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Comment by moose44 | Hacker News Reader

Curious about past examples of industries and companies left to govern themselves?

Movie ratings. They censored themselves to avoid the government stepping in.

Also professional orders like engineers, accountants and teachers in some places I guess.

Film/TV ratings is a famously terrible, opaque process with no rhyme or reason to it at all, and everyone in hollywood hates it

Conversely the Australian experience where the government is involved is just stupid, and gives us random banned games like Bully because it triggers boomer-era moral panic.

Bully the game rated 'M' in Australia that some parent groups raised a stink about and threatened to ban ?

https://www.classification.gov.au/titles/bully-1

    Films and computer games classified M (Mature) are not recommended for children under the age of 15. They can have content such as violence and themes that requires a mature outlook.

    Children under the age of 15 may legally access this content.

For an actual example of "Banned in Australia" (March 2022) see:

    The Board considered that the depiction of drug use in the game, Rimworld, did include “illicit or proscribed drug use related to incentives or rewards” and that therefore the Board was required to classify the game, Refused Classification. A game that has received an RC rating cannot be sold, hired, advertised, or legally imported into Australia.

Rimworld: https://steamcommunity.com/app/294100

    A sci-fi colony sim driven by an intelligent AI storyteller. Generates stories by simulating psychology, ecology, gunplay, melee combat, climate, biomes, diplomacy, interpersonal relationships, art, medicine, trade, and more.

https://www.classification.gov.au/about-us/media-and-news/me...

Kind of the point? The system winds up being stupidly reactionary - at best it's the same outcome as the industry self-regulation. Tossing government enforcement on there though you wind up with the old "we're just going to ban it" as an outcome, which you always end up as because people are doing political grandstanding and that requires oneupmanship on their perceived rivals.

> Kind of the point?

Not that I can see from these examples ...

> The system winds up being stupidly reactionary

"The system" didn't actually react to community outrage and ban Bully though, did it?

It appears there are well laid out and publicised ground rules in advance (whether these are fair and reasonable and|or considered as such by how many is another discussion), and that those rules are applied on a case by case basis after review by a largely independant rotating review board who publish their decisions and reasoning.

https://www.classification.gov.au/classification-ratings/how...

With the video game South Park, Stick of truth, the Aussie government doesn't approve of things like mini games where underage kids get ass-raped with dildos by aliens so they to replaced the scenes with images of Koalas.

I mean, they didn't ask for an example where it works well.

I'd look into industry trade groups and self-regulatory organizations. A few U.S. examples that come to mind are FINRA (broker-dealers), bar associations (lawyers), AMA (doctors), AICPA (accountants), etc.

Really glad you brought up FINRA, as I think it's the model that will ultimately work best for AI regulation. Despite their protestations, FINRA is almost a "quasi-governmental" organization at this point. I think of it as the SEC being ultimately in charge, but FINRA is responsible for the nitty-gritty, technical details of the regulations.

I think with AI, you'll need an industry body because they'll have the needed AI knowledge and expertise about the technology itself, but ultimately a government oversight body carries the legal force of the state.

This is the only good take. Obviously you need the expertise to write effective regulation that limits harm and externalities while still allowing important technical development. But that authority should come from the state, and nothing near anything run by VCs or big tech firms. Otherwise you wind up in regimes like the one we're in now where we still don't have comprehensive privacy policy regulating companies like Google and Meta.

Lawyers, doctors, engineers, IT practitioners, the film industry,...

It's extremely common and has been for literally millenia.

Underwriters Laboratories.

Do things like lawn services and clothing shops count?

Video games via ESRB, PEGI, et al.

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