How about we wait until someone can demonstrate real harm in the real world.
Then we can discuss what mitigations are available, what trade offs we want to make, then as an absolute last resort we can make things illegal.
This also applies to censorship. Looking at you Britain.
Yep. Great plan.
If it ever actually turns out to be a problem, we’ll just make a law that requires them to delete the data / model.
If Australia make a law requiring them to delete the data Facebook will just use an offshore copy, since they’ve already exported it.
Facebook/Meta is not a company with a moral compass. If it can get away with something, regardless of the harm it causes, it will.
Australia’s leverage against a US company is the same whether they try to enact a ban now or later.
The modern society is a product of the Industrial Revolution, which had many nasty side effects (destroyed the traditional structure of the society, poisoned the air and the water, led to large swaths of land being damaged by mining etc.)
Yet if, say, Prussia or France decided to ban industry early on because of the very real harms observed in England, they would have been conquered mercilessly by their foes later.
Technological bans often come at a price of stagnation. Facebook is at least a bit under Western control and can be regulated. Chinese AI labs won't be, and we will only see their results when smart missiles start raining on our heads.
Fools rush in is a warning against not diving headfirst into doing whatever you feel like doing just because you can, it's not advocacy for "banning everything".
If that’s the threshold, then we are genuinely talking about banning everything by default.
That'd be inglor_cz above.
> when they can’t even outline a real harm that the ban is intended to avoid.
Unsurprising when { something } (for various values of something) has never been done before.
The wise course of action is to not rush full bore into, say, handing out sticks of dynamite, dumping hundreds of thousands of gallons of waste, allowing third parties in other countries to digitize citizens, etc. etc. until time has been taken to look into pootential harms.
This is very much in the eye of the beholder. In my opinion, we already suffer from an abundance of suffocating safetyism, which may be a consequence of aging of our societies.
"time has been taken to look into pootential harms."
And I am also very skeptical towards the idea that a theorizing committee can predict future reliably. Which includes future harms and rewards of some technology that has barely started to develop.
The experience from the past is that we cannot tell such things in advance.
New technologies don't need to be "banned" forever, what a daft idea.
They also don't have to be jumped into head first w/out checking for snags and clearance either.
So new technologies should be at least put on hold until someone checks them for snags and clearance to an extent satisfying for ... whom? You? An average person? A committee? The parliament? Some regulatory body?
Again, what you think of as wisdom seems like obsessive safetyism to me. As someone else here argues, you shouldn't have the right to stop or delay random things just in case, unless you can demonstrate some concrete harm.
The world shouldn't be a carefully padded kindergarten for adults. Heck, even current kindergartens for kids are too safetyist by far. Shout out to Lenore Skenazy and her free-range parenting.
There is no need for anyone to advocate banning everything. It is a result of aggregate efforts of a diverse set of activists each trying to ban something.
You dislike AI training. Someone dislikes high speed rail, or possibly any new rail at all. Someone dislikes Starship. Someone dislikes new housing or rezoning of their city. Someone dislikes new biotech. Someone dislikes new factories. Someone dislikes new wind turbines. Someone dislikes new nuclear power plants. And nowadays, the fear of harm and doing harmful things is in vogue, so the standard line of defense is to argue potential harms, and given that no activity in the world is completely harmless, the result is stasis and a paper war over everything.
It is as if there was a group of activists who dislike individual letters. Even though Alice only hates H and Bob only hates Q, if enough people do this, the entire alphabet is going to be banned soon.
There is a certain irony in the fact that the Internet, a revolutionary technology in itself, has enabled various reactionary folks to organize themselves to stop their $Nemesis, for whatever value of $Nemesis. Where once were isolated naysayers, a pressure group is now easily put together.
I'll remember to say that whenever anyone wants to apply any law or regulation to anything I'm doing
In this particular instance, we are talking about AI analyzing pictures, and looking at the Russo-Ukrainian war which is developing into a massive drone-fest, you cannot ignore the military ramifications thereof.
It is possible to jam a remotely controlled drone, it would be much harder to neutralize a drone that is capable of detecting targets reliably on its own.
Yes, I guess in the future a lot pf people will be killed by autonomous swarms of drones that just don't like the way they look, sometimes malfunction, give plausible deniability for war crimes, etc... ("who knows what the drones did, there was no communication. Also, the drones cannot possibly kill anyone who isn't a terrorist. Also, surely it was the drones of the other side.)
That's actually a great example for something I'd like to be banned. It would require international cooperation and arms control agreements, which unfortunately currently doesn't seem likely to happen.
That's why are farmers are getting Parkinson's, and cars are too big for the roads, and there is too much sugar in everything, and social media platforms can broadcast whatever they want with no repercussions.
If it turns out to be proven, then it will be banned.
What alternative do you propose? Banning every chemical in society, just in case it is linked to a disease one day?
The only it was detected was by studying a weak association after decades of use.
The same is likely to be true for all other pesticides in use.
So what do we do? Ban them, or allow rhem?
Fucking yes, Jesus Christ, does it need to be spelled out?
My God, imagine you’re consuming some shite for 10 years only to discover you’re a vegetable or deadman at 40. Are you insane?
The nanny state is really only a couple decades old.
Government has realized it can take significant powers if it can convince a subset of the populace that it is the only way to protect them from some type of harm.
Nuance is tough. It is easier to find a simple thing to blame and advocate against it. But nothing is simple -- governments are composed of people and those people have inside them conflicting motivations, each person's different than the other -- and most of them are not malicious. The same with business, and with the public.
Let's look at issues on their own and not try to categorize everything as part of a black and white choice.
The result is that you keep the good inventions and discard the harmful ones.
What people are proposing here is to preemptively ban new inventions even when there’s no evidence of harm. It’s not a good idea because while it will stop the bad inventions, it will also stop the good ones.
This thread is full of people suggesting Facebook be banned from behaving this way based on little more than gut-feel. They aren’t even capable of giving a hypothesis for harm this could be harmful.
However I really wish the discourse around this stuff would shift a little bit. I want my government to protect me from huge tech companies and the massive infringement on our privacy, community and culture. Like the government should serve the people, both by not restricting the freedoms of individuals too zealously, but also by protecting people from genuine threats that they can’t or won’t protect themselves from, such as social media companies exploiting network effects that make it basically impossible for users to make alternative choices.
If you think otherwise please explain it to me because I really, genuinely want to understand.
The benefit of letting them play out for a while is that you can see how things ultimately turn out, and cherry pick the aspects that are worth keeping, decide what aspects are worth keeping with changes, and outlaw aspects that are harmful.
It’s a natural experiment where you keep the wins, cancel the loses, then repeat the process, making societies iteratively better.
If you just pre-emptively ban everything before any significant real world harm is apparent, then you lose the ability to be selective and keep the wins.
This is Europe’s big mistake. They’re too eager to ban on gut feel, which means they ban too much, which places their industries at a disadvantage relative to other countries where iterative innovation can continue.
Who used any resulting model to create anything at all? In which cases did something too similar to a real person result from the usage? How do we track all that down and delete it? Then we will need some IT guys coming over to the conpany in question going through their stuff, to ensure that all remnants are deleted, which only happens after looking at possibly millions of logs, to know who got those too similar results in the first place.
Making right after the fact always has a potential to be magnitudes more work than not allowing someone to use some personal data.
But public policy shouldn’t be based on what’s easiest, it should be based on what’s best for society, and that requires considering the trade offs.
Right now there’s no evidence that anything Facebook are doing causes real world harm, so the trade off favours allowing it.
If that changes, then policy can change at the same time.
Surely that is not simply grabbing people's personal data and using it for new purposes without consent.
> Right now there’s no evidence that anything Facebook are doing causes real world harm, so the trade off favours allowing it.
If I had been living under a rock, I might have claimed this. However, FB is complicit in genocide, so naah, not so sure about that claim. I would rather we have a very close eye on them.
My comment deals with if something has already been deemed illegal.