Regulators often barely grasp how current markets function and they are supposed to be futurists now too? Government regulatory interests almost always end up lining up with protecting entrenched interests, so it's essentially asking for a slow moving group of the same mega companies. Which is very much what Europes market looks like today. Stasis and shifting to a stagnating middle.
And also to prevent European powers trying to kill each other for the third time in a century, setting the whole world on fire in the process - for the third time in a century.
Contrary to the constant whining, most of them are actually quite wealthy. And thanks to strong right to repair laws, they can keep using John Deere equipment without paying extortionate licensing fees.
They're wealthy because they were paid for not using their agricultural land, so they cropped down all the trees on parts of their land that they couldn't use, to classify it as agricultural, got paid, and as a side effect caused downstream flooding
Well, the topic is really whether or not the EU's regulations are effective at producing desired outcomes. The comment you're responding to is making a strong argument that it isn't. I tend to agree.
There's a certain hubris to applying rules and regulations to a system that you fundamentally don't understand.
For those of us outside the US, it's not hard to understand how regulations work. The US acts as a protectionist country, it sets strict rules and pressures other governments to follow them. But at the same time, it promotes free markets, globalisation, and neoliberal values to everyone else.
The moment the EU shows even a small sign of protectionism, the US complains. It's a double standard.
So the solution is to allow the actual entrenched interests to determine the future of things when they also barely grasp how the current markets function and are currently proclaiming to be futurists?
The best way for "entrenched interests" to stifle competition is to buy/encourage regulation that keeps everybody else out of their sandbox pre-emptively.
For reference, see every highly-regulated industry everywhere.
You think Sam Altman was in testifying to the US Congress begging for AI regulation because he's just a super nice guy?
That's a bit oversimplified. Humans have been creating authority systems trying to control others lives and business since formal societies have been a thing, likely even before agriculture. History is also full of examples of arbitrary and counter productive attempts at control, which is a product of basic human nature combined with power, and why we must always be skeptical.
As a member of 'humanity', do you find yourself creating authority systems for AI though? No.
If you are paying for lobbyists to write the legislation you want, as corporations do, you get the law you want - that excludes competition, funds your errors etc.
The point is you are not dealing with 'humanity', you are dealing with those who represent authority for humanity - not the same thing at all. Connected politicians/CEOs etc are not actually representing 'humanity' - they merely say that they are doing so, while representing themselves.
No, regulation exists because we all agreed it's not such a great thing to allow any company to do anything they want with no consequences. e.g, pouring toxic waste into rivers.
But what started as a good thing has become a tool of those same companies to prevent competition. How we regulate needs to be rethought beyond the simplistic "more = better"
eu resident here. i’ve observed with sadness what a scared and terrified lots the europeans have become. but at least their young people can do drugs, party 72 hours straight, and graffiti all walls in berlin so hey what’s not to like?
one day some historian will be able to pinpoint the exact point in time that europe chose to be anti-progress and fervent traditionalist hell-bent on protecting pizza recipes, ruins of ancient civilization, and a so-called single market. one day!
No, that... that's exactly what we have today. An oligarchy persists through captured state regulation. A more free market would have a constantly changing top.
Depends on the time horizon you look at. A completely unregulated market usually ends up dominated by monopolists… who last a generation or two and then are usurped and become declining oligarchs. True all the way back to the Medici.
In a rigidly regulated market with preemptive action by regulators (like EU, Japan) you end up with a persistent oligarchy that is never replaced. An aristocracy of sorts.
The middle road is the best. Set up a fair playing field and rules of the game, but allow innovation to happen unhindered, until the dust has settled. There should be regulation, but the rules must be bought with blood. The risk of premature regulation is worse.
Calculated, not callous. Quite the opposite: precaution kills people every day, just not as visibly. This is especially true in the area of medicine where innovation (new medicines) aren’t made available even when no other treatment is approved. People die every day by the hundreds of thousands of diseases that we could be innovating against.
You're both right, and that's exactly how early regulation often ends up stifling innovation. Trying to shape a market too soon tends to lock in assumptions that later prove wrong.
Sometimes you can't reverse the damage and societal change after the market has already been created and shaped. Look at fossil fuels, plastic, social media, etc. We're now dependent on things that cause us harm, the damage done is irreversible and regulation is no longer possible because these innovations are now embedded in the foundations of modern society.
Innovation is good, but there's no need to go as fast as possible. We can be careful about things and study the effects more deeply before unleashing life changing technologies into the world. Now we're seeing the internet get destroyed by LLMs because a few people decided it was ok to do so. The benefits of this are not even clear yet, but we're still doing it just because we can. It's like driving a car at full speed into a corner just to see what's behind it.
I think it’s one of those “everyone knows” things that plastic and social media are bad, but I think the world without them is way, way worse. People focus on these popular narratives but if people thought social media was bad, they wouldn’t use it.
Personally, I don’t think they’re bad. Plastic isn’t that harmful, and neither is social media.
I think people romanticize the past and status quo. Change is scary, so when things change and the world is bad, it is easy to point at anything that changed and say “see, the change is what did it!”
People don't use things that they know are bad, but someone who has grown up in an environment where everyone uses social media for example, can't know that it's bad because they can't experience the alternative anymore. We don't know the effects all the accumulating plastic has on our bodies. The positive effects of these things can be bigger than the negative ones, but we can't know that because we're not even trying to figure it out. Sometimes it might be impossible to find out all the effects before large scale adoption, but still we should at least try. Currently the only study we do before deciding is the one to figure out if it'll make a profit for the owner.
> We don't know the effects all the accumulating plastic has on our bodies.
This is handwaving. We can be pretty well sure at this point what the effects aren’t, given their widespread prevalence for generations. We have a 2+ billion sample size.
No, we can't be sure. There's a lot of diseases that we don't know the cause of, for example. Cancers, dementia, Alzheimer's, etc. There is a possibility that the rates of those diseases are higher because of plastics. Plastic pollution also accumulates, there was a lot less plastic in the environment a few decades ago. We add more faster than it gets removed, and there could be some threshold after which it becomes more of an issue. We might see the effect a few decades from now. Not only on humans, but it's everywhere in the environment now, affecting all life on earth.
You're not arguing in a way that strikes me as intellectually honest.
You're hypothesizing the existence of large negative effects with minimal evidence.
But the positive effects of plastics and social media are extremely well understood and documented. Plastics have revolutionized practically every industry we have.
With that kind of pattern of evidence, I think it makes sense to discount the negatives and be sure to account for all the positives before saying that deploying the technology was a bad idea.
I agree that plastics probably do have more positives than negatives, but my point is that many of our innovations do have large negative effects, and if we take them into use before we understand those negative effects it can be impossible to fix the problems later. Now that we're starting to understand the extent of plastic pollution in our environment, if some future study reveals that it's a causal factor in some of our diseases it'll be too late to do anything about it. The plastic is in the environment and we can't get it out with regulation anymore.
Why take such risks when we could take our time doing more studies and thinking about all the possible scenarios? If we did, we might use plastics where they save lives and not use them in single-use containers and fabrics. We'd get most of the benefit without any of the harm.
I'm sure it's very good the first time you take it. If you don't consider all the effects before taking it, it does make sense. You feel very good, but the even stronger negative effects come after. Same can be said about a lot of technology.
Addiction is a matter of degree. There's a bunch of polls where a large majority of people strongly agree that "they spend too much time on social media". Are they addicts? Are they "coosing to use it"? Are they saying it's too much because that's a trendy thing to say?
WHAT?! Do you think we as humanity would have gotten to all the modern inventions we have today like the internet, space travel, atomic energy, if we had skipped the fossil fuel era by preemptively regulating it?
How do you imagine that? Unless you invent a time machine, go to the past, and give inventors schematics of modern tech achievable without fossil fuels.
Maybe not as fast as we did, but eventually we would have. Maybe more research would have been put into other forms of energy if the effects of fossil fuels were considered more thoroughly and usage was limited to a degree that didn't have a chance cause such fast climate change. And so what if the rate of progress would have been slower and we'd be 50 years behind current tech? At least we wouldn't have to worry about all the damage we've caused now, and the costs associated with that. Due to that damage our future progress might halt while a slower, more careful society would continue advancing far into the future.
I think it's an open question whether we can reboot society without the use of fossil fuels. I'm personally of the opinion that we wouldn't be able to.
Simply taking away some giant precursor for the advancements we enjoy today and then assuming it all would have worked out somehow is a bit naive.
I would need to see a very detailed pipeline from growing wheat in an agrarian society to the development of a microprocessor without fossil fuels to understand the point you're making. The mining, the transport, the manufacture, the packaging, the incredible number of supply chains, and the ability to give people time to spend on jobs like that rather than trying to grow their own food are all major barriers I see to the scenario you're suggesting.
The whole other aspect of this discussion that I think is not being explored is that technology is fundamentally competitive, and so it's very difficult to control the rate at which technology advances because we do not have a global government (and if we did have a global government, we'd have even more problems than we do now). As a comment I read yesterday said, technology concentrates gains towards those who can deploy it. And so there's going to be competition to deploy new technologies. Country-level regulation that tries to prevent this locally is only going to lead to other countries gaining the lead.
You might be right, but I'm wasn't saying we should ban all use of any technology that has any negative effects, but that we should at least try to understand all the effects before taking it into use, and try to avoid the worst outcomes by regulating how to use the tech. If it turns out that fossil fuels are the only way to achieve modern technology then we should decide to take the risk of the negative effects knowing that there's such a risk. We shouldn't just blindly rush into any direction that might give us some benefit.
Regarding competition, yes you're right. Effective regulation is impossible before we learn global co-operation, and that's probably never going to happen.
Very naive take that's not based in reality but would only work in fiction.
Historically, all nations that developed and deployed new tech, new sources of energy and new weapons, have gained economic and military superiority over nations who did not, which ended up being conquered/enslaved.
UK would not have managed to be the world power before the US, without their coal fueled industrial era.
So as history goes, if you refuse to take part in, or cannot keep up in the international tech, energy and weapons race, you'll be subjugated by those who win that race. That's why the US lifted all brakes on AI, to make sure they'll win and not China. What EU is doing, self regulating itself to death, is ensuring its future will be at the mercy of US and China. I'm not the one saying this, history proves it.
You're right, in a system based on competition it's not possible to prevent these technologies from being used as soon as they're invented if there's some advantage to be gained. We need to figure out global co-operation before such a thing is realistic.
But if such co-operation was possible, it would make sense to progress more carefully.
There is no such thing as "global cooperation" in our reality for things beyond platitudes. That's only a fantasy for sci-fi novels. Every tribe wants to rule the others, because if you don't, the other tribes will rule you.
It's been the case since our caveman days. That's why tribes that don't focus on conquest end up removed form the gene pool. Now extend tribe to nation to make it relevant to current day.
The internet was created in the military at the start of the fossil era, there is no reason, why it should be affected by the oil era. If we wouldn't travel that much, because we don't use cars and planes that much, the internet would be even more important.
Space travel does need a lot of oil, so it might be affected, but the beginning of it were in the 40s so the research idea was already there.
Atomic energy is also from the 40s and might have been the alternative to oil, so it would thrive more if we haven't used oil that much.
Also all 3 ARE heavily regulated and mostly done by nation states.
How would you have won the world wars without oil?
Your augment only work in a fictional world where oil does not exist and you have the hindsight of today.
But when oil does exist and if you would have chosen not to use it, you will have long been steamrolled by industrialized nations powers who used their superior oil fueled economy and military to destroy or enslave your nation and you wouldn't be writing this today.
I thought we are arguing about regulating oil not to not use oil at all.
> How would you have won the world wars without oil?
You don't need to win world wars to have technological advancement, in fact my country didn't. I think the problem with this discussion, is that we all disagree what to regulate, that's how we ended up with the current situation after all.
I interpreted it to mean that we wouldn't use plastic for everything. I think we would be fine having glass bottles and paper, carton, wood for grocery wrapping. It wouldn't be so individual per company, but this not important for the economy and consumers, and also would result in a more competitive market.
I also interpreted it to mean that we wouldn't have so much cars and don't use planes beside really important stuff (i.e. international politics). The cities simply expand to the travel speed of the primary means of transportation. We would simply have more walkable cities and would use more trains. Amazon probably wouldn't be possible and we would have more local producers. In fact this is what we currently aim for and it is hard, because transition means that we have larger cities then we can support with the primary means of transportation.
As for your example inventions: we did have computers in the 40s and the need for networking would arise. Space travel is in danger, but you can use oil for space travel without using it for everyday consumer products. As I already wrote, we would have more atomic energy, not sure if that would be good though.
Depends what those assumptions are. If by protecting humans from AI gross negligence, then the assumptions are predetermined to be siding towards human normals (just one example). Lets hope logic and understanding of the long term situation proceeds the arguments in the rulesets.
You're just guessing as much as anyone. Almost every generation in history has had doomers predicting the fall of their corner of civilization from some new thing. From religion schisms, printing presses, radio, TV, advertisements, the internet, etc. You can look at some of the earliest writings by English priests in the 1500s predicting social decay and destruction of society which would sound exactly like social media posts in 2025 about AI. We should at a minimum under the problem space before restricting it, especially given the nature of policy being extremely slow to change (see: copyright).
I'd urge you to read a book like Black Swan, or study up on statistics.
Doomers have been wrong about completely different doom scenarios in the past (+), but it says nothing about to this new scenario. If you're doing statistics in your head about it, you're wrong. We can't use scenarios from the past to make predictions about completely novel scenarios like thinking computers.
(+) although they were very close to being right about nuclear doom, and may well be right about climate change doom.
I'd like for you to expand your point on understanding statistics better. I think I have a very good understanding of statistics, but I don't see how it relates to your point.
Your point is fundamentally philosophical, which is you can't use the past to predict the future. But that's actually a fairly reductive point in this context.
GP's point is that simply making an argument about why everything will fail is not sufficient to have it be true. So we need to see something significantly more compelling than a bunch of arguments about why it's going to be really bad to really believe it, since we always get arguments about why things are really, really bad.
> which is you can't use the past to predict the future
Of course you can use the past to predict (well, estimate) the future. How fast does wheat grow? Collect a hundred years of statistics of wheat growth and weather patterns, and you can estimate how fast it will grow this year with a high level of accuracy, unless a "black swan" event occurs which wasn't in the past data.
Note carefully what we're doing here: we're applying probability on statistical data of wheat growth from the past to estimate wheat growth in the future.
There's no past data about the effects of AI on society, so there's no way to make statements about whether it will be safe in the future. However, people use the statistics that other, completely unrelated, things in the past didn't cause "doom" (societal collapse) to predict that AI won't cause doom. But statistics and probability doesn't work this way, using historical data about one thing to predict the future of another thing is a fallacy. Even if in our minds they are related (doom/societal collapse caused by a new technology), mathematically, they are not related.
> we always get arguments about why things are really, really bad.
When we're dealing with a completely new, powerful thing that we have no past data on, we absolutely should consider the worst, and of course, the median, and best case scenarios, and we should prepare for all of these. It's nonsensical to shout down the people preparing for the worst and working to make sure it doesn't happen, or to label them as doomers, just because society has survived other unrelated bad things in the past.
Ah, I see your point is not philosophical. It's that we don't have historical data about the effect of AI. I understand your point now. I tend to be quite a bit more liberal and allow things to play out because I think many systems are too complex to predict. But I don't think that's a point that we'll settle here.
The experience with other industries like cars (specially EV) shows that the ability of EU regulators to shape global and home markets is a lot more limited than they like to think.
Not really china make big policy bet a decade early and win the battle the put the whole government to buy this new tech before everyone else, forcing buses to be electric if you want the federal level thumbs up, or the lottery system for example.
So I disagree, probably Europe will be even more behind in ev if they doesn't push eu manufacturers to invest so heavily in the industry.
You can se for example than for legacy manufacturers the only ones in the top ten are Europeans being 3 out of 10 companies, not Japanese or Korean for example, and in Europe Volkswagen already overtake Tesla in sales Q1 for example and Audi isn't that much away also.
Regulating it while the cat is out of the bag leads to monopolistic conglomerates like Meta and Google.
Meta shouldn't have been allowed to usurp instagram and whatsapp, Google shouldn't have been allowed to bring Youtube into the fold. Now it's too late to regulate a way out of this.
It’s easy to say this in hindsight, though this is the first time I think I’ve seen someone say that about YouTube even though I’ve seen it about Instagram and WhatsApp a lot.
The YouTube deal was a lot earlier than Instagram, 2006. Google was way smaller than now. iPhone wasn’t announced. And it wasn’t two social networks merging.
Very hard to see how regulators could have the clairvoyance to see into this specific future and its counter-factual.
Technically untrue, monopoly busting is a kind of regulation. I wouldn't bet on it happening on any meaningful scale, given how strongly IT benefits from economies of scale, but we could be surprised.
> before we have any idea what the market is going to look like in a couple years.
Oh, we already know large chunks of it, and the regulations explicitly address that.
If the chest-beating crowd would be presented with these regulations piecemeal, without ever mentioning EU, they'd probably be in overwhelming support of each part.
But since they don't care to read anything and have an instinctive aversion to all things regulatory and most things EU, we get the boos and the jeers
I literally lived this with GDPR. In the beginning every one ran around pretending to understand what it meant. There were a ton of consultants and lawyers that basically made up stuff that barely made sense. They grifted money out of startups by taking the most aggressive interpretation and selling policy templates.
In the end the regulation was diluted to something that made sense(ish) but that process took about 4 years. It also slowed down all enterprise deals because no one knew if a deal was going to be against GDPR and the lawyers defaulted to “no” in those orgs.
Asking regulators to understand and shape market evolution in AI is basically asking them to trade stocks by reading company reports written in mandarin.
> In the end the regulation was diluted to something that made sense(ish) but that process took about 4 years.
Is the same regulation that was introduced in 2016. The only people who pretend not to understand it are those who think that selling user data to 2000+ "partners" is privacy
