We can debate the details and implementation but EU legislature is, at least in spirit, trying to protect human rights. What does it say about progress that the same laws that protect human rights also stifle innovation?
As you said, in spirit. In fact the EU’s AI Act is not really human rights legislation. (It exempts military and national-security uses.) Where it comes close, e.g. in seeking to ban facial recognition or social scoring, it does so clumsily.
So in practice, the EU has passed a series of laws that essentially make AI a monopoly of military and intelligence-community interests while forcing its consumers to use foreign products. Not exactly a win.
The EU cannot legislate on national security matters.
Sure. Legally, makes sense. Practically, if you want to do all those things the legislation purports to be doing for human rights, you just have to get the right general or spy or police chief on your side. That makes the whole scheme a bit of a boondoggle. Lots of friction. Remarkably little tangible benefit.
If you had just owned up to how you were mistaken about EU legislative limits - confidently stated - I probably would have taken everything else in your initial comment at face value.
Your doubling down into unfalsifiable territory has me thinking your arguments are feelings-based with post-facto justifications.
I’m not making any legal arguments. The fact that the EU can’t legislate on those issues doesn’t change that its AI Act has those loopholes.
> unfalsifiable territory
No, I’m not. If the AI Act constrained any actual risks, that would falsify my assertion. I’m saying it in practice doesn’t. Those capabilities are still being built, just not in Europe. And they’ll still be sold to Europe, just to its governments to use however they want, not to its people.
The EU doesn’t have the power to write AI legislation for human rights purposes. It does have the power to throw gum into its AI industry’s works. It did what it could. Which is very little of the former (by constraining B2C and B2B, sort of). It did a lot of the latter.
Congress can’t do a lot of things. Passing something stupid and then complaining that the reason it isn’t competently written is because of Constitutional limits doesn’t absolve the stupid bill.
I’m not an expert on EU law or AI. But I do make capital-allocation decisions around this stuff, and I know enough to know that as currently configured the only main AI business to do in the EU is in selling it things that kill or surveil.
There is no way I want America's future.
Innovative methods to destroy human life are "stifled" by measures intended to preserve human life. What to you mean by "progress" -- the betterment of the human condition, or the enrichment of the few and powerful?
Europe has no models to even block.
The US has a guy who occasionally can screw things up for a few weeks, but who will be gone in a while.
You have it upside down: the innovation and the stuff is the valuable thing, the laws are there to help us organize ourselves a bit after the fact. They're always a secondary concern to the extent that the vast majority of civilization is working with one another, doing material things wherein the law usually is there as a backstop.
There are some ugly things here and there but by and large - 'cookie settings' has not materially improved people's lives - and not nearly as much as the innovations on the web themselves.
Doing is primacy, regulating is always secondary, with only a few exceptions.
The EU is in really really bad shape on industrial issues on a continental scale - 'too many regulations' is actually not a root cause (it's a big drag, but not root), but it's also not for the most part some kind of advantage.
You see the same thing play out with defence and other things.
Having to beg the US for help with Ukraine, for Patriot munitions, Starlink, advanced intel, for 5th Gen gear, mid range ballistic missiles - it's an existentially disempowering posture.
Human rights won't matter in the areas where the Russians have conquerd or destroyed. Again, here EU/Euro governance issues loom large.
'Do the thing' then as you go along, think about some guardrails or whatever, but the 'do the thing' is the hard part that deserves most of the focus.
On the other hand EU started as an economic union and has rotten into a behemoth that tries to control every aspect of Europeans. It was not created by the people for the people, rather a bunch of bureaucrats to exert their power and establish authority. At the start EU has done a lot of good things as an economic union, but at its current form, it does more harm for the growth of Europe rather than helping
250 years is commendable, but it wasn't without problems.
'stable' as we understand it is relatively modern.
Let's try to figure out where the 3rd amendment might actually have significance in the future. Maybe in space habitats? Or could forced installation of government AI in systems be considered a 3rd amendment violation?
European countries have gone from massive societal changes to massive societal changes (for example from monarchies to republics).
The USA is a new country, and its constitutional rigidity causes a lot of social and political problems that most likely will lead to big changes in the future.
Yes, some countries in Europe remained monarchies for 1500 years or longer. They didn't really have a constituion back then because they were not republics.
A constitution, or supreme law, is the aggregate of fundamental principles or established precedents that constitute the legal basis of a polity, organization or other type of entity, and commonly determines how that entity is to be governed. [0]
> The USA is a new country, and its constitutional rigidity
and general loudness on the matter of "what is a constitution and why ours is the first and the greatest" has caused much confusion given they have such a short and barely evolved one.
250 years is older than almost every country in Europe (by that I mean current borders and form of government, not the ancient historical ones).
Most were monarchies or various forms of dictatorship till only a few decades ago and finally settled on their current borders only after WW2 or the fall of the USSR or the Yugoslav wars.
For example Spain had its first democratic elections in 1977 and then the UK was dealing with "The Troubles" sectarian conflict in northern Ireland. Europe always was a powder keg around forms of governance, culture, religion and sects. All that is not something that goes away overnight just because EU membership happened.
In contrast, 250 years of continuous governance and conflict free stability is super impressive by that standard.
Not much happened between 1861 and 1865?
Sure it is, it's very impressive.
What other nations have lasted that long?
Chinese Dynasties usually collapse within that range.
Aside from the UK, maybe Sweden (?) which have been fairly contiguous, most nations are more short-lived. France is on it's 5th Republic in the same time-frame.
America is way more than the gong show in charge right now.
Most of the 'tests' of it's integrity are due to really just that one guy.
But you're right to point out inherent problems with the Union.
Because EU is not a 'right wing flag waving' entity, we don't really think about it in terms of 'nationalism', but the EU has among the loudest, most clearly visceral and virulent nationalist supporters.
You can say anything you want about national governments but critique of the EU is met with a lot of rancour.
I've worked for EU bodies, it's full of well meaning people and it has tremendous value as an economic unions, but as a political entity it has existential flaws, too many to name, and it is absolutely an elitist project and it absolutely has a 'regulate first' attitude, which is quite upside down.
'Doing The Stuff' matters 10x more than 'Talking About The Stuff'.
It's vibrant and productive, just not at the 'next level' and it lacks some industrial dynamism.
We have all just realized that the American Constitution is the jurisprudential analogue of the Albanian virus (https://github.com/AriBjornOlafsson/Albanian-Virus). I wouldn’t take it for granted that what has happened up to now, before this new twist, will continue to happen in a world where being Trump’s friend is enough to change the NASDAQ listing rules.
The EU can and should reform many parts of its sclerotic laws and bureaucracies. Whether it can do so before it becomes a subservient puppet state which serves as a battleground for competing powers remains to be seen.
I'm not so sure the ideal should be to substitute for those.
Protect human rights as defined by EU legislature, obviously. And privacy in public places, for example, doesn't seem to be an undebatable human right.
Heck, I hate street views disfigured by huge privacy blobs.
> Heck, I hate street views disfigured by huge privacy blobs.
Services like Street View should have distance-based friction to preserve privacy. The further you are, the less (or at lower quality) should be available, to keep it proportional with the effort required to inspect the place in the real world.
How would the website validate how far I am from your neighborhood? What if I am your neighbor but I am traveling this week? Can I still check Street View of my neighborhood? This is how we get websites to require ID-based verification for everything.
Street View is one of the most amazing technologies ever invented. It brings humanity closer together. No longer do you need to get a visa and get on a plane to see what the world is like in a particular place. You can just look on street view. Throughout history people have given up their lives for that kind of world knowledge.
Your inclination to ruin one of humanity's greatest achievements with distance-based blurring to protect the privacy of what is already visible at street level is just sad.
No. OpSec is not Nimbyism.
> It brings humanity closer together.
Sure, then they show up at your door angry about something they saw online. No thanks.
They why on earth do you care?
That's an unfounded assertion. Of course, politicians will claim this to be the case. I don't see how patronising citizens protects their human rights, though.
In a more practical view though I'm not sure if it'll do anything to stop job replacement from automation as such. Most corporations seem all to eager to make deals with OAI or Anthropic here anyway, and if not that it'll be Chinese ones.
There is a question of "representation", like if a model cannot be trained on the data of one specific country with a specific language, then it does not learn it and the people of that country are now at a disadvantage when trying to leverage the result. Maybe that's a good thing, maybe not, depending on the perspective of how the model is being applied relative to the average person. If it's something that makes their job easier then it's a negative, if it's used by the government to automate scanning all chats then it would be beneficial for it to suck. For widespread languages that doesn't apply of course, so the UK and Spain might as well be exempt.
In general I think it's good for the EU to try and slow down adoption of bleeding edge tech so the US population with its lack of regulations can act as guinea pigs and absorb most of the early damage until we figure out what is the best approach when we get around to adopting it. Even if that means missing out on potential early upsides too. An old example is lots of late adopters going straight to gigabit fiber instead of being stuck on copper DSL.
Has it? I still have to see evidence of that. What GDPR definitely has achieved, though, is people engaging in pointless busywork out of fear some busybody is trying to have them fined for being in violation of GDPR.
> In a more practical view though I'm not sure if it'll do anything to stop job replacement from automation as such.
Again, I fail to see how automating jobs is supposed to be something negative. If a job can be automated that means humans ultimately can engage in more worthwhile endeavours. Most modern jobs would have been completely alien to someone from the 19th century. The same applies conversely. How many farriers do you know personally?
> In general I think it's good for the EU to try and slow down adoption of bleeding edge tech so the US population with its lack of regulations can act as guinea pigs and absorb most of the early damage until we figure out what is the best approach when we get around to adopting it.
Quite frankly, by that point there might be not be enough left of the EU to make such a (very) late adoption possible or even relevant at all. We're talking about a timescale of just a few years for a revolution that'll dwarf the Industrial Revolution (which took an entire century, give or take). Up until now, the benefits by far outweigh the downsides and if we're talking about catastrophic damage (essentially, the SkyNet scenario), EU regulation certainly won't stop a US AI from killing Europeans.
> An old example is lots of late adopters going straight to gigabit fiber instead of being stuck on copper DSL.
That's actually a very good example of how overly cautious behaviour in European countries leads to those countries being left behind. Up until very recently, for example, Germany's last mile Internet infrastructure was largely DSL-based (perhaps, still is; at least they're trying to make more use of fibre optics now).
> If a job can be automated that means humans ultimately can engage in more worthwhile endeavours
Yeah if that were actually the case. Seems like the plan is to just automate everything we can in broad strokes, then wait if anything happens to turns up to occupy that portion of the workforce. Nobody seems to have any idea what to do with vast amounts of unemployed people who aren't qualified to do anything anymore.
I think the very possible end result is that there won't be any immediate new jobs in a meaningful volume in the time span when they're needed. As you say, the timeline can be very short, and in the US it certainly will be. The idealistic future is that UBI gets implemented, automation gets taxed and redistributed, so the economy continues to work. But that's a fantasy with the current ring wing wave across the world where any kind of social service is seen as communist money burning for some reason, pocketing that extra wealth through corruption will be the priority. We've seen this again and again in countries where most of the income is dug from the ground in some form, which is economically the same as a few companies making it all through automation. The end result is usually not great for the population. With the AI Act being very anti-authoritarian, banning credits cores, facial recognition, etc. it's a step in the right direction to compensate.
The likely result is probably gonna be some kind of army service and an increase of international tensions to justify a draft when we realize there's only so many extra Wolt drivers a population needs, and then those will go to Starship too. With a war economy you can do pretty much anything to maintain stability, the numbers are made up and the protests don't matter.
If a delay in adoption can help bridge this intermediate gap without complete chaos, millions will suffer a lot less.
This is a common misconception by people who never had to deal with GDPR in a business capacity (including the politicians who have caused this mess). Corporations either simply don't care or they have their legal department deal with this. It's the small companies and self-employed solo entrepreneurs that suffer.
As for the economic ramifications, there will certainly be a massive short-term upheaval. However, going all Luddite - or even just slowing down the process locally - won't help. Regulation doesn't generate wealth, after all (although EU politicians would like you to believe that), and for something like UBI we need massive wealth generation.
Perhaps it merely says that certain good positive things stifle other good, positive things?
Having 24 languages is a good, positive thing for the EU's cultural distinctiveness, respect for citizens' heritage, and the fairness of the nexus of power not excluding speakers of any country's language.
And yet it's a major barrier to cross-border trade, military cooperation, popular support of closer political ties, and the prospects of any EU companies growing large enough to counterbalance the amazons and facebooks of the world.
A ban on cracking eggs serves the interests of eggs, while stifling the omelette industry.
Feels like a reaaaaal roll of the dice
Europe has more human rights protections than the US and stronger enforcement of them, even against the state, by many metrics. Freedom of expression ends where other human rights begin, is protecting hate speech and Holocaust denial really something worthwhile?
Belarus is a European country. How is freedom of the press doing there?
It is. Look at the freedom of press index for example. And as the US doesn’t accept foreign courts, there is not really a legal apparatus against the state outside of the US, which many European countries do have.
Belarus is not part of the EU, nor did it sign many of the international human rights
The comment I responded to was about Europe. Belarus is part of Europe. As are Serbia, Moldova, etc.
You are trying to move goalposts instead of trying to counter my arguments
Claiming that GDPR and the EU AI Act "protect human rights" is very, very far-fetched. How does the training of, say, Claude or GPT-X models, hurt human rights?
Honest answer, no, not if it was publicly published and available for free, not indefinitely.
From an ethical (not legal) perspective, 18 years seems long enough for something like that to enter the public domain.
It's not also actually "getting paid for your work" when you're talking about copyright. It's "collecting rent for your property".
Once upon a time, artists and writers got conned into thinking that was a good deal for them, forgoing payment for work in return for a dangling promise of rent extraction. The vast majority of them were wrong.
europe is huxley nightmarish utopia worst parts without any of the bright ones.