The whole point of regulating it is to shape what it will look like in a couple of years.
Same way the pols aren’t futurists and perfect neither is anyone else. Everyone should sit at the table and discuss this like adults.
You want to go live in the hills alone, go for it, Dick Proenneke. Society is people working collectively.
For reference, see every highly-regulated industry everywhere.
You think Sam Altman was in testifying to the US Congress begging for AI regulation because he's just a super nice guy?
If you are paying for lobbyists to write the legislation you want, as corporations do, you get the law you want - that excludes competition, funds your errors etc.
The point is you are not dealing with 'humanity', you are dealing with those who represent authority for humanity - not the same thing at all. Connected politicians/CEOs etc are not actually representing 'humanity' - they merely say that they are doing so, while representing themselves.
But what started as a good thing has become a tool of those same companies to prevent competition. How we regulate needs to be rethought beyond the simplistic "more = better"
Technology changes very quickly and the future of things is hardly decided by entrenched interests.
It's not just IT. Ask any EU farmer.
There's a certain hubris to applying rules and regulations to a system that you fundamentally don't understand.
The moment the EU shows even a small sign of protectionism, the US complains. It's a double standard.
Arguably that worked. :-)
Preferable to a burgeoning oligarchy.
In a rigidly regulated market with preemptive action by regulators (like EU, Japan) you end up with a persistent oligarchy that is never replaced. An aristocracy of sorts.
The middle road is the best. Set up a fair playing field and rules of the game, but allow innovation to happen unhindered, until the dust has settled. There should be regulation, but the rules must be bought with blood. The risk of premature regulation is worse.
That's an awfully callous approach, and displays a disturbing lack of empathy toward other people.
one day some historian will be able to pinpoint the exact point in time that europe chose to be anti-progress and fervent traditionalist hell-bent on protecting pizza recipes, ruins of ancient civilization, and a so-called single market. one day!
Doomers have been wrong about completely different doom scenarios in the past (+), but it says nothing about to this new scenario. If you're doing statistics in your head about it, you're wrong. We can't use scenarios from the past to make predictions about completely novel scenarios like thinking computers.
(+) although they were very close to being right about nuclear doom, and may well be right about climate change doom.
Your point is fundamentally philosophical, which is you can't use the past to predict the future. But that's actually a fairly reductive point in this context.
GP's point is that simply making an argument about why everything will fail is not sufficient to have it be true. So we need to see something significantly more compelling than a bunch of arguments about why it's going to be really bad to really believe it, since we always get arguments about why things are really, really bad.
Of course you can use the past to predict (well, estimate) the future. How fast does wheat grow? Collect a hundred years of statistics of wheat growth and weather patterns, and you can estimate how fast it will grow this year with a high level of accuracy, unless a "black swan" event occurs which wasn't in the past data.
Note carefully what we're doing here: we're applying probability on statistical data of wheat growth from the past to estimate wheat growth in the future.
There's no past data about the effects of AI on society, so there's no way to make statements about whether it will be safe in the future. However, people use the statistics that other, completely unrelated, things in the past didn't cause "doom" (societal collapse) to predict that AI won't cause doom. But statistics and probability doesn't work this way, using historical data about one thing to predict the future of another thing is a fallacy. Even if in our minds they are related (doom/societal collapse caused by a new technology), mathematically, they are not related.
> we always get arguments about why things are really, really bad.
When we're dealing with a completely new, powerful thing that we have no past data on, we absolutely should consider the worst, and of course, the median, and best case scenarios, and we should prepare for all of these. It's nonsensical to shout down the people preparing for the worst and working to make sure it doesn't happen, or to label them as doomers, just because society has survived other unrelated bad things in the past.
Innovation is good, but there's no need to go as fast as possible. We can be careful about things and study the effects more deeply before unleashing life changing technologies into the world. Now we're seeing the internet get destroyed by LLMs because a few people decided it was ok to do so. The benefits of this are not even clear yet, but we're still doing it just because we can. It's like driving a car at full speed into a corner just to see what's behind it.
Personally, I don’t think they’re bad. Plastic isn’t that harmful, and neither is social media.
I think people romanticize the past and status quo. Change is scary, so when things change and the world is bad, it is easy to point at anything that changed and say “see, the change is what did it!”
This is handwaving. We can be pretty well sure at this point what the effects aren’t, given their widespread prevalence for generations. We have a 2+ billion sample size.
You're hypothesizing the existence of large negative effects with minimal evidence.
But the positive effects of plastics and social media are extremely well understood and documented. Plastics have revolutionized practically every industry we have.
With that kind of pattern of evidence, I think it makes sense to discount the negatives and be sure to account for all the positives before saying that deploying the technology was a bad idea.
Why take such risks when we could take our time doing more studies and thinking about all the possible scenarios? If we did, we might use plastics where they save lives and not use them in single-use containers and fabrics. We'd get most of the benefit without any of the harm.
Do you think Heroin is good?
While some people get addicted to it, the vast majority of users are not addicts. They choose to use it.
WHAT?! Do you think we as humanity would have gotten to all the modern inventions we have today like the internet, space travel, atomic energy, if we had skipped the fossil fuel era by preemptively regulating it?
How do you imagine that? Unless you invent a time machine, go to the past, and give inventors schematics of modern tech achievable without fossil fuels.
Simply taking away some giant precursor for the advancements we enjoy today and then assuming it all would have worked out somehow is a bit naive.
I would need to see a very detailed pipeline from growing wheat in an agrarian society to the development of a microprocessor without fossil fuels to understand the point you're making. The mining, the transport, the manufacture, the packaging, the incredible number of supply chains, and the ability to give people time to spend on jobs like that rather than trying to grow their own food are all major barriers I see to the scenario you're suggesting.
The whole other aspect of this discussion that I think is not being explored is that technology is fundamentally competitive, and so it's very difficult to control the rate at which technology advances because we do not have a global government (and if we did have a global government, we'd have even more problems than we do now). As a comment I read yesterday said, technology concentrates gains towards those who can deploy it. And so there's going to be competition to deploy new technologies. Country-level regulation that tries to prevent this locally is only going to lead to other countries gaining the lead.
Regarding competition, yes you're right. Effective regulation is impossible before we learn global co-operation, and that's probably never going to happen.
Historically, all nations that developed and deployed new tech, new sources of energy and new weapons, have gained economic and military superiority over nations who did not, which ended up being conquered/enslaved.
UK would not have managed to be the world power before the US, without their coal fueled industrial era.
So as history goes, if you refuse to take part in, or cannot keep up in the international tech, energy and weapons race, you'll be subjugated by those who win that race. That's why the US lifted all brakes on AI, to make sure they'll win and not China. What EU is doing, self regulating itself to death, is ensuring its future will be at the mercy of US and China. I'm not the one saying this, history proves it.
But if such co-operation was possible, it would make sense to progress more carefully.
It's been the case since our caveman days. That's why tribes that don't focus on conquest end up removed form the gene pool. Now extend tribe to nation to make it relevant to current day.
Space travel does need a lot of oil, so it might be affected, but the beginning of it were in the 40s so the research idea was already there.
Atomic energy is also from the 40s and might have been the alternative to oil, so it would thrive more if we haven't used oil that much.
Also all 3 ARE heavily regulated and mostly done by nation states.
Your augment only work in a fictional world where oil does not exist and you have the hindsight of today.
But when oil does exist and if you would have chosen not to use it, you will have long been steamrolled by industrialized nations powers who used their superior oil fueled economy and military to destroy or enslave your nation and you wouldn't be writing this today.
> How would you have won the world wars without oil?
You don't need to win world wars to have technological advancement, in fact my country didn't. I think the problem with this discussion, is that we all disagree what to regulate, that's how we ended up with the current situation after all.
I interpreted it to mean that we wouldn't use plastic for everything. I think we would be fine having glass bottles and paper, carton, wood for grocery wrapping. It wouldn't be so individual per company, but this not important for the economy and consumers, and also would result in a more competitive market.
I also interpreted it to mean that we wouldn't have so much cars and don't use planes beside really important stuff (i.e. international politics). The cities simply expand to the travel speed of the primary means of transportation. We would simply have more walkable cities and would use more trains. Amazon probably wouldn't be possible and we would have more local producers. In fact this is what we currently aim for and it is hard, because transition means that we have larger cities then we can support with the primary means of transportation.
As for your example inventions: we did have computers in the 40s and the need for networking would arise. Space travel is in danger, but you can use oil for space travel without using it for everyday consumer products. As I already wrote, we would have more atomic energy, not sure if that would be good though.
So I disagree, probably Europe will be even more behind in ev if they doesn't push eu manufacturers to invest so heavily in the industry.
You can se for example than for legacy manufacturers the only ones in the top ten are Europeans being 3 out of 10 companies, not Japanese or Korean for example, and in Europe Volkswagen already overtake Tesla in sales Q1 for example and Audi isn't that much away also.