Tech world won't have long to fall in line when EU signs off on AI Act | Hacker News Reader

Tech world won't have long to fall in line when EU signs off on AI Act

theregister.com

27 pointsrntn68 comments

Is there any chance that all of these EU regulations will, at some point, cause tech innovators to flee Europe and tech companies to avoid Europe rather than deal with all of the government meddling?

They already do.

Tech innovators for sure. Companies for the most part will just offer difficult products in the EU.

They shouldn't let the door hit them in the ass on their way out.

No, no innovation in vaporware.

Tech companies fall over themselves to comply with China's regulations because: money. The EU is a big market so cynically I feel they will just comply for the same reasons.

Except most of them don't? Only a few big tech companies that are not Chinese operate in China due to the regulations, among other issues.

But the chinese companies do everything that outside companies do, and the money stays in china... for china, this is a good thing.

The mass net migration out of China suggests otherwise. Chinese people apparently prefer USA to China.

Every young, capabl and healthy person prefers the country with most money earned and less taxes taken away. Paying for eg. universal healthcare or taxpayer-paid education (college) is just a burden and not worth it for those people at that time. This does not mean that chinese regulation (eg. local protectionism) is bad for most of the chinese people.

Is there any chance that the lack of US regulations will, at some point, cause the general populations to flee the US rather than deal with tech companies monitoring and controlling every aspect of your life?

Nope.

Nope. These type of regulations looks good, but it's not fun or easy to do business in an overly regulated marked. If this continues, the US will improving financially faster than the EU. People are not likely to move to a worse economy because they value regulations like this.

> These type of regulations looks good, but it's not fun or easy to do business in an overly regulated marked.

This. Each regulation by itself sounds like something reasonable / potentially good, but trying to run a business in an environment like this is excessively complicated, and ends up being only something huge businesses are willing to put up with.

Ah yes, the bad-bad regulations of "do not spy on people", "don't collect and sell people's data wholesale" and "don't use undocumented blackboxes in surveillance".

Won't someone think of the financial improvement!

How are you meant to "innovate" if you can't harvest your customers data and sell it to the highest bidder?

Yup. These type of regulations looks bad, but it's not fun or easy to live in an overly deregulated market. If this continues, the US will deteriorate in happiness faster than the EU. People are not likely to move to a worse society because they value regulations like this.

I'm not happy with the monitoring, but tech companies control absolutely no aspect of my life.

Monitoring is invisible control.

In the hands of the government, yes. But companies can only use it to try, and fail, to get me to buy stuff I don't need because they really don't have the power to do anything unpleasant to me.

Some governments will contract with companies to obtain data, or even subpoena the data directly. There are checks and balances. Generally the system and the people behind it are trustworthy and reliabily act from principles over partisanship or economic concerns. Furthermore, we can generally trust that will always be the case; in addition to established political norms and precedents. So I agree there is nothing to worry about.

I suppose you, just like everyone else claims, are immune to marketing?

The most insidious form of control is convincing people they are forming their own opinions without any outside influence.

Regardless who you are, the content you are exposed to online and by extension in-person through your peers is shaped by who exposes it in the first place.

I'm speaking beyond just marketing, rather to general attitudes and knowledge.

Google, Facebook, Cloudflare, etc. can hand over all sorts of interesting data to the USG about you, assuming the NSA hasn't already taken it. And we know the FBI gets access to that, so...

so, you're off the grid?

The fact that you're on an internet comments section begs to differ. There are a lot of tech companies responsible for the connection between your computer and HN's servers.

Generally, the US seems to play a role similar for the EU that China does to the US. Regulations run a bit weaker, so companies can do nasty stuff with externalities, then the US (and the EU) can take advantage of it with the externality pushed off.

Like, the EU will have generative AI...a little lagged, but regulated for the interest of people. The comparatively lawless US will get the dirty hit, and they'll get the clean version. Maybe not even from US companies. If US companies just flee the regulation, they will probably have domestic companies doing it in compliance with their regulation, and if they lag a bit in innovation, they will see what happened in the US, then implement it in a compliant manner, and that has the advantage of boosting the domestic economy instead of relying on US tech anyway.

However, it doesn't seem quite that simple, because it ignores the economic advantage of more lax regulation, which doesn't run entirely disjoint from human interests, and it might account a little for the large size of the US economy. The calibration seems a bit off in the US. While a much poorer country, I like how Bhutan explicitly has a Gross National Happiness index, not just a GDP. It certainly feels like the GDP gets too much attention and the US treats economics as an end in itself, not in service to human happiness, with predictable results. (Obviously, I'm speaking in generalities. China has the 996, work 6 days a week, 9AM-9PM, which seems like a greater deprioritization of happiness for economics than the US. I mean the US would do better to keep the GDP in perspective as an element of happiness, perhaps an important one, but a subservient* one.)

*corrected thanks to comment below

It's 996 system, from 9AM to 9PM, 6 days a week. Not that it really matters that much, but it was found illegal Supreme People's Court in 2021.

thanks! total brain glitch there.

Economic strength is mostly valuable to states because of its correspondence to geopolitical power.

The happiness of citizens isn’t really that important to politics, as long as the citizenry aren’t angry at you personally.

> Is there any chance that the increase in EU regulations will, at some point, cause the general populations to flee the EU rather than deal with the government monitoring and controlling every aspect of your life?

>Is there any chance that the lack of US regulations will, at some point, cause the general populations to flee the US rather than deal with tech companies monitoring and controlling every aspect of your life?

Wow, your witty riposte really got 'em, eh? But wouldn't

>I know you are, but what am I?

be shorter to type? Or, even better,

>no u

> Is there any chance that the lack of US regulations will, at some point, cause the general populations to flee the US rather than deal with tech companies monitoring and controlling every aspect of your life?

Speaking as an Australian who lives in a place that is often considered over regulated ... zero chance.

Turns out living in a place that has laws like "thou shall not lie on the box", and "shrink wrap licences for software shall not override the law" (this is what new EU law says) is pretty nice.

Hell, in Australia we have laws that say ISP's must tell you what minimum bandwidth you are paying for, and horrors, the price displayed must be the price you pay in the end. Oh, the imposition this must place be on a business ... Actually it turns out it's very little. The ISP's already knew how much bandwidth people were using because they pay for it, and as for the difficulty of displaying th price you plan on charging the customer - lets no go there.

Most of the world thinks competitive markets are a good thing. The free markets the USA seems to prefer look to be a form of self flagellation to us.

That will depend on how easy it is to get visas to countries with more desirable regulations.

As for the other point, I still don't think Anthropic is available in the EU. Bard wasn't available at launch either.

Not really. Where do they want to sell their expensive toys and tools?

* EU is 450 million of potential customers.

* USA + Canada is market of 400 million of potential customers

* Japan + Korea is market of 200 million of potential customers

* China does not count, because they will rip off your product and you can do nil against that.

Rest of the world is just too poor to afford the product.

You forgot India, with a growing middle class probably larger than US or EU.

1) Maybe in the future, not today.

2) India like EU loves its regulations and compared to EU it is bureaucratic hellscape running on bribes.

I know the full text is not linked in this article, yet, the kind of regulation mentioned here sounds like the kind of regulation I'd love to see from AI companies.

- being required to disclose energy use

- not being allowed to scrape CCTV cameras for training

- not being allowed to use AI for things like social scoring

The things mentioned in this post feel like restrictions on the possible ways people could abuse others with AI. Even though I may not agree with all the items on the list (there are more than 3 hidden in the body of the article), the direction feels in service of me, as a citizen. That's great!

Contrast that to US regulation posted a few months ago which basically said: you have to be one of these 5 companies to develop AI because we trust these 5 companies.

Why is energy use of these models in particular of interest to you, vs everything else a tech company does?

How do you even define it? If you start with a pre trained model, must you include the energy that went into the initial training, even though that didn’t occur at your company?

Energy use for AI is interesting due to exponential growth. Most energy spent by these companies falls under existing categories like office HVAC which isn’t going to change much globally.

However AI as an emerging technology could quickly go from irrelevance to significant in a fairly short period and some lead time before the actual impact is useful.

Would knowing the energy use of an ai product influence you to use it less than if you didn’t know? Or is it simply a curiosity?

If the latter, this regulation seems useless and performative.

My point is not about users but the electric grid. You need to start planning capacity long before the actual demand shows up.

Energy use is obviously related to carbon emissions, which as you may have heard we would like to reduce.

It's related, but consider that tech companies are close to the forefront of sourcing renewable energy compared to other industries, and AI has the potential to supplant higher-emissions activity, so it may be a false economy if regulation has the effect of constraining AI development in the name of saving energy.

Also - should the energy used to create the training data be taken into account?

Presumably if a drone is flown over a terrain to collect data that activity should count; but what about the energy used to create make up for models etc?

> - not being allowed to use AI for things like social scoring

How bout not allowing social scoring at all?

2 points by normalaccess 59 minutes ago | prev | next | edit | delete [–]

I have a few questions about this sort of legislation.

How do you determine what "AI" even is in this context? I feel like we have a Loki's Wager situation on our hands where either the context is so restricted to be functionally meaningless or so broad that simple things like basic math processing would be covered.

Although it sounds crazy I fell like certain kinds of math (like matrix multiplication, gradient decent, and simulated annealing) will soon be outlawed unless you are authorized.

As far as the other stuff I'm not sure how effective it would be... Like CCTV data, you could just simulate virtually identical visual data using tings like the unreal engine. But I do get it. Things like social scoring? That cat is already out of the bag and using machine learning and AI is only a value add to the system.

At the end of the day AI is just /fancy/ math and any problems that fall into the "P VS NP" category use the same computational techniques.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loki's_Wager https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gradient_descent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matrix_multiplication https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulated_annealing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P_versus_NP_problem https://www.wired.co.uk/article/china-social-credit-system-e...

EDIT: Spelling

> I have a few questions about this sort of legislation. How do you determine what "AI" even is in this context?

Instead of linking 4 wikipedia articles you... could find the text of the legislation: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=celex%3A...

> Although it sounds crazy I fell like certain kinds of math (like matrix multiplication, gradient decent, and simulated annealing) will soon be outlawed unless you are authorized.

Yes, you sound crazy. That is, you blindly parrot the industry that started spreading FUD about this before the AI Act was little more than a twinkling in its authors' eyes. This legislation doesn't outlaw a single thing.

Here is another link: The truth about the EU AI Act and foundation models, or why you should not rely on ChatGPT summaries for important texts https://softwarecrisis.dev/letters/the-truth-about-the-eu-ac...

> Like CCTV data, you could just simulate virtually identical visual data using tings like the unreal engine. But I do get it. Things like social scoring? That cat is already out of the bag and using machine learning and AI is only a value add to the system.

"You could just", "it's only", "bad things are already happening, why should we bother with laws and regulations, the cat is already out of the bag"

You can read the proposed text of the regulation at https://drive.google.com/file/d/1xfN5T8VChK8fSh3wUiYtRVOKIi9... in the rather awkward format of a four-column diff, paginated and converted to PDF.

From what I've read, I don't really know what I think of it.

Some parts of it are clearly reasonable - like limitations on CCTV facial recognition. The lower requirements placed on open models are also welcome.

On the other hand, several times I read paragraphs that sounded like they were going to decisively settle issues like using copyrighted training material, only for the paragraph to end with something like "unless relevant copyright exceptions and limitations apply" or "without prejudice to" which seems to... just kinda leave the questions open. Such issues are complicated, though, and some people might find it reassuring there hasn't been a rush to decide either way.

Why PDF? Why 4-column format? It's available as a single HTML document here: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=celex%3A...

EU still a big enough market to bend US tech companies to their will.

However, anaemic economic growth, ageing population, high cost of living, accelerating de-industrialisation, rise of the nationalist right, inability to operate an independent international policy _and_ shrinking share of global GDP, it could be that US firms might soon be able to afford to ignore these rules from Brussels

I really hope the EU fails fast economically, so we can rebuild without these bureaucrats.

No need to wait!

Head to Nauru, Liberia or Kiribati, or anywhere else where the Government doesn't pay for useless paper-pushers:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_governm...

Some of these regulations seem like they should be aimed at the government, though the article doesn't specify what organizations they would apply to. Behavioral scoring is fine for a private business that wants to prevent spam or fraud, like HN’s own karma system. While arguably the negative consequences of unfettered, untargeted CCTV scanning by the government could be greater.

Is the act meant to be anti-Tech, or anti usage of tech?

Looks like William Gibson's Turing Registry is being constructed by the EU - although I imagine they won't be sanctioning their own or allied governments for using AI to automatically generate kill lists and conduct assassinations in regions under their own military occupation, will they? See:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38644725

AI-based detection of a 'possible supporter of violent resistance' for targeted assassination is on par, accuracy-wise, with identification of a 'potential customer for a new laptop' for a targeted advertising campaign. I imagine it's a very similar approach, in which user behavior is recorded by Google or similar and fed into an AI system which then generates a list of products/services that target might want to buy (or political opinions they might hold, etc.).

Relevant: The truth about the EU AI Act and foundation models, or why you should not rely on ChatGPT summaries for important texts https://softwarecrisis.dev/letters/the-truth-about-the-eu-ac...

Europe continuing to make itself more difficult and irrelevant to do business in is a great thing for America. Thanks guys!

Alternatively, Europe continuing to value the rights of its citizens over those of corporations is a great thing for Europeans. Thanks guys!

It's great for business that America is business-first, citizens' quality of life... Come maybe third or fourth in your priorities?

as opposed to the corporate profits first, employees and users last, "American way"?

Which seems to be working well for Boeing?

Sadly, yes. But I'm pretty sure Boeing's survival is due to its defense contracts.

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