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Comment by TheAceOfHearts | Hacker News Reader

I cannot help but feel that discussing this topic under the blanket term "AI Regulation" is a bit deceptive. I've noticed that whenever this topic comes up, almost every major figure remains rather vague on the details. Who are some influential figures actually advancing clearly defined regulations or key ideas for approaching how we should think about AI regulation?

What we should be doing is surfacing well defined points regarding AI regulation and discussing them, instead of fighting proxy wars for opaque groups with infinite money. It feels like we're at the point where nobody is even pretending like people's opinions on this topic are relevant, it's just a matter of pumping enough money and flooding the zone.

Personally, I still remain very uncertain about the topic; I don't have well-defined or clearly actionable ideas. But I'd love to hear what regulations or mental models other HN readers are using to navigate and think about this topic. Sam Altman and Elon Musk have both mentioned vague ideas of how AI is somehow going to magically result in UBI and a magical communist utopia, but nobody has ever pressed them for details. If they really believe this then they could make some more significant legally binding commitments, right? Notice how nobody ever asks: who is going to own the models, robots, and data centers in this UBI paradise? It feels a lot like Underpants Gnomes: (1) Build AGI, (2) ???, (3) Communist Utopia and UBI.

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> I cannot help but feel that discussing this topic under the blanket term "AI Regulation" is a bit deceptive. I've noticed that whenever this topic comes up, almost every major figure remains rather vague on the details. Who are some influential figures actually advancing clearly defined regulations or key ideas for approaching how we should think about AI regulation?

There's a vocal minority calling for AI regulation, but what they actually want often strikes me as misguided:

"Stop AI from taking our jobs" - This shouldn't be solved through regulation. It's on politicians to help people adapt to a new economic reality, not to artificially preserve bullshit jobs.

"Stop the IP theft" - This feels like a cause pushed primarily by the 1%. Let's be realistic: 99% of people don't own patents and have little stake in strengthening IP protections.

> "Stop the IP theft" - This feels like a cause pushed primarily by the 1%. Let's be realistic: 99% of people don't own patents and have little stake in strengthening IP protections.

This is being screamed from the rooftops by nearly the entire creative community of artists, photographers, writers, and other people who do creative work as a job, or even for fun.

The difference between the 99% of individual creatives and the 1% is that the 1% has entire portfolios of IP - IP that they might not have even created themselves - as well as an army of lawyers to protect that IP.

> "Stop the IP theft" - This feels like a cause pushed primarily by the 1%. Let's be realistic: 99% of people don't own patents and have little stake in strengthening IP protections.

Artists are not primarily in the 1% though, it's not only patents that are IP theft.

Do the artists that are not in the 1% actually benefit from IP or does it hinder them from building new art based on other art? It seem to me that IP only benefits the top players.

Can you give me an example of the situation you are picturing?

Simply because I can't see what you mean by artists being hindered by IP, artists try to create original work, and derivative work from other IP is usually re-interpreted enough to fall under fair use. I can't picture a situation where artists could be hindered on their creations due to IP owned by others.

Sampling in music is now paid for, it used to be free, as one example.

Sampling is still done, I'm a hobbyist music producer, and friends with many professionals. They have to clear the samples and pay royalties, and they get royalties from sampled tracks.

It's more cumbersome while being fairer, it hasn't stopped at all the practice. As a hobbyist I do it all the time while my professional friends clear their samples before earning money on their tracks.

Agreed. There are some pretty cool platforms in the last 5 years to streamline this process, too.

Photographers massively benefit from IP protection.

IP law gives young or up-and-coming artists leverage in negotiations.

"Stop the laundering of responsibility/liability" - the risk that you can run someone over with a software controlled car and it's not a crime "because AI" whereas a human doing the same thing would be in jail. Image detection leading to false arrests, etc. It's harder to sue because the immediate party can say "it wasn't us, we bought this software product and it did the bad thing!"

I strongly feel that regulation needs to curb this, even if it leads to product managers going to jail for what their black box did.

> This shouldn't be solved through regulation. It's on politicians to help people adapt to a new economic reality, not to artificially preserve bullshit jobs.

They already do this[1]. Why should there be an exception carved out for AI type jobs?

------------------------------

[1] What do you think tariffs are? Show me a country without tariffs and I'll show you a broken economy with widespread starvation and misery.

How are tariffs supposed to stop domestically produced AI from replacing workers?

> How are tariffs supposed to stop domestically produced AI from replacing workers?

I didn't say it would.

I said that politicians already artificially preserve jobs, and asked, quite legitimately I feel, why should they make an exception for AI?

> Show me a country without tariffs and I'll show you a broken economy with widespread starvation and misery.

I think that would be Singapore, as far as import tarrifs go? Not much starvation there!

Do you mean taxes? Or excise duties or...?

"Stop AI from taking our jobs" - This shouldn't be solved through regulation. It's on politicians to help people adapt to a new economic reality, not to artificially preserve bullshit jobs.

So politicians are supposed to create "non bullshit" jobs out of thin air?

The job you've done for decades is suddenly bullshit because some shit LLM is hallucinating nice sounding words?

They do create bullshit jobs in finance by propping up the system when it's about to collapse from the consequences of their own actions though.

Not that I believe they should allow the financial system to collapse without intervention but the interventions during recent crises have been done to save corporations that should have been extinguished instead of the common people who were affected by their consequences.

Which I believe is what's lacking in the whole discussion, politicians shouldn't be trying to maintain the labour status quo if/when AI change the landscape because that would be a distortion of reality but there needs to be some off-ramp, and direct help for people who will suffer from the change in landscape without going through the bullshit of helping companies in the hopes they eventually help people. As many in HN say, companies are not charities, if they can make an extra buck by fucking someone they will do it, the government is supposed to be helping people as a collective.

At this point if an LLM can do your job, it was already bullshit. But in the future when they can do non bullshit jobs, then you can go get another one just like every other person out of the billions who has had their job made obsolete by technology. It's not that hard.

If large swaths of people lose their jobs to AI, have no job prospects due to the presence of AI, and can't afford their next meal in the here and now, that is a recipe for civil unrest.

If... But most likely it will be like technology replacing all the many jobs it has replaced over the last 100 years and those people will move into other jobs. If it is different this time then it requires a different response, but that isn't needed until we know it actually is different.

In those past times of technological change, it was reasonably obvious where the puck was headed.

However, I feel like that has been changing over the past decade or two. I have met countless young people who have been willing and able to pick up a new skill to make a living. By and large, that has either turned out to be going into tech or going into gig work

AI is threatening both of those. It is not obvious to me what comes after. Frankly, these days if someone younger comes to me asking for career advice, I honestly wouldn't know what to tell them.

You give way too much credit to the US electorate. Right now vast swaths of the country are worshipping a billionaire and support policies that are actively harming them because the politicians claim to hate the same people they hate and/or quote scripture.

Hunger knows no political party.

Seeing the life if people in red states that continue to struggle and still vote for politicians that pass policies that hurt them, I disagree.

How many farmers right now are suffering between the current tariff policies and immigration policies are still professing support for Trump? The very people that unions and higher minimum wages would help the most are opposed to because they support the very people who favoring their employers getting rich over them.

If you take solace in “god will provide” as long as you give the church 10% of your income, you aren’t looking at things logically as long as the politicians can quote scripture.

> But in the future when they can do non bullshit jobs, then you can go get another one just like every other person out of the billions who has had their job made obsolete by technology. It's not that hard.

This was the argument made by the capitalists after they had jailed and murdered most of the people in the Luddite movement before there was employment regulation.

They ignored what the Luddites were protesting for and suggested it was about people who just didn't understand how the new industrial economy worked. Don't they know that they can get jobs elsewhere and we, as a society, can be more productive for it?

The problem is that this was tone deaf. There were no labor regulations yet and the Luddites were smashing looms as that form of violence was the only leverage they had to ask for: elimination of child labor, social support that wasn't just government workhouses (ie: indentured servitude), and labor laws that protected workers. These people weren't asking everyone to make cloth by hand forever because they liked making cloth by hand and thought it should stay that way.

In modern times I think what many people are concerned about with companies getting hot for throwing labor out into the streets when it's not profitable for them anymore is that there are once more a lack of social supports in place to make sure those people's basic needs are met.

... and that's just one of the economic and social impacts of this technology.

It's even simple than that, IMHO. Yes, there are always new jobs to replace one you've lost to automation. But no, those new jobs are not for you, and not for your children. Someone else will be doing them - you will be dealing with the fallout of having your life upended, suddenly facing deep poverty.

You can re-skill - but you'll be competing for starter positions and starter salary with people who're just entering the workforce, much younger than you, with no dependents or health issues.

The technology may have benefited everyone in the long run, but in immediate terms, sudden shifts like these ruin lives of people, and destroy futures of their descendants.

It's less about who is right and more about economic interests and lobbying power. There's a vocal minority that is just dead set against AI using all sorts of arguments related to religion, morality, fears about mass unemployment, all sorts of doom scenarios, etc. However, this is a minority with not a lot of lobbying power ultimately. And the louder they are and the less of this stuff actually materializes the easier it becomes to dismiss a lot of the arguments. Despite the loudness of the debate, the consensus is nowhere near as broad on this as it may seem to some.

And the quality of the debate remains very low as well. Most people barely understand the issues. And that includes many journalists that are still getting hung up on the whole "hallucinations can be funny" thing mostly. There are a lot of confused people spouting nonsense on this topic.

There are special interest groups with lobbying powers. Media companies with intellectual properties, actors worried about being impersonated, etc. Those have some ability to lobby for changes. And then you have the wider public that isn't that well informed and has sort of caught on to the notion that chat gpt is now definitely a thing that is sometimes mildly useful.

And there are the AI companies that are definitely very well funded and have an enormous amount of lobbying power. They can move whole economies with their spending so they are getting relatively little push back from politicians. Political Washington and California run on obscene amounts of lobbying money. And the AI companies can provide a lot of that.

A vocal minority led to the French Revolution, the Bolshevik Revolution, the Nazi party and the modern climate change movement. Vocal minorities can be powerful.

>There's a vocal minority calling for AI regulation, but what they actually want often strikes me as misguided:

There's a ton other points intersecting with regulation. Either directly related by AI, or made significantly more relevant by it.

Just from the top of my head:

- information processing: Is there private data AI should never be able to learn from? We restrict collection but it might be unclear whether model training counts as storage.

- related to the former, what kind of dystopian practices should we ban? AI can probably create much deeper profiles inferring information from users than our already worrrying tech, even without storing sensitive data. If it can use conversations to deduce I'm in risk of a shorter lifespan, can the owners communicate that data to insurance companies?

- healthcare/social damage: what is the long term effects of people having an always available yes men, a substitution for social interaction, a cheating tool, etc? should some people be kept from access? (minors, mentally ill, whatever). Should access, on the other hand, become a basic right if it realistically makes a lef-behind person unable to compete with others who have it?

- National security. Is a country's economy being reliant in a service offered somewhere else? Worse even, is this fact draining skills from the population that might not able to be easily recovered when needed?

- energy/resources impact: Are we ready to have an enormous increase in usage of energy and/or certain goods? should we limit usage until we can meet the demand without struggle?

- consumer protections: Many companies just offer 'flat' usage, freely being able to change the model behind the scenes for a worse one when needed or even adapt user limits on their server load. Which of these are fair business practices?

- economy risks: What is the maximum risk we can take of the economy being made dependent to services that aren't yet profitable? Is there any steps that need to be taken to keep us from the potential bust if costs can't be kept up with?

- monopoly risks: we could end up with a single company being able to offer literally any intellectual work as a service. Whoever gets this tech might become the most powerful entity in the world. Should we address this impact through regulation before such an entity rises and becomes impossible to tame?

- enabling crime: can an army of AI hackers disrupt entire countries? how is this handled?

- impact on job creation: If AIs can practically DDOS job offer forms, how is this handled to keep access fair? Same for a million other places that are subjected to AI spam.

your point "It's on politicians to help people adapt to a new economic reality" brings a few:

- Should we tax AI using companies? if they produce the same employing fewer people, tax extraction suffers and the non-taxed money does not make it back to the people. How do we compensate? And how do we remake - How should we handle entire professions being put to pasture at once? Lost employment is a general problem if it's a large enough amount of people. - how should the push of intellectual work be rethought if it becomes extremely cheap relative to manual work? is the way we train our population in need of change?

You might have strong opinions on most of these issues, but there is clearly A LOT of important debates that aren't being addressed.

Your list of evidence-free vibe complaints perfectly exemplifies the reasons why regulations should be approached carefully with the advice of experts, or not at all.

I'm not sure what you mean as evidence-free here.

Debates for public regulation should not be started by evidence-backed conclusions, but rather they are what pushes research and discussion in the first place.

Perhaps the conclussion to AI's impact on mental health is "hey, multiple high quality studies show that the impact is actually positive, let's allow it and in fact consider it as a potential treatment path". That's perfectly fine.

What is not fine is not considering the topic at all until it's too late for preventive action. We don't need to wait for a building burning before we consider whether we need fire extinguishers there.

My list is not made of complains at all, it's just a few of the ways in which we suspect AI can be disruptive, which are then probably worth examining.

Evidence-free? Did you even skim OP's list?

Healthcare/Social damage: we already have peer reviewed studies on the potentially negative impacts of LLMs on mental health: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10867692/ . We also have numerous stories of people committing suicides after "falling in love" or being nudged to do so by an LLM.

Energy/Resources: do I even have to provide evidence that LLMs waste enormous amounts of electricity, even leading to scarcity in some local markets, and even coal power plants being turned back on?

Those are just the ironclad ones, you can make very good data privacy and national security arguments quite easily as well.

> Energy/Resources: do I even have to provide evidence that LLMs waste enormous amounts of electricity, even leading to scarcity in some local markets, and even coal power plants being turned back on?

Yes, if you want to be taken seriously, then your claims about this should be based in evidence and contextualized amid the overall energy market.

Exactly. Energy/resources line is by far the most silly out of anti-AI arguments being regurgitated by people.

Electricity is fungible. Before decrying that LLMs are using it to provide the world (probably) more utility on the net per watt than your own work output (which segues into an actual problem of labor as source of personal and social worth), contrast it with what we'd otherwise be doing with that same electricity - e.g. more sportsball streams in higher definitions, more cryptocurrency shams, more Juiceros and other borderline-fraudlent startups in physical space (cheap energy means cheaper manufacturing, which means materials become more like bits, and it's easier to pull the same crap in the real world, as companies now pull in virtual).

Point being, if you want to judge use of electricity on AI, judge it in context of the whole human condition - of everything else we'd otherwise be using it on.

> "Stop AI from taking our jobs" - This shouldn't be solved through regulation. It's on politicians to help people adapt to a new economic reality, not to artificially preserve bullshit jobs.

This is a really good point. If a country tries to "protect" jobs by blocking AI, it only puts itself at a disadvantage. Other countries that don't pass those restrictions will produce goods and services more efficiently and at lower cost, and they’ll outcompete you anyway. So even with regulations the jobs aren't actually saved.

The real solution is for people to upskill and learn new abilities so they can thrive in the new economic reality. But it's hard to convince people that they need to change instead of expecting the world around them to stay the same.

This presupposes the existence of said jobs, which is a whopper of an assumption that conveniently shifts blame onto the most vulnerable. Of course, that's probably the point.

This will work even worse than "if everyone goes to college, good jobs will appear for everyone."

The good (or bad) thing about humans is they always want more than what they have. AI seems like a nice tool that may solve some problems for people but, in the very near future, customers will demand more than what AI can do and companies will need to hire people who can deliver more until those jobs, eventually like all jobs, are automated away. We see this happen every 50 years or so in society. Just have a conversation with people your grandparent's age and you'll see they've gone through the same thing several times.

The last 50 years in the USA (and elsewhere) have been an absolute disaster for labor: the economy as a whole grew, the capital share grew even more, and the labor share shrank (unless you use a deflator rigged to show the opposite, but a rigged deflator can't hide the ratios). This contrasts to the 50 years prior, where we largely grew and fell together, proving that K shaped economies are a policy choice, not an inevitability.

A Roosevelt economy can still work for most people when the "job creators" stop creating jobs. A Reagan economy cannot.

> The real solution is for people to upskill and learn new abilities so they can thrive in the new economic reality. But it's hard to convince people that they need to change instead of expecting the world around them to stay the same.

But why do I have to? Why should your life be dictated by the market and corporations that are pushing these changes? Why do I have to be afraid that my livelihood is at risk because I don't want to adapt to the ever faster changing market? The goal of automation and AI should be to reduce or even eliminate the need for us to work, and not the further reduction of people to their economic value.

Because the world, sadly, doesn't revolve around just 1 individual. We are a society where other individuals have different goals and needs and when those are met by the development of a new product offering it shifts how people act and where they spend their money. If enough people shift then it affects jobs.

> If enough people shift then it affects jobs.

Yes, but again, the goal of automatization should be to reduce the need for people having jobs to secure their livelihood and enable a dignified life. However, what we are seeing in the Western Hemisphere is that per capita productivity is rising while the middle class is eroding and capital is accumulated by a select few in obscene amounts. 'Upskilling' does not happen out of personal motivation, but rather to meet the demands of the market so that one does not live in poverty. The idea of ‘upskilling’ to serve the market is also absurd because, in times of ever-accelerating technological development, there is no guarantee that the skills you learn today will still be relevant tomorrow. Yesterday it was “learn to code” but now many people who followed this mantra find themselves in precarious situations because they cannot find a job or are forced into the gig economy. So what do you do with people who couldn't foresee the future, or who are simply too old for the market?

> But why do I have to?

Because you enjoy eating? Whatever you think society should be, the fact is we live in one where you have to exchange labour for money. What ought to be and what is, are unrelated to each other.

Its interesting how we feel this way about white collar jobs, but when a coal mine closes nobody cares.

This may be true, however, then upskilling should not be a way to solve economic issues as this line of thinking will not bring us further to solve the Is-Ought-Problem. I think most people can accept that a future where we don't have to exchange labour for money is a desirable future, right?

> I think most people can accept that a future where we don't have to exchange labour for money is a desirable future, right?

That depends at what cost and who the "we" is. There are plenty of variations on this idea i would consider a bad thing.

After all, this is already our present if you are born rich enough.

> The real solution is for people to upskill and learn new abilities

AI is being touted as extremely intelligent and, thus, capable of taking over almost any white collar job. What would I upskill to?

> AI is being touted as extremely intelligent and, thus, capable of taking over almost any white collar job.

The marketing buzz is not the same thing as reality. Upskill to something AI is bad at. There is plenty to chose from in the present.

The jobs that would exist if only we gave the "job creators" just one more tax cut, I'm sure.

Upskill? No, that’s not the point. You’ll be down leveled (potentially several levels) economically and held there.

Consider some poorly paid servant work. It will be sold to you as “noble work” or something along the lines to entice/slander you.

Oh I know, I’m just sowing doubt in the OP’s claims. Note the lack of response to this.

AI is not a value neutral tech.

> If a country tries to "protect" jobs by blocking AI, it only puts itself at a disadvantage

Regulating AI doesn't mean blocking it. The EU AI Act regulates AI without blocking it, just imposing restrictions on data usage and decision making (if it's making life or death decisions, you have to be able to reliably explain how and why it makes those decisions, and it needs to be deterministic - no UnitedHealthcare bullshit hiding behind an "algorithm" refusing healthcare)

Musk wants extreme law and order and will beat down any protests. His X account is full of posts that want to fill up prisons. This is the highlight so far:

https://xcancel.com/elonmusk/status/1992599328897294496#m

Notice that the retweeted Will Tanner post also denigrates EBT. Musk does not give a damn about UBI. The unemployed will do slave labor, go to prison, or, if they revolt, they will be hanged. It is literally all out there by now.

There are several concrete proposals to regulate AI either proposed or passed. The most recent prominent example of a passed law is California SB53, whose summary you can read here: https://carnegieendowment.org/emissary/2025/10/california-sb...

You should ignore literally everything Musk says. He is incredibly unintelligent relative to his status.

Elon Musk explicitly said in his latest Joe Rogan appearance that he advocates for the smallest government possible - just army, police, legal. He did NOT mention social care, health care.

Doesn't quite align with UBI, unless he envisions the AI companies directly giving the UBI to people (when did that ever happen?)

It's possible that the interests of the richest man in the world don't align with the interests of the majority, or society as a whole.

Of course he only wants the government to do only what benefits him.

Oh he's that ready to give up the billions the government funnels to SpaceX? Alright lets do it.

So army, police, legal don't benefit you?

I think you misunderstood.

I'm sure that "smallest government possible" involves cancelling all subsidies to EV car companies and tax credits to EV customers. What a wanker.

Like every other self-serving rich “Libertarian,” they want a small government when it stands to get in their way, and a large one when they want their lifestyle subsidized by government contracts.

"subsidized by government contracts"

Subsidized implies they are getting free money for doing nothing. It's a business transaction. I wouldn't call being a federal worker being subsidized by the government either.

I mean it depends what kind of subsidy we're talking.

On contracts: Space X builds rockets for the government, fair enough, in a vacuum. Though I would ask why we're paying a private corporation to recycle NASA designs we wouldn't fund via NASA, rather than just having NASA or the Air Force do it.

On welfare: Corporations like Walmart benefit incredibly from the tattered remnants of America's social safety net, because if it didn't both exist and demand that people work to earn the benefits, nobody in their right mind would work for places like Walmart, because they wouldn't get paid enough to live. If nothing else, they would all die of starvation, which of course I don't want, but Walmart is also benefiting from that, albeit indirectly.

Misc: artificially low taxes, the ability for corporations to shelter revenue overseas to avoid taxes, temporary stays on property taxes to attract businesses to a given area, lax environmental regulations in some areas, and lots of other examples of all the little ways private industry gets money from the government they shouldn't have. Most of these not only don't "give something back" but detract from the society or the larger world.

And to emphasize, I'm not even arguing for or against here. I'm just saying Elon Musk doesn't want a small government, nor a large one. He wants a government he can puppet. As long as it benefits him and does not constrain him, he doesn't give a shit what else it does.

A short list of libertarian principles I'd bet a LOT of money Elon does not endorse:

- Abolition of Intellectual Property: Hardcore libertarians argue patents and copyrights are government-enforced monopolies that stifle innovation. Musk’s companies rely heavily on IP protections—Tesla’s battery tech, SpaceX’s designs, Neuralink’s research. Without IP law, his competitive moat collapses.

- No Government Subsidies: Libertarian principle: the market should stand on its own, no handouts. Musk’s empire thrives on subsidies: Tesla leaned on EV tax credits, SpaceX lives off NASA and DoD contracts, SolarCity was propped up by state incentives.

- Minimal Regulation: Libertarians want deregulation across the board. Musk benefits from regulation: environmental rules push consumers toward EVs, carbon credits generate revenue, and zoning laws often bend to his lobbying.

- Free Markets Without Favoritism is a Libertarian ideal: no special treatment, no cronyism. Musk actively lobbies for policies that tilt markets in his favor, from energy credits to space launch contracts. That is not free competition, it is government-backed advantage.

- Flat, Transparent Taxation: Libertarians often push for simple, low, flat taxes with no loopholes. Musk’s companies exploit tax shelters, property tax abatements, and complex accounting maneuvers to minimize liability. That is the opposite of transparent.

> Elon Musk explicitly said in his latest Joe Rogan appearance that he advocates for the smallest government possible - just army, police, legal. He did NOT mention social care, health care.

This would be a 19th century government, just the "regalian" functions. It's not really plausible in a world where most of the population who benefit from the health/social care/education functions can vote.

> most of the population [..] can vote.

I mean, this is a solvable problem...

Algorithmic Accountability. Not just for AI, but also social media, advertising, voting systems, etc. Algorithm Impact Assessments need to become mandatory.

Sounds like a great way to make jobs for a bunch of talkers and parasites.

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