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Comment by thundergolfer | Hacker News Reader

A similar mistake was made by Ezra Klein in the NYT at the end of his opinion piece (1).

The 'we can regulate this' argument relies on heavy, heavy discounting of the past, often paired with heavy discounting of the future. We did not successfully regulate tobacco; we failed, millions suffered and died from manufactured ignorance. We did not successfully regulate the fossil fuel industry; we again, massively failed.

But if you, in the present day, sit comfortably, did not personally did not get lung disease, have not endured the past, present, and future harms of fossil fuels — and in fact have benefited — it is easy to be optimistic about regulation.

1. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/22/opinion/openai-sam-altman...

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In the US, at least, a new generation of congresspeople may not go by that same playbook.

We’re still dealing with most of the same politicians that were there in the late 80s. The anti-labor, pro-corporatist congress, if you will.

Maybe it’ll always be the same, but as the congress demographics changes, appeals to history don’t seem as strong.

> We’re still dealing with most of the same politicians that were there in the late 80s.

Factually, no we aren't; the average tenure of serving members in each House of Congress is under 10 years. It would have to be close to double what it is, even if everyone else was sworn in today, if we were dealing with most of the same members as even the very end of the 1980s.

EDIT: I suspect this impression comes from the fact that outliers both are more likely to be in leadership and, independent of leadership, get more media attention because they are outliers, as well as because they have had more time to build up their own media operations and to have opposing media build up a narrative around them.

My understanding of how US congress works is that you have to serve for decades in order to land the most influential positions - chair of various committees etc.

If you've served less than ten years your impact is likely limited. The politicians who have the most influence are the ones who have been there the longest.

> My understanding of how US congress works is that you have to serve for decades in order to land the most influential positions -

The current Speaker of the House, the highest ranking position in Congress and the second in line of Presidential succession, has been in Congress for 6 years.

Except for the President Pro Tem of the Senate, which traditionally goes to the longest-serving member of the majority party, most positions of authority or influence just require the support of either the majority or minority party caucus; longevity is correlated with that, but not a requirement in itself.

The current speaker of the house is a huge exception to how this usually works.

The preceding Speaker had been in Congress for 16 years (note: also not "since the late 1980s"), but had also been in caucus leadership positions all but the first two, and was #3 in the party caucus arte four years. Yeah, the current Speaker is ane extreme case, but it's simply not the case that position is simply a function of longevity normally.

All the more reason to start trying to regulate it early, before it is even more firmly entrenched in society.

We also got a lot of things right. The past isn't just some history of failure.

I mean smoking prevalence in fact decreases, this is at least a partial success. But other things can't be regulated this "easily". If restricting smoking was hard, and restricting AI that undermines social trust is hard, then there are things that even harder to prevent, much harder.

>this is at least a partial success

"If we are victorious in one more battle like this, we shall be utterly ruined."

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