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.