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Comment by ho_schi | Hacker News Reader

    … no regulation unless actual harm has been shown first.

What?

It is the duty of politics to protect the citizens and environment - also proactively. From reckless CEOs, greedy shareholders and lawyers which claim that it wasn’t strictly forbidden to cause harm.

Politics isn’t doing always right. The Cookie-Directive tried to make misuse of Cookies illegal. Actually it made web browsing horrible and created further questionable businesses like “cookie cloud storage providers aggregating cookies of several websites”.

On the other hand this people require ABS and ESP in cars. Banned Teslas “Autopilot” and had smart ideas like type certification for aircraft’s. And then they forbid stuff which can cause cancer…that was smart! What comes next? Acting against monopolies and oligopolies like Microsoft and Apple?

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(Harm has already been shown. Its more nuanced than this.)

Also proactively, indeed, but usually rather reactive. Why bother with say cops on the street to check for weapons when civilians tend to not carry them there? Proactive is rather: seemingly proactive, like AI is seemingly intelligent. In reality 101, its reactive, but the quality of the reactivity matters (speed, thoroughness, accuracy, transparency, cost, etc). Some of these qualitative measures are at odds with each other.

> And then they forbid stuff which can cause cancer…that was smart!

Tobacco is regulated; not forbidden.

Regulation without known harm is a case of we need to do something and this is something. The rules will be arbitrary and expensive to comply with and will most likely have no preventative effect on any negative effects.

vaccines are like the medicine analogy to regulation.

You have to first prove that it is not going to do more harm than good. And without knowing what sort of harm AI's do - it's all theoretical at the moment - any regulation is merely speculating a harm, and the cost of prevention might be high (or stifling).

ABS and ESP in cars came _after_ harm was shown. And so is emission controls, and crash-related safety measures and testing/certification.

> And then they forbid stuff which can cause cancer…that was smart!

which makes sense, as those stuff has been shown to cause cancer.

In other words, harm has to be shown, rather than speculated, before regulation is desirable.

We know certain possible high risk applications already (e.g., dosage recommendation for medication), so it is not all about figuring if something is risky or can cause harm.

The question then is more: regulate those within the particular area of use or have something that generally aims to regulate risky use.

How are you going to *proove* in advance that a certain economic or social measure is doing what you expect?

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