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Comment by lukasLansky | Hacker News Reader

Yes, AI regulation needs to be global to be effective.

The difference between "we should abstain from our moral values because everyone dies anyway in the end" and "we should find ways to pursue our moral values effectively" is substantial. You don't have to be nihilistic to not accept cheap signaling being sold as a solution to real problems.

Few corporations deciding to not do dirty work, just providing their lower-level cloud resources to thousands of smaller firms who will gladly compete for any kind of money -- that does not solve anything.

Stuff like GDPR can change at least something.

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> AI regulation needs to be global to be effective. [...] not accept cheap signaling being sold as a solution to real problems.

Amazon making a pledge not to work on facial recognition does not seem like cheap signaling to me! Cheap signaling would be Google's "AI Ethics Board" staffed with people unlikely to make trouble while Google continues to work on AI. A pledge not to work on technology is an expensive signal!

Ideally, sure, to stop something everyone agrees not to do it. But history is stuffed full of examples where one company could have made a difference. Imagine if IBM refused to work with the Nazis or if Dow Chemical refused to sell agent orange to the US.

It is impossible to solve anything "forever." Facial recognition will be developed, but how long that takes and how well the world can grapple with the consequences matters!

At the time there was no alternative to IBM and their technology. Same can be said of Dow Chemicals.

Now there is competitors. Alibaba Cloud and Tencent Cloud will gladly help anyone with facial recognition . See how evil America refuse to help you with your needs? We will because we care about your needs, China will support you.

That's incorrect.

There were other tabulating machines (for example the Bull[1]) and of course there were (and are) other deforesting agents. The governments in both cases would have found another supplier.

It also would have made a difference! There's a reason the Nazis picked IBM and the US picked Dow.

If it's the case that Amazon could do better work than Tencent and Alibaba - then their abstention is laudable. If it's the case that Amazon is inferior, then they'd get out-competed in a winner-take-all marketplace so they both save money and have clean hands. So win-win.

[1] http://www.feb-patrimoine.com/projet/bull_t30/tabu_t30.htm

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