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The EU AI act is coming, this time for real probably

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Re: The EU AI act is coming, this time for real probably

#261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Flashback to 1880 Oklahoma, US: "What if an oil research company doesn't want to be a supervillain or do bad things but they (or their investors) decide it's safer to just do the research in a jurisdiction where they face less risk of being subjected to regulatory burden especially during the early exploratory stage." Edit: In case anyone is confused, Post 1880, Land in modern day Oklahoma was considered "unassigned"…

I'm sorry but despite the edit I still fail to get the point you're making.

The idea of searching for places to do product development that have fewer structural protections for residents is unconscionable.

This kind of "externality washing" is talked about as though it were some kind of amoral or practical business matter separate from ethical decisions, rather than an explicit attempt to avoid responsibility for the community that you are moving into.

That is to say, organizations look for economic areas that do not have power structures that will scrutinize, push back or otherwise enforce community social standards on said organizations. Capital will always find a downtrodden population to exploit for it's own development BECAUSE they do not have other protections.

Re: The EU AI act is coming, this time for real probably

#262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The effect is going to be that all the innovation happens elsewhere, big AI companies will develop outside Europe. And Europeans will only get to benefit as consumers, not as makers of AI. And the EU will take that as a reason to regulate even harder and then also somehow end up giving a bunch of money to its telcos. EDIT: My point is that regulation doesn’t just prevent “bad products”. The compliance overhead also p…

>The effect is going to be that all the innovation happens elsewhere, big AI companies will develop outside Europe. The EU has rules for aircraft and automobile manufacturing and yet Airbus and Ferrari seem to be able to continue to be world leaders in their fields. Moreover, there are very few restrictions on many industries in Somalia, yet for some reason it fails to be a hub of innovation. Regulations don’t immedi…

> Regulations don’t immediately mean a flight of intellectual capability to less restrictive places.

This. Most people forget that the US is still a highly regulated place. And the tech hub (California/Bay Area) is a highly-taxed and highly-bureaucratic area too...

It's not deregulation or investment. Innovative economies are like emergent behavior. They spring out of chaos and no one has no understanding so far how that happens.

Re: The EU AI act is coming, this time for real probably

#263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One actively encourages corporations to use the population as test subjects for any psychopathic idea that gets enough money backing it The other is Europe

How many of those “psychopathic ideas” do Europeans end up benefiting from once they mature?

Sorry just to be clear, are you attempting to make the Tuskegee vaccine argument?

Re: The EU AI act is coming, this time for real probably

#264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is enough to recognize that at minimum, people disagree about which software things cause harm whereas people overwhelming recognize that lead in food is bad. Given that reasonable people disagree, it's not even close to comparable.

Well yeah. Lead in food is very specific. Software is very broad. Nobody said all software was bad.

What is an example of a specific, non-controversial harm that software causes?

Re: The EU AI act is coming, this time for real probably

#265
post #259
post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but gun regulations don't operate under the assumption that guns shoot people on their own. They operate under the understanding that people who do damage can do much more damage with guns than without. Pretending that any of the regulation of guns or AI is done with the understanding that they are anything other than powerful tools that can be used by humans to do profound damage is a strawman argument. We all…

Given that Switzerland allow guns, this idea is that guns will make it worse is wrong. People don't need guns to make significant damage. Because guns are harder to get in Europe, nut-jobs used trucks. The solution is to educate people to do less self or other's harm. To understand how to operate with these things. But educating people is expensive and difficult. It also sometimes backfire in creating a population th…

I don't disagree with you, and I find Switzerland a really interesting example. Building good education, good culture, and good social values is often a much healthier outcome than regulation. In my experience, trying to build effective, reproducible education is not just expensive and difficult, but nebulous as well. A lot of American attempts to better their education systems have been expensive for questionable benefit.

I'd much rather have a good culture than good regulations, if I had the choice. I think most people would, but there's no sure path to get there. Switzerland has some magic sauce that other countries would be hard pressed to replicate at scale.

Re: The EU AI act is coming, this time for real probably

#266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think he is saying that laws have unintended consequences. And a law with good intentions (preventing bad AI outcomes) can have the unintended effect of discouraging entrepreneurs from choosing europe to build a new company. I know plenty of people who avoid the healthcare sector because of HIPAA and avoid handling credit card data because of PCI. PCI and HIPAA are well-intentioned but can scare off innovators.

PCI isn’t a law. It’s a standard that the free market decided upon by itself. You’re making the exact opposite point than the one you are intending to make.

I don't think I am. The point is that well-intentioned rules can have the unintended consequence of stifling innovation.

Re: The EU AI act is coming, this time for real probably

#267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well yeah. Lead in food is very specific. Software is very broad. Nobody said all software was bad.

What is an example of a specific, non-controversial harm that software causes?

The way social media acts as an echo chamber and may intensify extreme viewpoints and isolation from fellow citizens isn't extremely controversial. It has also been leveraged as a tool for good, helping prevent many people from being effectively suppressed, but it's hard to deny the harm that comes from engagement-driven advertisement algorithms systemically stoking people's anger and sense of personal victimization.

The trends of polarization and politically extreme positions in America in particular over the past 30 years are profound and striking.

Re: The EU AI act is coming, this time for real probably

#268
The problem with this is that is is too easy to encompass lots of current uses of data analytics and even primitive AI in its definition. Also, does a simple matrix scoring classify as AI?

> AI systems which can influence voters in political campaigns and by use of suggestion systems on very large platforms

I read that as "targeted advertisement is banned for political campaigns".

> biometric categorisation systems

This brings back the debates on "biased" AI, where people seem to forget that machine learning works on the basis of bias and then go and propose introducing more bias to counteract.

My guess is that we will reach a state where anyone using ML/AI for anything having to do with people will be exposed to a fine, but the EU will apply the rules to it's own discretion against the companies that it does not like.

Re: The EU AI act is coming, this time for real probably

#269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

EU and Putin together would be unstoppable…?

The EU is happy to deal with Erdogan. Well, maybe not happy, but willing. The only thing that puts Putin into a category of his own is the Ukraine war. Before that happened, pulling Russia closer to the EU and maybe making them a bit more moderate over the decades was the strategy. Compared anything that happened before and after, the USSR with its hostility towards the rest of Europe was an outlier, just an outlier…

What you got wrong is putting all the blame on Putin. The US has made it clear that it is not accepting that Europe gets its gas from Russia regardless whether Putin is friendly, not in power, or Russia is a democracy. Not everyone agrees with the US stance (Germany went with the pipeline, France/Macron tried to avert the war). It seems that US intelligence has prevailed, however, to the advantage of the US (or their plans at least).

Europe got badly screwed. Now Putin is an enemy forever. And he is not going down since all of Russia's powerful people are on a watch list. They have nowhere to go, and so they might as well stick around to the bitter end.

Re: The EU AI act is coming, this time for real probably

#270
post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If creating LLMs based on copyrighted data is found to be legal, all that will do is allow giant companies to sell copyrighted work without crediting the original authors, while leaving everyone else in the dirt.

Won’t it actually harm big companies that own the majority of IP currently? It will empower individuals to benefit from creative works more cheaply.

The vast majority of IP is not owned by big companies. For every big picture movie there are hundreds of indie movies that will only get a few views.
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