Hacker News Reader

Comment by gbanfalvi | Hacker News Reader

Lmao you can’t be serious. This is something that can only be said if you can’t/won’t quantify social cost.

Deregulated gambling has had a horrible impact on individuals. Repealing Glass—Steagall led to a global financial crisis. Gig economy businesses are exploiting workers by the thousands through self employment loopholes. We have insane monopolistic pricing and practices in the US in eg the telecom industry. Worst of all is that we’ve likely doomed the entire planet based on what is effectively too little environmental regulation.

View on HN

>Deregulated gambling has had a horrible impact on individuals.

Yes, but gambling and all vices for that matter, are a centuries old issue that's well studied and well understood by everyone, while AI(hate that term in this case) LLMs are only an issue since November 2022, while most influential politicians are dumbass boomers who don't understand how a PC or the internet works let alone how LLMs work but yet are expected to make critical decisions on these topics.

So then it's safe to assume that the politicians will either fudge up the regulations due to sheer cluelessness, or they will just make decisions based on what their most influential corporate lobbyists will tell them. Either way it's bad.

ML and other automated systems are not new, and we know enough about automated systems to come up with regulations like "no, you should not use these in a certain set of specific circumstances" or "if you're unleashing this onto the world, you have to show that you understand what you're doing" etc.

>ML and other automated systems are not new

Let's not be overly pedantic and overly Pius on petty semantics like that. It was clear from my original comment, the context of what I was talking about.

Even for LLMs the same thinking applies.

E.g. "if a decision cannot be explained by a human, it should bot be done by a machine" applies to them, too.

Basically, if you read the EU AI Act for example, it's hard to find anything you'd disagree with regardless of whether it's about ML, LLMs or three if statements in a trench coat.

Of course the industry is up in arms about it (just like GDPR)

> Gig economy businesses are exploiting workers

Actually, around here they are giving a second chance to people whom over-regulation of the work market made too expensive to hire.

> insane monopolistic pricing and practices in the US in eg the telecom industry

It's actually regulations deterring competition in telecom who are responsible to those practices.

It goes like this: (well intended) regulation => raise price of doing business => fewer startups => less competition => incumbents enjoying practically monopoly => incumbents behaving like monopolistic a-holes.

> too little environmental regulation

In China. You forgot "in China". That is where most of that planet dooming is happening. Good luck promoting environmental regulation there.

> Actually, around here they are giving a second chance to people whom over-regulation of the work market made too expensive to hire.

Over-regulation being what, minimum wages? Coverage for basic social safety nets? ‘Cause that’s what we lost.

> It goes like this: (well intended) regulation => raise price of doing business => fewer startups => less competition => incumbents enjoying practically monopoly => incumbents behaving like monopolistic a-holes.

Bell system was broken up into seven different companies, thanks to regulation. It’s _lack_ of regulation that let telecoms merge together into behemoths. There _are_ small ISPs and telecoms in the US, they just can’t compete due to the size differential.

> In China. You forgot "in China". … Good luck promoting environmental regulation there.

Right, let’s jump for a Tu Quoque. China is destroying the planet so who cares what we do ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I’m not blind to the existence of plain bad regulation, regulatory barriers and capture — but the overwhelming majority of these arguments have just been used to make regular people’s lives’ worse.

“Cheap housing isn’t being built in the UK because regulation makes it more expensive!” -> remove regulations -> there’s still no cheap housing but anything from 1990s onwards is now also badly built.

As a construction developer I’m sure I’d say there’s still too much regulation though. Gotta bump those margins.

> Over-regulation being what

One easy example is regulation making it hard to fire people. Then, naturally, firms will hire just as hard. The tradeoff is thus between a healthy, fast, dynamic and competitive job market with plenty of opportunities but with job insecurity and - fewer jobs, smaller salaries but the lazy unproductive bum slowing everybody down is now impossible to get rid of.

Yes, minimum wage is another. In effect it makes people whose work is worth less than the minimum wage - legally unemployable.

> Bell system

Bell system was a monopoly thanks to government regulation in the first place. The government actually passed a law that made illegal to connect a 3rd party telephone to Bell's network!

Yes, you need more regulation when your regulation f'd up a market. In free markets competition keeps market participants honest and even breaks monopolies. This is why one of the first regulation incumbents lobby for is meant to deter competition.

> Cheap housing isn’t being built in the UK

I do not live in the UK, but I am willing to bet everything that there is still a ton of regulation stopping building there. Last summer I visited London during a heat wave. We were sweating in our AirBnB, complained to the owner but he answered that he couldn't install an A/C because he wasn't allowed to change the building facade...

It's not just China. It's everybody.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com