Safety regulations exist in every major industry, and sometimes it slows some progress for the sake of individuals. This isn't a bad thing.

Software development as a discipline certainly needs more rigor like the other engineering disciplines. However the AI act is premature since AI ultimately is an implementation detail for a variety of use-cases, that should be regulated independently, not AI. Regulating AI in general is like regulating electrons.

If the EU has an issue with AI potentially resulting in more misinformation, then regulate the types of sites, that is social media, that would be the vector for such spread.

I'm open to counterexamples outside those class of examples.

Elsewhere in the thread you have touched on firearm regulation; it's worth noting that amongst states with the capacity to do so, it is really only the US that abdicates its responsibility to regulate firearms, with predictably tragic consequences (though, as with everything in the US, that varies state to state etc.)

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3959903/

Food should be regulated because as you mentioned it is consumed and is a vector for obvious harm. In addition to that due to the fact that food is comprised of chemicals, it is difficult to ascertain the quality of food once prepared without consumption.

Banning AI is like banning books. Useless. Information will spread either way. It'll just do so elsewhere.

At the end of the day guns do not shoot people on their own, though.

Pretending that any of the regulation of guns or AI is done with the understanding that they are anything other than powerful tools that can be used by humans to do profound damage is a strawman argument. We all understand that guns don't shoot people on their own. Don't oppose regulation by characterizing the opposing viewpoint as something it isn't.

At the end of the day you either democratize the access, or you don't. Those who want to break the law will break it either way. All you are going to do is punish those who follow the law by not giving them access.

People driving drunk do profound damage as well. Cars don't kill people on their own. Would you agree with making drunk driving legal again?

When a tool allows a person to do a lot of damage, it should be regulated to prevent bystanders from taking the brunt of other peoples' bad decisions. A race to the bottom doesn't really help anybody.

If you're going to argue that every tool that allows people to do harm should be not regulated at all because the tool isn't anthropomorphized, I'm not sure how we can have a discussion at all about it.

No, because drunk driving inhibits your ability to operate a vehicle lawfully.

a better example would be using your phone while driving. should this be illegal? it's well documented that using your phone, even if hands-free increases car accidents. should phones be designed to automatically shut off while in a vehicle?

your ak47 example is also just silly. please use better examples to make your point.

There are already laws governing phone use while driving in many places. In my experience, people using phones while driving can be extremely dangerous, and I've often wished that people couldn't do so.

My AK-47 example was intentionally silly, and was framed as something silly and extreme, as a direct comparison to you accusing me of believing that government was infallible. I'm not sure why you're pointing out that something I explicitly pointed out as extreme and unreasonable is extreme and unreasonable. That was the entire point: that we will get nowhere by attacking straw men.

The solution is to educate people to do less self or other's harm. To understand how to operate with these things.

But educating people is expensive and difficult. It also sometimes backfire in creating a population that's much harder to persuade. So yeah let's regulate these idiots to death...

I'd much rather have a good culture than good regulations, if I had the choice. I think most people would, but there's no sure path to get there. Switzerland has some magic sauce that other countries would be hard pressed to replicate at scale.

Given that reasonable people disagree, it's not even close to comparable.

The trends of polarization and politically extreme positions in America in particular over the past 30 years are profound and striking.

Many capital intensive internationally traded industries are different. Once overseas competitors have been through a few innovation cycles and sunk tens of billions of dollars into product development it's basically impossible to catch up. Even with government support.

TSMC is the canonical example, but similar principals apply with Amazon and other big tech companies with high infra spending. More subtly, industries with high marketing costs are very hard to penetrate at scale when an incumbent has reached a certain depth. See enterprise software with MSFT or high fashion with LVMH.

As well as losing the opportunity for economical development in a new industry, dependence on overseas imports for critical industries creates geopolitical headaches.

European governments recognised this risk in aerospace a few decades ago, and the Airbus project saved Europe and the world from a Boeing dominated international passenger jet market.

Why though?

Like, most of the requirements listed in the AI act seem extremely reasonable and low-overhead, if not seriously meek. Given the immense budgets AI labs can call upon, why would "having to fill a form that says you made sure the AI wasn't racist" be a disqualifying factor?

So in effect the eu is protecting it’s citizens work from theft and companies from unethical competition.

But Small companies can’t afford the compliance overhead.

And big companies can only develop out of small companies.

So they will develop elsewhere

They really are "let's annoy people people so they hate GDPR popups", not so much "GDPR popups".

You would not ask "can I track you?" to random people physically entering your store as a storekeeper.

A funny but probably true prediction. Brussels loves handing money to PTTs the way the US Congress loves handing it out to Raytheon.

I've lived in both the USA and The Netherlands and I now live in The Netherlands. I recently had to renew my Dutch driver's license and the entire process so painless and quick. Compared to my experiences doing the same thing in both Virginia and California it was a lovely breeze. That's progress. That's innovation.

Don't even get me started on the byzantine nonsense that is the IRS versus the Belastingdienst. I'll take the Belastingdienst any day.

Americans wouldn't know real innovation if a walkable neighborhood arrived on a highspeed train and began eliminating healthcare bureaucracy.

Thanks for the laugh, beautifully put.

In general I agree with your point, Americans hyperfocus on certain types of innovation (reinventing this or that wheel, "revolutionising X", like every single bullshit "reinventing transportation" "like a train, but much worse" proposal out there), mistake everything else for lack of innovation, and totally miss the forrest for the trees. New and different stuff is celebrated, even if it's an obvious disaster in the making for most involved (e.g. Uber destroying labour protections, Airbnb putting immense pressure on already stressed housing markets, idiots reinventing trains but worse with "pods").

Meanwhile American companies are drastically behind in many niches (airplanes, cars, trains, railroad companies, cosmetics, etc.), but you don't hear Americans complain for their lack of innovation. But when anything EU is mentioned "innovation is dead, Deutsche Telekom is so old and just sucking Brussels money". When Intel gets subsidies to manage to catch up to the competition because they stagnated it's strategic, but when EU funds go for anything it's handouts propping up failing industries.

To be stereotypical: in the US organisations exist to provide value people choose to pay for (e.g. electric cars; cheap rocketry; cheaper accommodation for travel; cheaper and much more convenient taxis); in the EU they exist to employ people, and hopefully they provide value, but if they don't provide much it's fine because it's pretty difficult to start a competitor anyway.

I think this is simply untrue. US is profit focused above all, customer experience be damned. If you need examples, check Boeing killing people to get a plane out as soon as possible with ridiculously bad engineering choices; railroad companies skimping on decades old safety tech to keep profits as high as possible; healthcare being the quagmire that it is; massive companies posting record profits while laying off employees en masse; extremely customer hostile practices like like selling customer data everywhere; abusive pricing models on basic infrastructure like internet and mobile; etc. etc.

The only segment I can think about where you can legitimately say "customer-focused" is in hospitality, and that's only because employees have to, them getting any money depending directly on customers being very happy. For me it's to annoying extents though.

> in the EU they exist to employ people, and hopefully they provide value, but if they don't provide much it's fine because it's pretty difficult to start a competitor anyway.

Also disagree. That's not how things work, even in flag airlines, let alone private companies. And no, it's not difficult to start a competitor outside of capital-intensive market segments, which is the same everywhere.

Do you think there’s some kind of karmic point scoring system that you win by being the first one to build horrible unethical dystopian AI models?

Or are you just complaining you won’t be able to horrifically exploit people using them to make lots of money?

…because, sure, red tape is bad, but is it ultimately that terrible not being a allowed to be super villain?

“But America has super villains! …! We’re being left behind…”

Ok… um. Yeah… I’m ok with that. Please don’t try to be a super villain.

These laws don’t seem nearly as outrageous as you make them out to be.

What if an AI research company doesn't want to be a supervillain or do bad things but they (or their investors) decide it's safer to just do the research in a jurisdiction where they face less risk of being subjected to regulatory burden especially during the early exploratory stage. Surely they'll care about abiding to the rules of one of the major world's markets, but they'll so it after they have a mature product.

At least that's how I interpreted GP's comment. EU will eventually get the product that confirms to the safety specifications that we all agree they should, but it will be a foreign product.

"What if an oil research company doesn't want to be a supervillain or do bad things but they (or their investors) decide it's safer to just do the research in a jurisdiction where they face less risk of being subjected to regulatory burden especially during the early exploratory stage."

This kind of "externality washing" is talked about as though it were some kind of amoral or practical business matter separate from ethical decisions, rather than an explicit attempt to avoid responsibility for the community that you are moving into.

That is to say, organizations look for economic areas that do not have power structures that will scrutinize, push back or otherwise enforce community social standards on said organizations. Capital will always find a downtrodden population to exploit for it's own development BECAUSE they do not have other protections.

So wealth is leaking(patent costs etc) out of Europe and the continent will have less wealth in total over time. Especially now that the cheap Russian energy they had access too is going to their manufacturing rival China and it will also boost Indian development manufacturing.

Brussels is doing everything in their power to deindustrialise and make Europe less competitive on the global market..

> Kind of like how EU car manufacturers have been sleeping on the EV movement. Now they have to source their parts from Chinese manufacturers.

Do we know that’s actually because they weren’t able to innovate on their own due to Brussels regulation, or some other factor?

The amount of AI startups that are being restricted by this are minimal. Hugging Face isn't going to have to shut down because of this. University research into the best ways to stabilize GAN training isn't going to grind to a standstill. Companies developing weeding robots aren't going to have to turn to symbolic AI for image recognition. Scientists are still going to be able to model landslide risk caused by receding glaciers.

Maybe only 1% of AI start ups will be negatively effected by this to the point they would be better off leaving Europe.

I am not in a EU country and I would never ever vote to join the EU, but this is one of the better EU legislations. Saying this would "kill all startups" is like saying GDPR will kill all internet business in Europe. Its both alarmist and false.

That's a meme and not true at all. Well, of course a lot of European car makers source from China. As does everyone, everywhere, else.

Having watched this new brand of "AI" capitalists behave, that's exactly what they want to do with it

I know plenty of people who avoid the healthcare sector because of HIPAA and avoid handling credit card data because of PCI. PCI and HIPAA are well-intentioned but can scare off innovators.

As a programmer who used to work on medical devices, these sound pretty similar like the FDA regulations we dealt with. The goal isn't to stifle innovation, it's to keep scammers and crooks out of the market and make things better for everyone. The EU doesn't want another Thalidomide, and the US shouldn't want another Theranos.

But please consider this:

How many people’s lives could have been saved if FDA regulations didn’t make medical approvals take 10 years? How many life-saving medications could have been invented if the cost of approval didn’t limit innovation to the biggest companies?

Medical regulations are written in literal blood and dead people. Really good example for Chesterton's fence.

You cannot see the damage done by regulation, but it exists.

Regulation is always a trade-off.

It’s not “us vs them”. It’s us vs us.

Unregulated medical research is bad, like in really, literall Nazi doctor bad. Shocking it still has to pointed out...

We can't really know whether it was a net good or a net bad because we can't take a look at the reality that didn't happen. What we do know is that there were deadly medications on the market before the FDA. There were medications available over the counter that were outright poisonous. Arsenic and mercury were in common medicines.

It is a balance. You can sacrifice lives through inaction, or sacrifice lives in the way of progress. Lack of regulation is bad, but so is overregulation.

We don’t know! But to ask incredulously about only one side of these questions is disingenuous.

I am all in favor of reasonable, individual rights protecting regulation. The EU AI act might just be one, as is GDPR.

The EU has rules for aircraft and automobile manufacturing and yet Airbus and Ferrari seem to be able to continue to be world leaders in their fields.

Moreover, there are very few restrictions on many industries in Somalia, yet for some reason it fails to be a hub of innovation.

Regulations don’t immediately mean a flight of intellectual capability to less restrictive places.

This. Most people forget that the US is still a highly regulated place. And the tech hub (California/Bay Area) is a highly-taxed and highly-bureaucratic area too...

It's not deregulation or investment. Innovative economies are like emergent behavior. They spring out of chaos and no one has no understanding so far how that happens.

I’m saying you have to consider the price of regulation.

Airbus is able to compete in the airliner market because it’s a huge incumbent.

Maybe this is the price we have to pay for safe planes. But there is almost zero competition in the airline manufacturing sector because the regulation is keeping out any potential competition.