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Comment by wjnc | Hacker News Reader

As someone who read Milton Friedman to quite disliking professional licensing, this strikes me as a real US perspective (Louisiana florists and hair braiders come to mind). Plain old US tort law should do the trick.

In the same direction of your idea though: Why don’t the token factories have risk management and compliance departments? Multibillion dollar firms that stand to lose every penny if they hack and destroy any reasonable sized firm. I think these firms are the largest firms without proper corporate governance in humanities history. Move fast and break other peoples shit.

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> Plain old US tort law should do the trick.

Difficulty: these companies are run by people (many of whom also read Milton Friedman) and who have participated in the regulatory capture of the justice system. They've convinced lawmakers to put limits on damages. They've put arbitration clauses in their ToS. They've got well-funded legal departments that can outlast a person who has to pay out-of-pocket for a legal team just by filing motions to delay proceedings. Sometimes they'll just file SLAPP suits against people they don't like.

If tort law is to be a remedy, then average people have to feel like there's a chance the remedy will go their way. To make that a reality will take several major reforms at the local, state and federal level that the people with money absolutely will not tolerate.

you are honestly comparing Louisiana florists to OpenAI in order to support "just say no Licensing by government" ?

No, he's saying that licensing or additional regulation isn't necessary when torts get involved (and states attorneys general get perturbed!)

These don't tend to utterly destroy an industry, but they are often successful in forever transforming it. Just ask Big Tobacco. No new laws needed: if your product hurts someone else, you're eventually going to be found liable, regardless of your arbitration clauses. Additional laws will just slow down innovation, which will itself cause harm (AI is already becoming quite good at recognizing melanomas, for example)

> Just ask Big Tobacco.

Lol, wtf. Tobacco delayed any punishment for decades before general public sentiment changed enough to go against them. In light of the AI race, we'll already have our heads blown off by a terminator before the legal system will present any significant delay for them.

It was pretty well understood by the 1960s that smoking was harmful. The big tobacco settlement was in 1998. That is an extremely bad example of tort being a sufficient alternative to regulation.

If we're on a similar timeline with AI if we reach a consensus that AI is dangerous today, then we'd be looking at a big lawsuit finishing up around the year 2070, give or take a few years. I'm not sure if we need regulation, and I'm definitely not sure that regulation could actually be effective for this, but tort a la the big tobacco lawsuits is definitely not a reasonable alternative.

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