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Europe seeks to limit use of AI in society

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Re: Europe seeks to limit use of AI in society

#91
post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is needlessly pedantic, but private prisons are absolutely a thing in America.

Although private prisons exist (in strikingly small numbers[1]), private corporations can't just decide to throw you into a private prison on a whim; the government decides that. [1] https://www.sentencingproject.org/publications/private-priso...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kids_for_cash_scandal

Private prison kickbacks for conviction are a thing.

Re: Europe seeks to limit use of AI in society

#93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 --- fro…

> All these technologies give us new capabilities and allow us to more precisely understand and shape the world. Allow who to shape the world, exactly? Because it's not me, and it's probably not you. Technology gives power to those who control it, and control over face-recognition tech, personalized risk-scoring and ad tech is in the best cases behind several layers of bureaucratic abstraction. Our world is being sha…

Our lives are being shaped by powerful organizations so we should shun progress because it helps them too! Let's all burn our phones and dismantle the internet, it's the root of all evil, I tell you.

After we destroy AI we should make sure nobody does any data analysis by hand or other means. Just to be sure. Because there are people who would justify the exact same decisions even without AI. They just use data to do what they want. So let's destroy data too, and math so nobody can do anything biased or wrong.

Re: Europe seeks to limit use of AI in society

#94
The listed examples seem reasonably good.

    * systems which establish priority 
      in the dispatching of emergency services
    * systems determining access to or 
      assigning people to educational institutes
    * recruitment algorithms 
    * those that evaluate credit worthiness
    * those for making individual risk assessments
    * crime-predicting algorithms
While I'd also like to see autonomous military devices banned, banned AI that makes opaque life-changing decisions about individuals seems reasonable. We already say that these shouldn't discriminate and we've seen ways AI can allow discrimination through the back door.

Re: Europe seeks to limit use of AI in society

#95
post #78

> 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 This appears to obviously apply to the Facebook wall. You can find a high-profile example of this in [0], but [1] explains how this manipulation, which optimizes "engagement", is built deep into Facebook's design. I think the case that it cau…

Seems like books fit that description.

Re: Europe seeks to limit use of AI in society

#96

Europe != Obscure department of the European Commission issuing unsolicited opinions

I beg to differ. "AI" is already rejecting CVs and untransparently keeping people unemployed. People do care about how to use this tool responsibility.

I think OP was referring specifically to the HN title.

Re: Europe seeks to limit use of AI in society

#97
post #91
post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Although private prisons exist (in strikingly small numbers[1]), private corporations can't just decide to throw you into a private prison on a whim; the government decides that. [1] https://www.sentencingproject.org/publications/private-priso...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kids_for_cash_scandal Private prison kickbacks for conviction are a thing.

They're not presently a thing; it's just a scandal that happened at one time in history. It's also corruption, and corruption exists in both the private as well as public sectors. In the case of the Kids for Cash scandal, there have since been lawsuits, overturned adjudications, and commissions to ensure that it doesn't happen again.

Solving corruption is orthogonal to the question of whether private corporations can perform extra-judicial imprisonment with impunity. That really just doesn't happen at scale, because it can't.

Re: Europe seeks to limit use of AI in society

#99
post #4

Earlier 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?

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 --- fro…

> There is no such thing as a net-negative technology.

OK, but no one is actually arguing that. The problem starts when the technology gets abused. We need safeguards against abuse of AI in much the same way as we need it for nuclear weapons and energy and, more recently, social media (eg GDPR protections).

Re: Europe seeks to limit use of AI in society

#100

No one actually wants a society being ruled by computers, except maybe the people running those computers. This is at least a step in the right direction.

> No one actually wants a society being ruled by computers, except maybe the people running those computers.

Humans in charge are known for injustice, kickbacks, favor trading, selective enforcement and other forms of corruption and abuse. Properly engineered and regularly reviewed open source systems with balance checks might just get us closer to a rules-based system that provides a level playing field for everyone. Given all the known biases of current AI systems, we are certainly far from ready for it, but the prospect of transforming large parts of government into an open source "social operating system" that automatically and fairly offers basic services according to clearly coded and broadly enforced rules looks like a desirable goal in the (very) long term.

Many laws can be expressed as computer code. Where they cannot is often due to deliberate vagueness built in to leave scope for future interpretation as new cases arise. This suggests that we could express laws in computer code that raises a HumanInputRequiredException in the cases currently handled with deliberate vagueness. The resulting reduction in vagueness would remove a huge amount of discretion that currently facilitates corruption and abuse of power while ensuring ultimate human control and human-directed evolution of the law.

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