E.U. Parliament approves landmark AI Act, challenging tech giants’ power | Hacker News Reader

E.U. Parliament approves landmark AI Act, challenging tech giants’ power

washingtonpost.com

31 pointsisaacfrond15 comments

> The move solidifies Europe’s position as the de facto global tech regulator, setting rules that influence tech policymaking around the world and standards that will likely trickle down to all consumers, as companies shift their practices internationally to avoid a patchwork of different policies.

Was this piece written by the EU government? It sounds so weirdly congratulatory.

>Was this piece written by the EU government? It sounds so weirdly congratulatory.

There is a self-congratulatory concept that's fairly prevalent in some policy circles called "The Brussels Effect". It's the idea that the EU can exercise outsized political influence by being the first and/or most ambitious mover in regulatory contexts.

In some policy circles, this has morphed into a probably unsupported belief that the Brussels Effect, to the extent it exists, will have economic benefits for the EU. It's an obviously attractive luxury belief for those whose bread and butter is pushing regulations.

It's always seemed like this tech regulation was thinly disguised protectionism, similar to and possibly copied from the Great Chinese Firewall.

> as companies shift their practices internationally to avoid a patchwork of different policies

That is one theory. Another is that AI companies just don't comply and have no nexus of assets in the EU so there could be no enforcement against them.

The assets would be anyone who does business with them.

I don't think you truly appreciate the money being left on the table with your 'just'

Curious. This works ok for things like standardising sockets on mobile phones. AI seems set to revolutionise warfare and cause serious churn in the workforce. I'd definitely drop Europe as a customer in preference to stopping research on machine intelligence. I think they've overplayed their hand here.

Alternative title, EU torpedos it's possible AI Tech market

To be fair, it's already been torpedoed due to GDPR. I wonder if it could get worse. I'm not saying it was a bad idea, but it truly puts the EU at a great disadvantage there.

> To be fair, it's already been torpedoed due to GDPR

Not really. I'm a deep learning researcher and my work has to be palatable to the GDPR. You can remove personally identifying information from training datasets with some effort (replacing faces with GAN-generated fake ones, ditto with license plates and telephone numbers, etc.) It's just another aspect of data cleaning and not that big a deal.

Are there any good papers describing best practices for doing this? For example, how do you handle personally identifying information that needs to be in the training set? (e.g., names of actors, authors and other famous people) Do you have a mechanism in place to process "right to be forgotten" requests, e.g., by removing that person from the training set and then retraining the whole model, or do you put in some kind of filter on the output side?

The problem is that a lot of those databases will not exist to begin with. Also, data owners are much more protective of their data. 8 years ago I could just ask companies for anonymised data for academic purposes and they would give it or allow scraping. Now the answer is GDPR bla bla bla. On the other hand, I am not saying privacy efforts are bad.

No worries there are enough customers inside the Great EU Wall, as proven by others.

There is a reason the typical company on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_companies_in_t... is half as old as the typical company on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_European_compa... :)

https://archive.is/MBkQc

Sounds like they want to let the US dominate, for whom are they really working for? Certainly not for their own interests, or perhaps that's part of their interests?

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