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Europe is in danger of regulating its tech market out of existence

foreignpolicy.com

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Re: Europe is in danger of regulating its tech market out of existence

#351

Post by polski-g »

dirtsoc wrote: post #312
KaiserPro wrote: post #88

A company that provides a phone service (mobile or other) has to conform to a large amount of regulatory red tape. Why? because either a company before tried to monopolise the entire country, or they killed someone. Now, large tech companies haven't wholesale killed people (unlike say tobacco, or talc powder, 3M and half of their solvents, weed killer, most car makers, etc etc) but they have been trying desperately t…

Do increases in suicide rates from social media addiction count? There are emails unearthed from the early days of Facebook where utilizing addiction feedback loops were discussed to retain and maximize young users. The Anxious Generation provides a lot of evidence correlating the rise of social media and a major increase in depression and anxiety related disorders.

When controlled for testosterone levels, how do the suicide rates look?

Re: Europe is in danger of regulating its tech market out of existence

#352

Post by crossroadsguy »

ilrwbwrkhv wrote: post #252
autoexec wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not on Apple's scale, but with apple pulling products from the market, this opens the door for someone else to step up and fill that highly profitable gap in the market apple abandoned. I really hope that they do. The more players there are in the game from other countries the better off we'll all be.

But Apple also fumbled with the Vision Pro. They won't remain on the top for much longer I think.

The only other OS option being Android (on mobile) and Windows (on desktop) I don't think Apple is going anywhere anytime soon. A lot of Apple's moat is in its OS (however degrading in has been in last decade). It's the perfect duopoly in both segments. Do you see that changing? If not then all other OEMs will keep fighting among themselves for loose change.

Re: Europe is in danger of regulating its tech market out of existence

#353

Post by XCSme »

tcfhgj wrote: post #295
tzs wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What exactly do you mean by "targeted advertising"? I'm guessing you probably mean "behavioral advertising", which is a subset of "targeted advertising". Targeted advertising includes contextual advertising (e.g., a company putting an ad for their bird watching binoculars on a bird watching blog) and I'm having trouble thinking of any reason to ban that.

I'd even go to banning all commercial ads, like several cities have done offline. Reasons? Click bait, boosts consumerism, ads imply essentially a tax for everyone (remember that ads have to be paid by the consumers), CEO spam, annoying, environmental costs

> boosts consumerism

Don't we live in a capitalist world?

Re: Europe is in danger of regulating its tech market out of existence

#354

Post by DelightOne »

no_wizard wrote: post #191
pembrook wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody is against regulation that disfavors large incumbents to support competition instead. You'll struggle to find people who are against the Digital Markets Act for this reason. It literally only targets the potential monopolists. However, virtually every other piece of regulation does the opposite. Regulation usually gets trotted out after the downside of doing [new innovation] is experienced. This always happens…

Specifically with AI I don’t want to experience the downside of innovation before we regulate because of how wide spread its use already is, and it’s problems have already become apparent. For example, it’s being used to job screen applicants even though we have proven that AI models still suffer from thing like racial bias. Companies don’t disclose how their models are trained to negate bias or anything like that ei…

Problem is most innovation is in using existing models in new ways. You can't expect these most people to train their own models.

Regulating it the way you say just means "zero innovation!".

Re: Europe is in danger of regulating its tech market out of existence

#355

Post by lanstin »

fallingknife wrote: post #317
ivan_gammel wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can combat bias in a team of people, but in LLM you may not even know it exists.

How can you combat bias in a team of humans if humans are susceptible to bias? How do you even know what neutral is if it's not a physically measurable quantity?

They send resumes with the same accomplishments and names that indicate race and observe the relative degrees of acceptance.

Everytime they do this test, considerable bias is found to still exist.

Re: Europe is in danger of regulating its tech market out of existence

#356

Post by lanstin »

dudinax wrote: post #298
627467 wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

there maybe better examples of why AI biases provide deep systemic problems but: CV screening? are contemporary LLM really worse that previous screening tech and processes?

Of course they could be. A company that doesn't want a racial bias won't intentionally filter on names, but might accidentally deploy an LLM that can discern race from name.

The humans will do it unconsciously if they can see the names.

It is like orchestras used to use auditions where the judges could see the people; when they went to auditions where they couldn't see the people, the number of women being hired went right up.

Re: Europe is in danger of regulating its tech market out of existence

#357

Post by AnthonyMouse »

Larrikin wrote: post #341
fallingknife wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How can you combat bias in a team of humans if humans are susceptible to bias? How do you even know what neutral is if it's not a physically measurable quantity?

This sounds like an argument for never educating people and doing nothing about the problem. Just because you graduated from a CS program doesn't mean you will always write bug free code using the ideal algorithm and design pattern. But you know what you should be striving for, can more readily identify issues, and maybe sometimes you actually are perfect.

> This sounds like an argument for never educating people and doing nothing about the problem.

I feel like it's really the opposite.

There is a major problem with using AI to screen CVs, which is that AI is bad at screening CVs. It excludes good candidates and offers mediocre ones, and opens up a bunch of hacks the equivalent of black hat SEO, which gives an undesired advantage to people inclined to dirty tricks.

But "it's racist" is a political hot button, so before people can start to point that out, someone scrambles to push the hot button and suck all the oxygen out of the room. Then the purveyors of snake oil can munge the algorithm until it passes the naive oversimplified racial bias test someone made up (probably making it even worse at its intended purpose), and then claim "the problem" is solved, as if that was the main and only problem.

Re: Europe is in danger of regulating its tech market out of existence

#358

Post by alephnerd »

kazen44 wrote: post #121
cheptsov wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately true, but one can also think that it’s a consequence and not the root cause. Why VC should invest if the environment isn’t supportive? A vicious circle :)

to give a different perspective, why are VC's somehow the cause of "tech industry"? this seems like a very US perspective on tech in general. Also, VC's in the US have another large advantage. Very, very cheap money because the status of the US dollar as a reserve currency compared to the euro and other currencies.

> why are VC's somehow the cause of "tech industry"

Who else will give private capital for what is purely an idea?

Not Banks giving a business loan - they will demand interest at the current interest rate.

Not Private Equity - they only move private capital into public companies or late stage private companies

Not Hedge Funds - they only deploy capital into public markets

Not Growth Funds - they only deploy capital into late stage companies

The only funds that will deploy private capital into early stage companies are Angel Investors and VC Funds.

> this seems like a very US perspective on tech in general

Israel, India, China, UK, Russia (pre-2022), Ukraine (pre-2022), and ASEAN all developed a VC scene similar to the American scene.

Yet mainland West European investors are nowhere near as dynamic.

If the Western European market was more dynamic, Spotify would not have moved to NYC, Ghodsi would have founded Databricks in Stockholm instead of San Francisco, and Datadog would have remained a purely French company instead of moving most of hiring from Product Leadership to HR to the US a decade ago.

While you can mention ASML, the only reason ASML/Phillips even has EUV IP is because the US Government gave it to them instead of Canon or Nikon due to anti-trust reasons in the early 2000s and can very easily revoke IP access if prodded.

> Very, very cheap money because the status of the US dollar as a reserve currency compared to the euro and other currencies

Then why do high interest rate Israel, India, and China continue to have fairly robust VC scenes despite having high interest rates and currency controls and/or relatively illiquid currency markets?

The reality is "cheap money" as in interest rates don't really matter for early stage funding. Indtutional investors always leave some money on the side for VC funding as a diversification tool.

The difference is American, Israeli, Indian, Chinese, and ASEAN institutional investors will try to fund local VCs to build a local ecosystem, but Western European ones will just hand that money to an American, Israeli, Indian, or Chinese VC instead.

Re: Europe is in danger of regulating its tech market out of existence

#359

Post by xvector »

kube-system wrote: post #218
KaiserPro wrote: post #88

A company that provides a phone service (mobile or other) has to conform to a large amount of regulatory red tape. Why? because either a company before tried to monopolise the entire country, or they killed someone. Now, large tech companies haven't wholesale killed people (unlike say tobacco, or talc powder, 3M and half of their solvents, weed killer, most car makers, etc etc) but they have been trying desperately t…

The move-fast-and-break-things mentality of many tech companies has absolutely killed people. https://abcnews.go.com/GMA/Family/parents-kids-died-after-dr... https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/01/business/instagram-suicid... https://www.cbsnews.com/news/electric-scooter-electric-bike-... https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/family-sues-airbnb-19-m... https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/rohingya-seek-reparat... https:…

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Re: Europe is in danger of regulating its tech market out of existence

#360

Post by xvector »

baq wrote: post #148
KaiserPro wrote: post #88

A company that provides a phone service (mobile or other) has to conform to a large amount of regulatory red tape. Why? because either a company before tried to monopolise the entire country, or they killed someone. Now, large tech companies haven't wholesale killed people (unlike say tobacco, or talc powder, 3M and half of their solvents, weed killer, most car makers, etc etc) but they have been trying desperately t…

> Now, large tech companies haven't wholesale killed people Teen suicides are a thing. It isn’t lung cancer, sure, but it also isn’t nothing.

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