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.
but tbh, i dont see what the regulations would be. I am a fan of no regulation unless actual harm has been shown first.