Luddites.
If you look at the course of history, every attempt to slow the adoption of new technology has been a disaster for human welfare. This policy move is just like trying to ban the telephone or the printing press.
Europe seeks to limit use of AI in society
11–20 of 154 posts
Re: Europe seeks to limit use of AI in society
#12>those designed or used in a manner that manipulates human behaviour, opinions or decisions ...causing a person to behave, form an opinion or take a decision to their detriment
Would this mean that A/B testing of news article headlines would be banned if it was powered by software?
Re: Europe seeks to limit use of AI in society
#13> The use of AI in the military is exempt, as are systems used by authorities in order to safeguard public security.
I'm fairly sure this excludes nearly 100% of the most risky uses of AI that exist today.
Re: Europe seeks to limit use of AI in society
#14Bonus points if they name the overseeing organization the Turing Police. And if Switzerland goes its own way and allows citizenship for AIs. In all seriousness, I’m not sure if these legal restrictions will actually be effective. They are too broad, vague, and will likely just result in technological stagnation.
But, what good is technology for the sake of technology if it’s detrimental to people’s well-being? Technology to conquer ills, yes. Technology which alienates people, no. It’s kind of like the goths vs the romans or the inuit vs europeans. Is the value of progress more than the value of self-worth?
How do you know that these technologies are detrimental to people's well-being?
Some activists claim that things like facial recognition, ad targeting, and personalized risk scoring are detrimental, but are these activists correct? I don't think so! All these technologies give us new capabilities and allow us to more precisely understand and shape the world.
Every single time humanity has gained new abilities --- from the Acheulean stone ax to the modern deep neural network --- humans in general have benefited and prospered, because any increase in our ability to understand and manipulate the world is a boon.
There is no such thing as a net-negative technology.
Re: Europe seeks to limit use of AI in society
#15Earlier quoted context omitted.
But, what good is technology for the sake of technology if it’s detrimental to people’s well-being? Technology to conquer ills, yes. Technology which alienates people, no. It’s kind of like the goths vs the romans or the inuit vs europeans. Is the value of progress more than the value of self-worth?
That’s a different question. Even if you think certain technologies are overall negative, you may be forced to adopt them in order to remain competitive with other nation states. Nuclear weapons are probably the classic example here. AI seems similar to me.
Nuclear weapons are a huge net positive for humanity. Have we had another big industrial war since WWII? No. Why not? Because the combatants understand that nowadays total war means total annihilation. Now we resolve our disputes in other ways. Nuclear weapons gave us an age of peace.
Re: Europe seeks to limit use of AI in society
#16I thought this article would be about software in heavy machinery like self driving cars but it's more aimed at applications of AI that are incompatible with human rights: social scores, surveillance, crime-prediction, etc.
Re: Europe seeks to limit use of AI in society
#17Luddites. If you look at the course of history, every attempt to slow the adoption of new technology has been a disaster for human welfare. This policy move is just like trying to ban the telephone or the printing press.
I see this more along the lines of preventing nuclear proliferation, chemical and biological warfare.
Re: Europe seeks to limit use of AI in society
#18Bonus points if they name the overseeing organization the Turing Police. And if Switzerland goes its own way and allows citizenship for AIs. In all seriousness, I’m not sure if these legal restrictions will actually be effective. They are too broad, vague, and will likely just result in technological stagnation.
" will actually be effective"
Effective in doing what?
Everyone is caught up in ridiculous AI mythology, and misunderstanding the nature of the tech.
AI is just one approach to solving a problem, and will invariably make up just a small part of more complex systems involving mostly classically approaches.
Not only is AI not hugely special, nothing we do or use is mostly 'AI' to begin with.
From the article:
"AI systems used for indiscriminate surveillance applied in a generalised manner"
So does this mean as long as we're not using Deep Learning, we can indiscriminately surveil?
And what if the 'surveillance system' doesn't use AI, but the cameras themselves have AI embedded within to adjust focus? Does that count?
What if the system doesn't use AI, but the supporting services do?
It's basically ridiculous.
If the government wants to regulate 'mass surveillance' - that sounds like a good thing so do that.
If they want to ensure privacy in certain domains - great - but it has nothing to do with 'AI'.
Edit:
Futhermore:
"Mr Leufer added that the proposals should "be expanded to include all public sector AI systems, regardless of their assigned risk level".
"This is because people typically do not have a choice about whether or not to interact with an AI system in the public sector.""
This is laughably bad, because again, there is not such thing as an 'AI System'.
A broad ban on on AI in the public sector would almost guarantee European stagnation in every sector, for no good reason at all.
Will they ban Google Search in public service? Google assistant? Google navigation? Those use AI.
Will they ban AI signal processing for anything related to government?
They'll have to ban Tesla as well, there's a ton of AI in every unit.
Will there be a single automobile in 10 years that won't have AI components? The EU is going to ban all of them from use in public service?
Even today, AI is almost universal in every day systems, that is only going to increase quite a lot.
In 5 years, you literally won't be able to use any tech without it touching some form of AI.
Mr. Leufeur has no understanding of what he is talking about.
Re: Europe seeks to limit use of AI in society
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
My perspective is that our technological advancement has well outpaced our ability to adapt to the changes or bring our legal and social tools effectively to bear on them. A decade or two of stagnation would be frustrating for those in the field but probably overall a good thing. Plus I don't think this would affect research at all so not even.
Agreed 100%. I appreciate the hacker mindset, but when things approach society-altering scale, "just because you can doesn't mean you should" should be the mantra, not "move fast and break things".
And who decides when that "should" condition is met? Over the past few years, I've seen far too many activists react to algorithms that notice true but politically inconvenient things by trying to shut down the algorithms, to pull wool over our eyes, to continue the illusion that things are other than what they are. Why should we keep doing that?
I have zero faith in the ability of activists or states to decide when it's safe to deploy some new technology. Only the people can decide that.
Re: Europe seeks to limit use of AI in society
#20Luddites. If you look at the course of history, every attempt to slow the adoption of new technology has been a disaster for human welfare. This policy move is just like trying to ban the telephone or the printing press.
I see this more along the lines of preventing nuclear proliferation, chemical and biological warfare.
This is more like banning the production of chlorine gas because someone might put it in an artillery shell --- never mind all the other useful things you can do with chlorine gas. If you want to regulate externalities, regulate externalities: don't ban technology itself.