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Europe seeks to limit use of AI in society

bbc.com

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Re: Europe seeks to limit use of AI in society

#121

Post by bhupy »

La1n wrote: post #107
bhupy wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>just a scandal that happened at one time in history. I really hope that's true, but it might also be that it was only convicted for once in history while it happens more often.

Oh, I absolutely do not doubt that it could happen again more often, but at least we have Racketeering laws and a system to essentially minimize the degree to which it happens with impunity.

Re: Europe seeks to limit use of AI in society

#122

Post by neilparikh »

geraneum wrote: post #56
modeless wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with government regulation of AI is that the biggest threat is government use of AI. Rules for thee but not for me!

Government (ab)use of AI is is of course a serious threat. But I’d say big corporations abuse of AI is even worse. Assuming we are talking about a democratic state, at least there are some checks and balances on governments whereas people cannot elect a FAANG CEO or go to a ‘.gov’ website to read a transcript of board meetings. Edit: I am by no means advocating for government’s use of AI in any form.

Note that these checks and balances don't apply to non-citizens of the country, who are the people affected the use of AI in military (one of the exemptions listed above). If a EU member state abuses AI in the military against a non-European, what direct recourse do they have?

Re: Europe seeks to limit use of AI in society

#123

Post by joe_the_user »

neilparikh wrote: post #118
joe_the_user wrote: post #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 make…

I think the tradeoff is that at least the AI discrimination is systemized, and there's one place you can manipulate to reduce that discrimination, while with pre-AI human discrimination, it's not at one place, so it's harder to eliminate. As an example, it's the difference between being rejected by a central agent for a loan, versus going to your local branch, and being rejected by a random employee at the local bran…

"I think the tradeoff is that at least the AI discrimination is systemized"

What does systematized mean in this context? The specific problem is that modern deep learning systems are unsystematic - they heuristically determine a result-procedure based on some goodness measure and this result-procedure is a black box.

You already have criteria-based algorithms for things like loans - the individual employees aren't making arbitrary decisions or just pen-and-paper calculations. You have a central algorithm now in a given bank, one that can be looked and understood. The question is whether to go from that to an opaque, "trained" algorithm whose criteria can't analyzed directly.

Re: Europe seeks to limit use of AI in society

#125

Post by birdsbirdsbirds »

keiferski wrote: post #2

Bonus 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.

The limits are a convenient way to escape the challenge. By opting out, nobody can ask why European companies don't have state of the art AI technology.

If Europe cannot offer more than €6.7 billion to create an alternative infrastructure to AWS, GCP and Azure then they better prepare an excuse for why they haven't managed to create AI.

[1] https://ec.europa.eu/digital-single-market/en/european-cloud...

Re: Europe seeks to limit use of AI in society

#126

Post by alexvoda »

tomp wrote: post #103
joe_the_user wrote: post #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 make…

> we've seen ways AI can allow discrimination through the back door. Do you have any concrete examples of these, in particular where the use of statistics or AI enables more discrimination than using human decisions?

It's not that it enables more, it's that the AI is harder to fight and easier to excuse.

Just like when a clerk tells you "The computer won't let me."

Re: Europe seeks to limit use of AI in society

#127

Post by nix0n »

tomp wrote: post #113
YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why does it have to be "more"?

Parent mentioned that AI is used to sneak in discrimination through the back door , implying that discrimination wouldn’t be there (or there would be less) without AI.

Here's an example: mortgages (in the USA) used to be approved or denied by humans, but there were certain neighborhoods where only white people were allowed.

Now, there's a law against that.

In the future, there will be an AI system to approve or deny mortgages, based off of historical training data. Since that data includes the redlining era, the AI will learn to make racist decisions.

Most people do not understand how it is possible for a computer to be racist. (Other than against all humans like in Terminator 2.) This is why it's "through the back door", because it's not obvious how it's possible or where it's coming from.

Re: Europe seeks to limit use of AI in society

#128

Post by tablespoon »

8fGTBjZxBcHq wrote: post #7
keiferski wrote: post #2

Bonus 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.

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.

> 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.

I agree. And frankly, technological "progress" for its own sake reeks of technopoly [1]. Technology should serve society, not the other way around.

[1] A term coined in a very good book by Neil Postman: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technopoly:

> Postman defines technopoly as a "totalitarian technocracy", which demands the "submission of all forms of cultural life to the sovereignty of technique and technology".

Re: Europe seeks to limit use of AI in society

#129

Post by ThomPete »

clownpenis_fart wrote: post #34
ThomPete wrote: post #30

the only outcome of this is that Europe will fall even further behind the US and China. How sad.

Since there have been and will be exactly zero useful ai application anytime soon other than bias laundering (aka "systematic discrimination is ok when a computer does it"), I think it's ok.

And with that approach there wont be in europe anytime soon :)

Re: Europe seeks to limit use of AI in society

#130

Post by extropy »

neilparikh wrote: post #118
joe_the_user wrote: post #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 make…

I think the tradeoff is that at least the AI discrimination is systemized, and there's one place you can manipulate to reduce that discrimination, while with pre-AI human discrimination, it's not at one place, so it's harder to eliminate. As an example, it's the difference between being rejected by a central agent for a loan, versus going to your local branch, and being rejected by a random employee at the local bran…

As far as I can tell the law does not prohibit algorithm assisted decision making. So as long there is a human rendering the final decision we are good. Which seems to be a reasonable balance IMO.
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