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The difference in the second case is that the corporate landlords in question are automatically pegging their rates to the algorithm's recommendation and not giving property managers discretion. The algorithm's customers combined also control over half of supply of apartments in the Seattle area.
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But the point of legal clarity, is to reduce the amount of questions, which both 1) heads off potential issues and 2) makes the issues that come into the legal system faster and clearer to process. It also potentially actually makes things easier for companies who make AIs too, since legal defense spending isn't exactly cheap.
>I don't get it. For the first example, the system is only a tool used and the responsibility is still with whoever does the sentencing/traffic stops etc.
Sometimes though the rules of society must take into account the actual reality of humanity, with all our foibles, and work anyway. Pointing the finger at "individual responsibility" doesn't always cut it. Certain tools simply push too far to the edge of well known human mental failure points. If the overall system for activities involving serious life/safety/security/liberty human failure modes tends to push towards these failure modes and lean too heavily on an expectation of human perfection, and then imperfect humans fail resulting in loss, it can be very worth considering whether the problem is human imperfection or if it's just a bad system. The incredible safety record of the modern airline industry for example comes heavily from treating accidents as system failures by default. Outside of a few edge cases that are constantly working to get shrunk, no accident should ever result from just a single problem including human problems, from a single person getting tired or making a mistake. There are checklists and formalized procedures. There are layers and layers of redundancy, of everyone checking each other. We don't just take incredibly complex tools like aircraft and then if one crashes say "well the pilots didn't have the right stuff!"
Or for a current AI-related ongoing change, consider self-driving technology. There have been two overall broad approaches, one "working its way up" from driver-assist tech, and the other aiming to start at full self-driving immediately even if that means tight geographic restrictions and vehicle tech requirements. In the first, the idea is that "the driver is still always in charge" and "it's only a tool" until full self driving is achieved. And perhaps in principle either could get there in the end without wildly different issues.
But in practice, that's not how humans work at scale. For many people if you give them something that works 99.5% of the time and then fails catastrophically 0.5% of the time and tell them that they need to constantly act as if the tool wasn't there and might not be there at any instant, well, they just won't do that consistently. They'll come to depend on it. Attention will wander, distractions will set in, and they won't maintain mental state the same as if they were driving themselves. If there is some warning they may need to take over sure they'll be able to execute a state change and do so, but if it's a matter of seconds, they won't. Humans are creatures of shortcuts and habits, that's just how it is. So maybe L3/L4 driver assist just isn't ok, and saying that it's "only a tool" doesn't cut it.
>In the second case, how is this different from e.g. Kelley Blue Book for car prices?
The issue is if it's all being done automatically, not merely as a recommendation, and at scale.
In general an area the law has yet to really effectively grapple with is that of emergent effects, where individually something would be fine, but with enough scale has an effect that mimics something we already aren't ok with. Here, the effect of fully automated algorithmic pricing of a sufficiently high percentage of the market of nominally independent actors could create the effect of formal collusion to change market prices.
Another example would be AI, networking and storage with sufficient cameras. Putting a security camera out on your property is perfectly legal. So is many cameras. So is saving video, and humans looking at it. There is no "reasonable expectation of privacy" in public per se. Individually there'd be no issue. But if there are a sufficient number, networked, with sufficient storage/memory/computer and AI thrown at it, the effect suddenly changes and becomes as if someone was being persistently trailed/tracked the same as if a GPS tracker had been stuck on them or the like. And worse it's for everyone simultaneously. The sum is greater then the individual parts. Such a system could effectively not just trace everyone's movement but also interactions and start to build up their social network graphs and no doubt all sorts of other personal information.
How to grapple with things that are fine and even incredibly helpful by themselves but become dangerous at scale may be one of the great challenges of this century.
And if you try, you end up writing something vague that doesn’t actually fix the problem and instead bans something else.
Case in point is the EU having to write something vague and it turns out they had no idea what was coming.
Maybe just wait until there is a problem before trying to write vague laws IMO.
I.e. "We don't approve loans to {ethnic majority} on purpose. We only use our models, which only rely on historical data." -> No proof, no case, no problem
The point of any AI law should be to put the onus on the model executor to explain how their model doesn't violate existing law.
You can use any model you want, but you can't point to its unexplainability as a free pass for ignoring protected classes.
And if you can't explain its results? Well, then you're opening yourself up to lawsuits.
Requiring the claimant have some evidence might not be a perfect legal regime, but the converse is a de-facto ban on innovation.
Can a human _prove_ that their decisions are made without bias? No. Are we going to hold them to the same standard proposed here for an AI? Also no. In practice, rules like the one proposed here just enshrine legacy decision systems which are already understood to biased and ineffective.
The most mysterious black box we have is the human brain.
What would you say of requiring training data and hyperparameter archiving for subsequent legal review?
> The regulation, proposed by the Commission in 2021, was designed to ban some AI applications like social scoring, manipulation and some instances of facial recognition. It would also designate some specific uses of AI as “high-risk,” binding developers to stricter requirements of transparency, safety and human oversight.
The issue is that as written it would still not cover general AI and that would still be legally grey.
Some of those uses in the US have already been problematic, like Madison Square Garden using computer vision to ban any lawyers from firms suing them from their vast properties, which is actually against various laws like their liquor license.
Automated human classification without recourse nor transparency is what the EU is against. "You cannot get a loan because the AI says so" is not acceptable.
> Would it be good if it was computed by hand on paper instead of through AI?
Yes. As a judge can check what information was used and what algorithm applied to get to a conclusion. And it may declare that use of data or algorithm illegal.
> They fear the amplification factor of such tech, but the amplification factor works for the good and for the bad
Maybe just go slower. Something like an Hippocratic oath can be a good principle to follow for high impact technologies. To do some good may not justify the harm.
To me this makes it seem like acces to loans is a right,in which case the EU should make a lender of last resort that can loan to people who would otherwise get rejected.
Not to the people making those decisions. That's brand new.
No bank EU or not has people manually approving loans.
This is obviously bad for both legal and moral reasons. Legally you may be (unintentionally) violating anti-discrimination laws. Morally you may be setting up a system that arbitrarily denies people who are otherwise deserving with little to no recourse.
It does not matter who personally made that decisi9n, the bank is operating this code and paid someone to write it.
With 'AI' there is no way to know.
Let's imagine my bank is sexist, the code literally says "if WOMAN, Reject'
You can sue my bank for discrimination, and in process of discovery you can request information and documents from the bank, including the code / formulas.
If you have a solid argument, let's say my bank never approved a mortgage for a woman, the judge will grant your request. You, or someone appointed on your behalf, will look at the code / excel formula, see that it's discriminatory by design, and you can request massive punitive fines, because this demonstrates contempt for the law.
Now let's say I instruct my developers to create a neural network that is as convoluted as possible but is unlikely to approves mortgage for a woman. That can be easily done. There will be no proof that we ever did this on purpose, and even proving that it is discriminatory will be challenging. At best, my bank will get a slap on the wrist.
That is why they are banning AI from some areas of life.
That isn’t how it would work in reality.
It would be up to the bank to prove that their practices are non discriminatory if there will be a discrepancy between the number of applications issued.
The plaintiffs will be able to sue and win based on the outcome alone.
As far as actual rights go then you have the right to appeal any automated decision and have a human review it without any bias. Which again it doesn’t matter if it’s AI or a an algorithm based on flipping a coin.
The credit score system already in place in the US is frequently as arbitrary in some cases already. I don't think I need to preach to HN about that (crypto money and all that). Does Europe do it much differently?
Not an arguement for AI to do it, but the only reason why the current system is better (at least in the US) is its sluggish incompetence.
Almost every country has some kind of credit reporting system, but many of them differ from the US in how they do it. In particular, in many countries, credit bureaus only hold negative information such as failing to pay bills or repay debts – which means if you keep up to date with all your bills and debts, your credit history will be blank. At which point, lenders will generally ask you to provide evidence of your employment history, salary, bank balance, assets, etc, and base their lending decision on that. They may well internally convert that all info into a "score", but every lender is going to have a different scoring system. Here's an article – https://www.businessinsider.com/credit-score-around-the-worl... – which discusses the systems used in different countries, including several European countries. There is no uniform approach to this in Europe – the UK and Germany are closer to the US in their approach, the Netherlands, Spain and France are closer to the "credit bureaus hold negative info only" system.
Germany here.
a) But we are still not required to "build score"
b) There is currently yet another legal challenge against the Schufa (our credit scoring agency), this time in front of the ECJ.
Yes, as far as I'm aware the US & Canada are unique in having 'a credit score' for people; elsewhere there may be agencies offering scoring services to lenders, but it's not something individuals ordinarily nor need to care about, and it's not 'their score' it's just that particular company's (Equifax's, or whoever) rating.
It's not taken as seriously, nor does it need to be.
The credit score system is not arbitrary, it's a specific formula that applies equally to everyone.
>You get punished for just looking at it.
No you do not. There are hard inquiries and soft inquiries, and an individual viewing their own credit score is considered a soft inquiry which has absolutely no effect on your credit score.
As for Europe, there is no one homogeneous answer. Different parts of Europe handle credit differently. The UK and Germany are very similar to the U.S., whereas in France there is no concept of a credit rating or credit score.
With that said, generally the countries that do not have a credit scoring system are much harder to get a loan from.
That doesn’t mean the formula is reasonable or transparent. An AI is also a specific formula that applies equally to everyone. It’s about how the formula takes “weight” on the individual’s differences.
> There are hard inquiries and soft inquiries
Why there are “hard inquiries”? Why someone else inquiring my credit score should affect my credit score?
Dinging your score over that only punishes you for soliciting credit offers from multiple lenders at once so you can choose the best terms. Which ought to be an antitrust violation.
And there are obviously better ways to prevent "double spend," like reporting the new loan being granted, which actually should reduce the credit score due to the new debt. It's not as if we can't make computers capable of updating this information in real time.
> The VantageScore credit score model takes rate shopping, e.g., for a mortgage or car loan, into consideration. All inquiries for mortgages, auto loans and major credit cards that appear in your credit file within a 14-day window are interpreted as a single inquiry.
I believe that's the case for the FICO score algorithm as well. I think a 14-day window is probably too short, but it likely does cover most situations.
You have to understand that there is a no "credit denied" feedback into the credit rating system. The standard pattern for an approved credit application is a hard-pull followed by the opening of a new tradeline, both of which affect your score. If you're applying for credit, but not being approved, then that just shows up as a hard-pull with no new line.
The FICO score is also set up specifically to ignore additional hard-pulls for the same type of credit within a bounded period; so if you go shopping for a mortgage (or an auto loan, or a student loan), then multiple queries within a 30 day period are coalesced, and only count once from a scoring perspective.
But more importantly the ding is maybe 10 points which is pretty much irrelevant to the “buckets” that define credit worthiness (>800, 700-800, etc).
Plus individual lenders can look at the report themselves and make their own determination.
AI’s are not “a specific formula” and not only that, it’s decision-making is opaque to humans.
You can learn literally everything you need to know about how the FICO credit scoring systems works in probably two or three hours of dedicated research, even though the model itself is a trade-secret. When lenders deny credit, they're legally obliged to provide the specific reasons why.
This is not-even-in-the-same-ballpark as AI, where no-one can even tell you how inputs relate to outputs, not even the creators.
https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2013/02/...
It's one of the few things thats so obvious its bipartisan. I'm amazed you think its worth defending. There should not be a punishment for LOOKING at a credit score hard or soft, that's insane.
To require someone take on debt in order to have good credit is pretty arbitrary. You can have all the money in the world, but no debt? you're fucked. The fact you can juice your credit with someone elses credit cards is also really arbitrary.
Banks lending you money don't care (at least not as a primary concern) how much money you have, their first concern is whether you have a history of paying back debt you owe. A credit score scores you on your ability and willingness to pay back your debts on time.
And yes, this means someone who takes on debt with a credit card only to immediately pay the balance before any interest accrues both has a stellar credit score and no debt in any practical sense.
This also means someone who is making their house or car payments properly also has a good credit score, outstanding debts negatively affecting the credit score slightly notwithstanding.
No, you’d be totally fine paying cash for anything you needed.
Yes (Finland and afaik other nordic countries at least).
The lenders use statistics, not individul spying to set their rates.
Not completely false, but misleading: you get penalized if a lender looks at it with the express purpose of using it to decide whether or not to offer you credit (called a "hard pull"). You looking at your own credit report does not penalize you, and certain other activities (like getting pre-approved for a loan) won't either.
The penalty for hard pulls isn't that bad, anyway, and disappears after a relatively short while. I currently have 7 hard pulls (I've been chasing credit card rewards offers lately), but my overall credit score is still over 800.
* perhaps closer to PATCH as multiple requests in short time are combined as one (as in mortgage shipping)
On the flip side it also causes a hole that’s increasingly hard to dig out of because if you have bad credit or borderline credit and apply for a card to see if you’re allowed back in at the capitalist buffet, you enter into a feedback loop of diminishing credit worthiness.
It isn’t true however that any form of read changes credit worthiness. There are many routine reads that have no impact. It’s specifically when you’ve directly requested an evaluation for expanded credit. It can’t happen passively, as sometimes banks refresh your credit history and even offer more credit automatically. It also can’t happen for other purposes than expansion of credit.
That's not prima facie unreasonable. If you have someone who suddenly starts applying for lots of personal loans (for example), that's probably something you'd be interested in, as someone who has previously extended credit to that person.
As the prior poster indicated, when you look at your own credit file, it's not a hard pull. Nor is it a hard pull when a creditor updates their records on you as part of ongoing monitoring of your account. It's only a hard pull when the subject is specifically requesting a new, or increased, extension of credit. Those soft-pulls are GETs.
Can you elaborate? Everyone of the banks I use have an affordance on their website/app that allows me to see my credit score, history, etc. The bank puts it pretty front and center, so if even juts viewing it has a negative impact, why do you think the bank would make it so easy?
people often think that the problems that pertain to their country are universal, but they would be wrong.
A ban on "AI social scoring" would be neither necessary nor sufficient to make your scenario a reality.
Genuinely, why does process matter? Shouldn’t outcomes?
Maybe you’re not from the US, but we have a looooong history of “good unbiased processes” leading to awful and biased outcomes.
Yes, process matters in that they need to be reviewable and fixable. Them being good or unbiased is a function of how much scrutinity and oversight there is, but before even talking about biases, we need to know what's happening.
Even outside of fixing the system, in most countries if your get a credit application refused you can request the info that lead to the decision and act on it (update/fix your credit history for instance). Even if you can't fix specific aspects you at least know what conditions block you and deal with it accordingly (no use in reapplying twelve times if you're banned for life for instance, same way you might want to wait 6 months if it's a matter of prescription)
So yes, knowing what, why and how is as critical as the final outcome.
That's not the case. As long as there is no discrimination based on a legally protected characteristic (e.g. race) you can lend to whoever you want based on whatever criteria you want.
Bread can be baked to feed the needy, or to fill the bellies of soldiers who invade a peaceful neighbor. Who is to blame? The people inventing industrial bakeries, or the people using them to feed their invasion army?
Yes, as long as that is based on clear reasons why the decision was reached. (Unless this was a quip meant to mean "matrix muls with pen and paper are not AI!", personally I'd say they are, the same way bubble sort is bubble sort on paper and in code.)
[1] on the topic "why":
> For example, it is often not possible to find out why an AI system has made a decision or prediction and taken a particular action.
As far as I know, there are some rules around that (especially social scoring), but the regulation was/is targeted to lay out rules minimizing the applications in similar risky areas that do not have those same rules yet.
[1] https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/regulatory...
That is a far more complex issue which is far deeper than such a simple correlation.
You might not be making an example in support of an argument you think you're making ;P
The people who use guns to kill in Switzerland instead use knives or other objects in France.
(I am admittedly cheating a bit, as Switzerland lacks the high crime subpopulations that France has)
I specifically said "intentional homicide rate" for a reason, to get ahead of this ridiculous argument that people bring up despite it not holding up or being relevant.
I don't care how the homicide happens, I care that a homicide happened. And despite lots of guns, it doesn't happen a lot in Switzerland compared to the world or even other EU countries. Clearly, guns aren't the problem, the other factors play into it more.
In other words, Switzerland has a much healthier attitude towards gun ownership and usage.
This take comes across as insulting and I am not even from there.
Do you, by any chance, hail from the land of the free, where government can seize your property without even accusing you of a crime? (Civil forfeuiture)
Could you go and do some research on the country before you comment on it?
> If it had a bigger military, the fake gun rights would disappear overnight.
The Swiss military is _huge_ for its size. It has one of the largest militaries per capita in the world.
I wish more nations could have that kind of direct acces to their democracy. Even so, the majority of these referenda fail to change anything, so presumably people tend to make more noise than wanting actual change.
The US is so far ahead of every other country, including Switzerland, that the argument "it works for the Swiss people" makes no sense.
Also, Switzerland is basically where the USA would be if the first clause of the second amendment was meaningful.
You’re taking an absolutist position, so I’d like to explore it.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ketamine-assisted_psychotherap...
Every item I listed has a clear and valuable purpose, but only in specific contexts.
For example, land mines, machine gun emplacements, and chemical weapons can be effective forms of home defense. An intruder would have access to the same equipment, but at least the playing field is level, right? However, an attacker would also be able to inflict astounding mass casualties in moments with this equipment.
On the other side, if the most effective self defense weapon available is a kitchen knife, the playing field is not very level, and a weak victim can be overpowered by an attacker or intruder. However, the ability to inflict mass casualty is greatly limited.
So, I don’t have a specific level to prescribe, but I would start the discussion by framing the decision as a balance between these two elements.
Unfortunately the tools we have currently aren't great at that.
Landmines in the garden it is then. Hard to use offensively.
Sellers split the item into parts so none of them individually is the completed item but anyone can buy them and stick them together. So you pass a law that says the "lower bit" is the part that's banned, and they can't sell that part. People start selling "80% lower bits" or whatever the nearest not-illegal thing is that can be converted into it. 3D print files for the part appear on the internet, or detailed instructions for how to manufacture one yourself.
What now? Ban 3D printers and CNC machines? Ban anonymous communications or encrypted communications with anyone outside the jurisdiction, so people can't distribute the parts files? Now you're banning things with beneficial public uses. But if anybody can easily reproduce the thing the thing then the ban is ineffective.
This happens with or without AI. It's not too hard to make an algorithm that discriminates against people without doing so explicitly. You can use certain bits of data as proxies for whatever characteristic you want to discriminate against (e.g. ZIP code, household income, marital status, etc).
Due to the myriad of ways to arrive at a discriminatory conclusion, it's easier to regulate results than tools.
One potential solution to your question is to make the laws carry strict liability (I'm assuming the EU has something along those lines). Plausible deniability no longer exists because intent doesn't matter. The company is liable if someone can demonstrate discrimination, regardless of whether it was intentional or accidental.
That ends up pushing towards something similar to what you want. It encourages a tool that can show its work to fend off lawsuits without being directly tied to the tool itself. The other alternative is extensive testing to make sure discrimination doesn't happen, but I think that will still be worrying to companies due to the inability to prove a negative.
In Switzerland, guns exist for recreational and competitive shooting, hunting (so long as you have a hunting permit), and national defense. Not personal defense.
US is somewhat unique in the Western world across the board - no public healthcare, generally poor social safety net etc - which means that exercises in causal linking of those unique traits to outcomes are wild guesswork, if one is taking a charitable perspective. A non-charitable one is that people mostly just cherry-pick things that compare favorably for whatever political cause they're advancing, and will often outright refuse to believe a similar comparison that is contradictory.
Let's see:
--- start quote ---
A gun in the Czech Republic is available to anybody subject to acquiring a firearms license. Gun licenses may be obtained in a way similar to a driving license – by passing a gun proficiency exam, medical examination and having a clean criminal record.
the issuing authority (police) firearm owners' database is connected to information needed for a background check and red flags any incidents that may lead to loss of license requirements. Similarly, health clearance by the general practitioner is needed for periodical renewal of license (every ten years).
* also very specific restrictions depending on license *
Obtaining the license requires passing a theoretical and practical exam.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_law_in_the_Czech_Republic
--- end quote ---
Oh look, already more strict than many states in the US (and some states are busy removing any restrictions).
I'm not claiming that Czech gun laws are identical to US. I'm claiming that you can have shall-issue concealed carry and broad access to "assault weapons" for civilians without gun violence problems as seen in US.
I don't have to take a wild guess around this kind of thing: I'm specifically referring to the gun culture of the US and comparing it to that of Switzerland. There's a different attitude to gun ownership in the two countries, one of which places strong emphasis on responsible ownership and the other which doesn't. That difference has little to do with mess of a healthcare system the US has, nor its poor social safety net (though it's interesting to note that those most obsessed with with getting rid of the safety net and public healthcare correlates with those most obsessed with the US second amendment). Now, what might be interesting to observe is that in Switzerland, rights come with responsibilities, whereas in the US, this attitude is much less prevalent, hence how much more common "rights absolutists" are there.
Personally, I have no issue with people having guns. What I do have a problem with is people who fail to recognise that exercising their right to have those guns comes with a responsibility to the wider community.
I disagree that the situation in US has nothing to do with healthcare and social safety net, though. For example, suicides constitute most gun deaths in general, but this is worse in US because of its generally poor situation with preventative health care, especially mental health care. Similarly, poor social safety net means a lot more people ending up in poverty, which drives up crime including violent gang clashes that cause the majority of gun-related deaths in US. This isn't to say that the prevailing attitudes among American gun owners do not contribute to the problem, either - but I'm sure that, if US would catch up with e.g. Canada when it comes to taking care of its own population, the numbers would strongly reflect that.
And yes, it is ironic and sad that support for RKBA is strongest on the right, which is also the cause for all this. It's not exclusively them, though. The running joke on the subject in many hard left spaces is that "if you go far enough left, you get your gun rights back".
We need the same thing for AI generated imagery, video and text.
Some AI tools are open source so nothing prevents me from modifying the code and removing the part that adds those watermarks.
Even closed source programs can be patched to remove that functionality.
These regulations are aimed at major institutions like banks. Those rely on government-provided privilidges and protectuons to exist. In return we expect they follow some rules.
Nobody cares about AI running in your garage.
The tracking dots stop a huge portion of the low hanging fruit, identity thefts, fake money scams etc. Of course they do nothing to people who know how to hack the printer driver and/or firmware to remove tracking, but they aren't the ones being targeted.
Having trackable data in the biggest AI-generators would again stop a metric fuckton of casually made revenge porn and fake news. It won't stop actual professionals from training their own GPT-3 to do the same thing.
It doesn’t make sense to use gun ban and gun control interchangeably.
[1] California laws prohibiting deepfakes https://www.dwt.com/insights/2019/10/california-deepfakes-la...
This seems backwards and contrary to lessons learned in the past. Once the thing exists, prohibition is infeasible and expensive. Supply will find a way to reaech demand regardless of your multi-billion dollar efforts to prevent that.
It's better to stop $NEFARIOUS_THING being invented in the first place, if possible, and if any regulations that achieve this don't have too many unintended side effects.
In fact most technology does both negative and positive things. It’s not obvious banning it completely will be a net positive. Especially with AI. There’s a lot of potentially great uses. Like detecting cancer on CT scans.
All that I'm speaking out against is the mindset of the post I was replying to, where the onus is solely on the user of the tool rather than on the context (laws, situation, people) that leads to the invention of the tool itself. I believe this to be a misunderstanding/misattribution of causality, as well as contrary to learned experience.
Fuck, imagine if every devices you ever owned for last 30 years needed total of 3 different cables to connect, it would be fucking amazing.
It basically does. USB-A, USB-C, Lightning, Micro-USB.
Stop bullshitting. 4 wouldn't even cover connectors for apple stuff
In this case, USB-C is pretty much expected to win and be the dominant standard - even Apple was already moving towards it way before the mandate - but it’s the principle of it.
In what other area will the EU elect itself to “choose the winner” next? The whole thing sets a bad precedence and opens up the possibility of corruption - which the EU isn’t immune to.
Some people will benefit from their standard being chosen as the winner. This is just corruption waiting to happen.
It’s fine I guess if the standards are functionally identical or the market has already clearly chosen what it wants by mass adopting said standard - USB-C has not reached that state yet - and the government is just “making it official” - ideally in addition to the standard being unlikely to change for a very very long time.
How would you feel if the US government mandated Windows for all desktops and servers and Android for all mobile devices? It improves interoperability …
Or perhaps mandate all programs be written in C++ … again interoperability.
In this case it’s easy. But the next standard, should the the choice no longer be so clear cut between competing standards with their pros and cons. It would also be interesting to see how the EU determines when we should switch to a successor. Why should a bunch of old people in Brussels who in all likelihood can barely operate a smartphone be the ones deciding these matters?
There is also the issue of corruption - which is still fresh in my mind; see Qatar and the EU parliament. As such I rather nigh dictatorial power not be unnecessarily placed in the hands of governments.
Those bastards, standardizing interoperability and making sure market is open for new competition!
So that EU bureaucrats can feel a sense of purpose in their lives.
the amplification factor works for the good and for the bad, so you need to focus just on the bad
That's just hand-waving. You have no plan for dealing with bad things, but you are worried about the loss of good things. This is not so different from saying you want to cash in on opportunity, the wholly predictable downsides of the opportunity are just someone else's problem. Guess what, nobody wants that problem so it just festers in proportion to the enthusiasm with which people chase the upside.
And the way we prevent abuse is with anti-discrimination laws, and AI won't change the deals here. If, for example one notices that a company doesn't hire black people even though there are plenty of them applying with suitable qualifications. Regulators could step in and ask what's wrong, and I doubt "that's my AI" will be a satisfactory answer, but neither is "that's Bob".
Have you not noticed how heavily those are contested in many jurisdictions. If you discover some way to draft legislation on morality such that it's effective, consistent, and widely accepted in a disparate population, I look forward to hearing about it. I can't wait to read about the solution to spam, scams, and discrimination deployed at industrial scale. In the meantime, it's wise to take the amplifying aspect of technology into account and consider its potential for abuse as well as for good.
No. It's the AI. Humans are not psychologically capable of interfacing with something whose goal is to appear convincingly human, that can be hugely scaled and that is very unpredictable.
We are currently dealing with a huge number of people who are distraught and grieving because a company changed their product because they developed relationships with a sexy chatbot. This isn't going to stop, and it is not worth the potential benefits, because we have clear examples of harm already.
We shouldn't raise any questions but leave participations to themselves.
this is exactly what people against gun control say
war, policing, defense, hunting, animal control, shooting down flying objects, remotely activating something from afar, immobilizing a car.
In particular, most societies deem automatic rifles to have no legitimate peace-time use, and so outlaw them, while still allowing shotguns and hunting rifles with a license.
b) One of the first and foremost items on gun-regulation todo-lists is to get rid of the kind of guns with the specific use-case of making killing people as easy as possible, aka. miltary weapons, automated weapons, easily concealed weapons, etc. So the regulations against guns are already targeting use-cases.
c) Physically controlling guns is a proven method, its effectiveness is supported by decades of evidence in countries implementing it.
Isn't that like saying theft cannot be regulated effectively without removing the things people want to steal from society? The goal is not perfect gun control, but reducing access to guns and thereby reducing the crime and harm that stems from gun ownership. So it being illegal to own X doesn't mean no one will own and use X, but that fewer people will and law enforcement will be able act against those who do.
And what's wrong with social scoring in general?
Modern form of AI has regulatory issues: some can’t be audited easily, some can’t be deterministic, some can’t be fair, some use biased data, some can’t be proven to work accurately enough for critical missions.
We already regulate the way we make various decision by law. For instance, we regulate how public market are assigned: price needs to make for 30% of the decision, social impact 20% etc. If the tool cannot demonstrate it considers it with those weights, it shall be banned. You cannot expect judges to understand this complexity. It needs to be codified prior to the issue.
Which means if government bans apps designed for social scoring, it's probably just so that government has monopoly over scoring people behaviour.
It's not the AI that's the issue, it's the use of it that's the problem. The law shouldn't focus on the AI, for example:
>The regulation, proposed by the Commission in 2021, was designed to ban some AI applications like social scoring
Ban social scoring, not the AI, the tool doesn't matter. Would it be good if it was computed by hand on paper instead of through AI? No, so the issue is not the tool.
They fear the amplification factor of such tech, but the amplification factor works for the good and for the bad, so you need to focus just on the bad, not on the tech. Otherwise you end up impairing the good too.