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.
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.