EU proposing to regulate the use of Bayesian estimation

Back to the point of regulation, the fact that we're able to have a conversation about the factors that are/aren't allowed to be taken into account relies on the pricing model being relatively transparent about its inputs. Unrestricted machine learning leads to better predictions but often at the expense of transparency about what exactly is going on. If you feed first and last names into a model for example, it might learn things that correlate very closely with ethnicity

There are some fairly minor externalities in some of those companies products that we could look at regulating but by and large, it's not existentially problematic.

The 'scary' parts of AI probably haven't come to pass just yet, and I think it might have more to do with privacy than 'biased algorithms'.

Alongside this legislation, the EU should also be trying to figure out why it's using all of those American products instead of having champions of it's own because that's probably a bigger issue in the end.

As for this law, it is going to be heavily criticised and this rather polite post from Gellman is just the beginning. Even the quoted part in the top voted comment is absurd. What exactly are these "subliminal techniques" that need regulating? How do they work? There are no AI papers I recall that discuss how to build a mind controlling AI, let alone one that's designed to cause people psychological harm. Does the EU really believe in this stuff? I thought government belief in subliminal messaging and mind control disappeared with the CIA's LSD experiments decades ago.

It'd probably be possible for well-funded organizations to use automated data collection and clandestine communication methods to collect detailed profile information about people and then disseminate it in a way that attempts to make people fall in line with some particular ideology; or simply to harass people (wasting their time, which eventually amounts to a form of attack).

Unlikely though that might seem, if such things are becoming technically feasible, then it seems worthwhile to put safety regulations in place to prevent them from taking too much hold.

Enough automation of such systems could make it very difficult for individuals -- perhaps entire groups -- to backtrack out of whatever mindset the systems are leading them towards. Let's try to avoid those kind of outcomes.

I guess if one is told (clearly) that "this is an ad" then it's probably fine?

The wording is far, far too broad in scope and is guaranteed to cause major headaches for everyone as it spends decades in the courts being refined to the point of reaching some degree of clarity.

There's some interesting impetus here, but this one needs a lot of work - it might be worthwhile to focus in more on specific areas, such as ads themselves, or registration data collection wherein clarity might be more easy to achieve.

I guess you could argue that it is abusing some peoples lower intelligence when it suggests relevant groups for them, but that is probably a stretch.

"(a) Machine learning approaches, including supervised, unsupervised and reinforcement learning, using a wide variety of methods including deep learning;

(b) Logic- and knowledge-based approaches, including knowledge representation, inductive (logic) programming, knowledge bases, inference and deductive engines, (symbolic) reasoning and expert systems;

(c) Statistical approaches, Bayesian estimation, search and optimization methods."

I find this (machine learning, logic/knowledge, statistics) to be pretty a pretty good definition of what they're after. The fact that very specific things are also mentioned does not seem like a red flag to me - it's the way laws are written, with examples, to give guidance to courts.

https://twitter.com/AlecStapp/status/1385960305663090689

A supermarket chain is not a public authority. This prevents governments from creating systems to evaluate the trustworthiness of people, not private businesses.

A few, like the entire ad industry, Google and Facebook? :)

There's no reason to presume that the use of AI in firms is too complex to be legislated. Basically I'd hope it turns out to have both a ex ante compliance aspect (a firm needs to document X, Y and prove and register Z) and ex post aspect (individuals can sue and judges can assign damages for failing to comply). The OP has a knee-jerk reaction to a list of techniques that might lead to discriminatory practices.

GDPR isn't a bad law in my book. Cookie walls are both cargo cults and a function of disfunctional tracking practices in the market. Lack of enforcement is key in not recognising the value of the law. If compliance with GDPR would be a board level concern we'd be on another internet/ in another world by now.

The draft law says any logic or knowledge based systems - This could mean anything from an if-else switch to a neural network.

If waiting till black box AI creates a mess and cleaning it up later is immoral, than so is prematurely killing something before you even get to know what it is.

Regulation has to be clear, simple and easy to understand. This proposal is none of the above. Given the loopholes that Berlin govt. introduced in the law (which btw, got through as it was deemed unconstitutional), even after playing a long, big PR campaign, about combating housing issues, I have no doubts that any such law regulating "AI" will turn into a similar sham.

Well, this is a post about Bayesian inference, so technically pointing out bad regulation should cause people to update their beliefs by adjusting the prior probability that any new piece of regulation will be bad. Assuming people reason based on experience of course, which is reasonable.

What we have here is an unclear and highly controversial problem that many people would argue doesn't even exist at all (I don't see anyone in my own life who has been harmed by AI for example), a very vague and poorly worded regulation, which nonetheless has massive fines attached to it. That makes it pretty much a textbook example of bad regulation. And unfortunately this is the latest in a series of such anti-technology regulations from the EU, which doesn't seem to be learning how to write higher quality regulation or how to judge proportionality.