I don't know why people compare software regulation to the regulation of physical things that do obvious harm like food regulations.

Could you please clarify: is your position that software is not capable of doing harm?

Yes, most software is harmless. There are some scenarios where it could do harm, but ultimately said harm was the product of human usage of the software, not software inherently. There are a few examples such as medical device software and things like train software where honest mistakes can result in human harm. However even with those the issue was that humans made the mistakes.

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.

I don't think you need counterexamples, because your base argument is faulty. Food full of formaldyhde only causes harm as the product of human usage, i.e. someone eating it, regulation aims to make it impossible for such a situation to arise. For a less extreme but no less real example, just look at the regulation of raw milk in much of the world.

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.)

Your example is flawed because the harm is obvious and palpable. Not to mention food in most countries must disclose ingredients that are used. Take alcohol which is known to be poisonous. Do you support its banning: yes or no?

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.

Who banned AI? This discussion is about regulation of AI to reduce its capability for harm, not to ban it outright.

Replace "software" with "guns" in your post and it's the same effect.

Sure. There are people who think guns are harmless and do not need to be regulated. There are those who do.

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

Yes, but gun regulations don't operate under the assumption that guns shoot people on their own. They operate under the understanding that people who do damage can do much more damage with guns than without.

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.

I'm well aware of the distinction. I'm simply saying that it is a fact that guns do not shoot people on their own. Some countries regulate differently, obviously. You also seem to think governments, which are made by the said humans that can do "profound damage", are infallible.

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.

I don't think governments are infallible, and I didn't argue as such. I don't agree that regulations are inherently bad. If you want to race to the bottom, I can easily pull out some extreme scenario of giving AK-47's to every citizen upon graduating Kindergarten, but it would be a stupid argument based on nothing you've actually said, other than taking your point to the most extreme extent. Please give me the courtesy of not assuming I hold the most unreasonable extension of my argument as well. It only sabotages the conversation.

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.

> 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?

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.

It is still a regulation, and supports the argument that a tool that can be used to do damage should have rules to reduce the risk and security of damage where reasonable.

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.

Given that Switzerland allow guns, this idea is that guns will make it worse is wrong. People don't need guns to make significant damage. Because guns are harder to get in Europe, nut-jobs used trucks.

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 don't disagree with you, and I find Switzerland a really interesting example. Building good education, good culture, and good social values is often a much healthier outcome than regulation. In my experience, trying to build effective, reproducible education is not just expensive and difficult, but nebulous as well. A lot of American attempts to better their education systems have been expensive for questionable benefit.

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.

But software can do obvious harm. This is surely one the most important lessons of the internet era

Yeah it really can’t though. If there’s mercury in the tuna that’s obviously and unequivocally bad. If there’s funny memes supporting the other political party that’s supposed to be equivalent?

This comment is so disingenuous it's ridiculous. It's like opposing gun regulation with some contrived scenario about water pistols and Nerf guns.

It is enough to recognize that at minimum, people disagree about which software things cause harm whereas people overwhelming recognize that lead in food is bad.

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

Well yeah. Lead in food is very specific. Software is very broad. Nobody said all software was bad.

What is an example of a specific, non-controversial harm that software causes?

The way social media acts as an echo chamber and may intensify extreme viewpoints and isolation from fellow citizens isn't extremely controversial. It has also been leveraged as a tool for good, helping prevent many people from being effectively suppressed, but it's hard to deny the harm that comes from engagement-driven advertisement algorithms systemically stoking people's anger and sense of personal victimization.

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

Many military applications, obviously. Most of that is intentional harm. There’s a lot of unintentional harm in software too, such as biases in models for medical insurance companies, policing and the justice system.

We use software to make all kinds of harm preventing and harm causing decisions. Military, medical, social, policing, financial. Pretty much all aspects of life

It may be less acute than mercury poisoning, yes, but social media and the search engine-optimized web encouraging polarization and radicalization in adults, and exacerbating mental illness in children, have been pretty harmful outcomes, not to speak of them being leveraged by state actors with that intention.

Considering how much software actually export controlled under, e.g. ITAR (coming from the US by the way), your point is?

In the food industry there (generally) isn't a big isn't a big prize or defensive moat for being the first to develop a new product at scale. Especially at the national level.

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.