but tbh, i dont see what the regulations would be. I am a fan of no regulation unless actual harm has been shown first.
I used to be, but some of the modern crop of CEOs has taken the wind out of that. They have done tremendous damage, very quickly, and the regulation has been unable to keep up, until severe damage has already been done.
Once the bullet has left the gun, it can't be stuffed back in.
All of those examples are primarily damage done pre 80s
The "organic" social stuff that helped Trump 2016 (leaked Democrat emails, etc) had nothing to do with privacy or ads.
More than 87M people were profiled, and more than 3M people were targeted by Cambridge Analytica in 11 key states during the election to feed them the content that would swing their indecision towards Trump based on their psychological profile and preferences.
Trump paid for that, and Michigan and Pennsylvania and New Hampshire were all very close.
To boldly state that CA had no impact on US elections, Brexit and I don't remember which South American election when the people involved in it literally sold it and used previous results as evidence seems a bit of a stretch.
I might be wrong, but there's no clear way of knowing unless votes were not anonymous.
The CA thing is the same level of stupid. The targeting would just be senselessly bad based on CA's methodology.
Airbnb is also a boon for travellers looking to stay cheap, and a boon for property owners to cash in on underutilized real estate.
The "harm" that has been cited to have been caused by them are only the incumbents that do not move with the market or times.
Glance at it and she looks like a renter or typical youth of a city with tourism but poor purchasing power/ social mobility, but stare a bit longer and relax your focus and she becomes an incumbent who doesn't move with the market or times
Now that the harm is done (speculation on housing priced out teachers and low income workers, old, niche stores turned into tourist traps), we finally have regulation. A bit too late. But at least the mayor is adding 20k housing units (+20%), driving the price down and making speculators eat a fat loss.
Uber was regulated much faster so it's impact have mostly been positive, unless you've been raped by a predator as they used to not check their drivers.
You have to regulate ahead of time, even if it's soft and toothless in the beginning. Check the EU proposal to regulate AI, it seems really, really soft.
It would take about twenty seconds with Google, to come up with hundreds of examples. Some, better than others.
Basically, if there's no rule saying I can't do it, then I should do it, until rules are developed to stop it; regardless of the morality or danger.
I suspect that one way to make people more careful, is to make future rules and regulations retroactive.
For example, if I had developed a fintech product that was a legal ponzi scheme, or a downloader that is a legal way of accessing copyrighted material, because of loopholes, and those loopholes are closed, after the fact (happens all the time), then, if the new remedies can be applied to the "legal" implementations that were in effect before the closing of the loopholes, I suspect that it would make the "loopholer" a wee bit more cautious.
But that won't happen. There's way too many ways that it could go off the rails.
So people will keep on bending, folding, spindling, and mutilating, until they are stopped by a steel door, slamming down in front of them.
I strongly suspect that a lot of companies are set up to harvest as much as possible, before the door slams, so they can reap the benefits.
and there's moral implications about applying new rules retroactively. What you do today that is completely legal, should not be punished tomorrow even if it was decided in the future that it is illegal. Otherwise, there would be a chilling effect on innovation.
Suddenly, we owe ten years of back taxes, with penalties.
It’s not feasible to do this.
But there are plenty if people –many on this very forum, I suspect– that know what they are doing is highly immoral, and will likely get shut down, but … MONEY … so they do it for as long as they can gt away with it.
it's because the gov't is not incentivized properly. I think they should be pressured to keep up. This isn't an argument to "pre-regulate", because incompetence at the gov't can be fixed!
> Once the bullet has left the gun, it can't be stuffed back in.
But once many people start shooting guns willy-nilly, you start regulating guns. But not before.
It's not about _not_ having regulations. It's about not introducing new regulations without demonstrating harm first.
The current crop of regulations, i argue, is sufficient, and no new ones introduced for AI.
… no regulation unless actual harm has been shown first.
It is the duty of politics to protect the citizens and environment - also proactively. From reckless CEOs, greedy shareholders and lawyers which claim that it wasn’t strictly forbidden to cause harm.
Politics isn’t doing always right. The Cookie-Directive tried to make misuse of Cookies illegal. Actually it made web browsing horrible and created further questionable businesses like “cookie cloud storage providers aggregating cookies of several websites”.
On the other hand this people require ABS and ESP in cars. Banned Teslas “Autopilot” and had smart ideas like type certification for aircraft’s. And then they forbid stuff which can cause cancer…that was smart! What comes next? Acting against monopolies and oligopolies like Microsoft and Apple?
Also proactively, indeed, but usually rather reactive. Why bother with say cops on the street to check for weapons when civilians tend to not carry them there? Proactive is rather: seemingly proactive, like AI is seemingly intelligent. In reality 101, its reactive, but the quality of the reactivity matters (speed, thoroughness, accuracy, transparency, cost, etc). Some of these qualitative measures are at odds with each other.
> And then they forbid stuff which can cause cancer…that was smart!
Tobacco is regulated; not forbidden.
You have to first prove that it is not going to do more harm than good. And without knowing what sort of harm AI's do - it's all theoretical at the moment - any regulation is merely speculating a harm, and the cost of prevention might be high (or stifling).
ABS and ESP in cars came _after_ harm was shown. And so is emission controls, and crash-related safety measures and testing/certification.
> And then they forbid stuff which can cause cancer…that was smart!
which makes sense, as those stuff has been shown to cause cancer.
In other words, harm has to be shown, rather than speculated, before regulation is desirable.
The question then is more: regulate those within the particular area of use or have something that generally aims to regulate risky use.
> He called for some regulation “between the traditional European approach and the traditional U.S. approach,” whatever that means.
And you phrase it:
> I am a fan of no regulation unless actual harm has been shown first.
This is the "traditional US approach". As has been shown far too often, by the time actual harm has been shown, it is far too late. Especially as large industries like to use their economic clout to pervert things with propaganda like "oh, the science isn't settled yet".
The "traditional US approach" is why cigarettes were sold for 100 years after they had been shown to cause cancer along with other major medical issues. And why cigarettes are still sold.
And another HN story from today discusses this exact issue: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36067401
The European approach is "show us that it is safe before you put this stuff on the market". They use the 'Precautionary Principle'.
> The precautionary principle is the idea that when there is the chance of negative consequences from an industrial practice, that the burden of proof lies with the inventors/implementers of the process to prove that there are no negative (ecological and environmental) consequences of it. The principle is often cited by "technological conservatives" and/or environmental activists when there is a perceived lack of evidence showing that a technology is absolutely safe.
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Precautionary_principle
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precautionary_principle
Is AI "safe enough" to be sold/marketed to people? Many people say it isn't. The people who tend to get into executive positions at companies have a visible lack of concern about anything other than their personal wealth. So while AI might be "safe enough", the people who tend to get to the top will make even the safest things unsafe.
And not to mention that such regulations (on AI) might not be adhered to by countries such as China, which would make it all but moot - except it causes harm to western companies looking to profit.
A cautious approach is valid only if you have unlimited budget and you are not in a natural darwinian selection process of elimination.
Of course all business should comply until they can't, at which point it's really not their problem anymore. I think it's perfectly fine to say "hey, we did our best", but if it still isn't enough, to simply not play the game.
Unfortunately, HN has fallen for the tricks.
"any real regulation" does not match in any way what was said.
Conversely if the AI system is reasonable, but the regulations are making them illegal, then the blame is on the regulations.
There is a trade-off between potential benefits and potential harm, and it's not immediately clear to me, who is in the better position to find it: the AI companies or the legislators. The first are biased because they want to sell their products, but the second have worse understanding of the technology and are IMO on average too over-protective.
Since a company is usually harmed by increased regulation their opinion is biased.
But there's no oppposite to this. Governments don't benefit if companies leave and in fact they lose out. This also includes the population (jobs etc) that means the opinion of the government isn't biased.
I know this is the prevailing point of view in business, but is it actually true? How many bank failures would have been avoided if US banking regulations hadn't been slackened so much?
how many guns would get sold if the government didn't created laws that protects the industry from liability.
or section 230 which shields websites from the rent seeking of the cable companies but allows them to rent seek advertisers.
Most of the failures after 2000 would have been prevented. All of the 2008 financial crisis was caused by removing regulation.
Prior to Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000 [0], several states ruled that credit default swaps were insurance and thus regulated CDS as insurance. Some states ruled that CDS were gambling and regulated it as gambling. The CFMA basically said "credit default swaps are now a federal issue and it will be regulated at the federal level" and set up a poorly funded agency that had no teeth until after the bailouts in 2008.
During the 1920s, many banks got involved in both commercial banking (taking deposits and making loans) as well as investment banking (arranging IPOs). In 1933, the Glass-Steagal Act [1] said that banks may do one or the other, but cannot do both. In 1999, Glass-Steagal was later repealed by GLBA [2] as CitiCorp was doing both (due to mergers) while daring the regulators to do anything about it.
0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodity_Futures_Modernizatio...
1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1933_Banking_Act
2 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gramm%E2%80%93Leach%E2%80%93Bl...
A similar situation would be a country that in 1900 decides whether or not to outlaw cars.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_flag_traffic_laws#Red_flag...
The problem is you're assuming the people writing the regulations are perfect. It's not that bad AI should exist, it's that we're probably at least a decade away from regulators even having a hope of starting to understand what's going on.
I am sorry if the tone comes across as snarky. Not my intention. Genuinely curious.
If everyone uses ChatSkyNet for programming (or even ChatGPT-4), but EU is not allowed, EU will simply lose its competitiveness in creating products.
it... might?
it possibly existing in the future is not a good reason to lay down and just surrender control of world governance to ChatGPT today
And if it's not SkyNet but just an awesome tool like ChatGPT is today, do you think regulators will manage to take into consideration the advantages lost making this tool illegal while protecting us from a potential SkyNet?
have you read the EU's proposed approach to regulating AI?
https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/regulatory...
it seems to be an extremely reasonable approach to me, if anything a little too lax
the problem for OpenAI is its products can't easily be segregated into the different risk buckets...
and they want ChatGPT wired into the high risk areas as that's where the profit is
One thing I don't quite understand is how they are going to ensure that AI-generated text is always marked as such. When the text is generated in the chatbot, the fact that it is AI-generated is clear, but the user is free to copy-paste it anywhere. There is no good way to watermark plaintext.
And if someone is operating a troll farm in another country, this won't help.
Isn't that what any normal company does? Comply until it's impossible to operate legally? They can choose between ceasing to operate or getting arrested.
If the AI regulations are reasonable and AI companies can't operate, the technology just isn't ready for wide-spread adoption yet. See also: Tesla's Autopilot.
I have to wonder what the investors over at Microsoft are thinking right now. I doubt they'll be happy with threats of leaving lucrative markets from a company so deeply integrated into their product suite.