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Europe seeks to limit use of AI in society

156 points by anticristi 6y ago

keiferski 6y ago
Bonus points if they name the overseeing organization the Turing Police. And if Switzerland goes its own way and allows citizenship for AIs. In all seriousness, I’m not sure if these legal restrictions will actually be effective. They are too broad, vague, and will likely just result in technological stagnation.
- daenney 6y ago
  Laws aren’t immutable and right now this is just a proposal. We’ll have to see what its final form ends up being. > will likely just result in technological stagnation. Nothing in this stops any kind of research nor does it ban its use. It just limits how effortlessly you can invade people’s privacy and discriminate against them. It may very well help research in underinvested areas of AI, and it’s ethical consequences.
  - Aerroon 6y ago
    >Laws aren’t immutable You could've fooled me. About the only thing that seems to change laws in places like the EU is when the courts decide to strike something down. Everything else seems to just go ahead the way the EU politicians envisioned. Consequences be damned.
- mc32 6y ago
  But, what good is technology for the sake of technology if it’s detrimental to people’s well-being? Technology to conquer ills, yes. Technology which alienates people, no. It’s kind of like the goths vs the romans or the inuit vs europeans. Is the value of progress more than the value of self-worth?
  - keiferski 6y ago
    That’s a different question. Even if you think certain technologies are overall negative, you may be forced to adopt them in order to remain competitive with other nation states. Nuclear weapons are probably the classic example here. AI seems similar to me.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - quotemstr 6y ago
      Nuclear weapons are a huge net positive for humanity. Have we had another big industrial war since WWII? No. Why not? Because the combatants understand that nowadays total war means total annihilation. Now we resolve our disputes in other ways. Nuclear weapons gave us an age of peace.
      - thoughtstheseus 6y ago
        There’s a survivorship bias here. If nuclear weapons did totally annihilate society we could not have this conversation.
        kube-system 6y ago
        Their point is that anyone who can develop a nuclear weapon also is aware of this. It might be a survivorship bias, but it is also self-fulfilling. The biggest threat, as I can see it, is a truly irrational actor. Luckily they're hard enough to build that this prerequisite has so far filtered out anyone truly irrational.
  - shadowgovt 6y ago
    I'm more concerned about these two aspects of it from the reporting: > Experts said the rules were vague and contained loopholes. > The use of AI in the military is exempt, as are systems used by authorities in order to safeguard public security. Sounds like it's keyed to build stagnation in public tools, but state-actor tools can go right on ahead becoming more sophisticated (and harder to understand or predict).
    - overscore 6y ago
      There are almost always these exemptions for military/law enforcement use cases in EU Directives and Regulations, because while the constituent countries in the EU have miltary and law enforcement co-operation, they would veto new legislation that impacts their independence in those areas.
  - quotemstr 6y ago
    How do you know that these technologies are detrimental to people's well-being? Some activists claim that things like facial recognition, ad targeting, and personalized risk scoring are detrimental, but are these activists correct? I don't think so! All these technologies give us new capabilities and allow us to more precisely understand and shape the world. Every single time humanity has gained new abilities --- from the Acheulean stone ax to the modern deep neural network --- humans in general have benefited and prospered, because any increase in our ability to understand and manipulate the world is a boon. There is no such thing as a net-negative technology.
    - WitCanStain 6y ago
      > All these technologies give us new capabilities and allow us to more precisely understand and shape the world. Allow who to shape the world, exactly? Because it's not me, and it's probably not you. Technology gives power to those who control it, and control over face-recognition tech, personalized risk-scoring and ad tech is in the best cases behind several layers of bureaucratic abstraction. Our world is being shaped by megacorporations and governments, not those whose lives these technologies have the potential of having the most negative impact on.
      - visarga 6y ago
        Our lives are being shaped by powerful organizations so we should shun progress because it helps them too! Let's all burn our phones and dismantle the internet, it's the root of all evil, I tell you. After we destroy AI we should make sure nobody does any data analysis by hand or other means. Just to be sure. Because there are people who would justify the exact same decisions even without AI. They just use data to do what they want. So let's destroy data too, and math so nobody can do anything biased or wrong.
    - ncallaway 6y ago
      > There is no such thing as a net-negative technology Explain to me the benefits of a gatling gun, other than being a more effective tool for killing humans. Is all of humanity really better off for all those that have been killed by this invention? That's a lot of deaths that start out as a massive negative balance against. Tell me the overall improvement to society that the gatling gun brought us that was "worth" those deaths.
  - visarga 6y ago
    > Is the value of progress more than the value of self-worth? Why is self worth put in antithesis with progress? Was past progress a cause of loss of self worth?
    - mc32 6y ago
      Progress brings good: vaccines, decreased infant mortality, etc. But we also get to live in cities, disconnected from some realities, like food and self sufficiency. In civilization you are counting on other people doing things for you. Farming, housing, transportation, care, education, etc. Yes it’s fancy and advanced and most of us will choose modern life, but not everyone has gone that route (goths in roman times, inuit in present times). Some people see value in being connected to nature, not necessarily in some artificial romantic way, but more visceral ways and forgoing modern progressive life.
- londons_explore 6y ago
  > will likely just result in technological stagnation. I believe that is the goal of the legislation. By stagnating the field of AI within the EU one can encourage any negative effects to happen in other countries, so they can suffer and discover the potential downsides.
- 8fGTBjZxBcHq 6y ago
  My perspective is that our technological advancement has well outpaced our ability to adapt to the changes or bring our legal and social tools effectively to bear on them. A decade or two of stagnation would be frustrating for those in the field but probably overall a good thing. Plus I don't think this would affect research at all so not even.
  - RankingMember 6y ago
    Agreed 100%. I appreciate the hacker mindset, but when things approach society-altering scale, "just because you can doesn't mean you should" should be the mantra, not "move fast and break things".
    - quotemstr 6y ago
      And who decides when that "should" condition is met? Over the past few years, I've seen far too many activists react to algorithms that notice true but politically inconvenient things by trying to shut down the algorithms, to pull wool over our eyes, to continue the illusion that things are other than what they are. Why should we keep doing that? I have zero faith in the ability of activists or states to decide when it's safe to deploy some new technology. Only the people can decide that.
      - 8fGTBjZxBcHq 6y ago
        Decisions like these need to made slowly and societally and over time. Tension between small-c conservatism that resists change and innovators who push for it before the results can be known is very important! No one person or group needs to or will decide. Definitely not states. "Activists" both in favor of and opposed to changes will be part of it. The last few decades in tech the conservative impulse has been mostly missing (at least in terms of the application of technology to our society lol) and look where we are. A techno-dystopian greed powered corporate surveillance state. We're not going to vote on it. Arguments like the one happening in this comments section _is_ the process for better or worse.
- flohofwoe 6y ago
  It's a good thing that it is brought into the light and discussed though, because most people probably don't realize how much power "automated decision making" already has over their lives, and it will only get worse if tech giants and oppressive governments have their way.
- jariel 6y ago
  " will actually be effective" Effective in doing what? Everyone is caught up in ridiculous AI mythology, and misunderstanding the nature of the tech. AI is just one approach to solving a problem, and will invariably make up just a small part of more complex systems involving mostly classically approaches. Not only is AI not hugely special, nothing we do or use is mostly 'AI' to begin with. From the article: "AI systems used for indiscriminate surveillance applied in a generalised manner" So does this mean as long as we're not using Deep Learning, we can indiscriminately surveil? And what if the 'surveillance system' doesn't use AI, but the cameras themselves have AI embedded within to adjust focus? Does that count? What if the system doesn't use AI, but the supporting services do? It's basically ridiculous. If the government wants to regulate 'mass surveillance' - that sounds like a good thing so do that. If they want to ensure privacy in certain domains - great - but it has nothing to do with 'AI'. Edit: Futhermore: "Mr Leufer added that the proposals should "be expanded to include all public sector AI systems, regardless of their assigned risk level". "This is because people typically do not have a choice about whether or not to interact with an AI system in the public sector."" This is laughably bad, because again, there is not such thing as an 'AI System'. A broad ban on on AI in the public sector would almost guarantee European stagnation in every sector, for no good reason at all. Will they ban Google Search in public service? Google assistant? Google navigation? Those use AI. Will they ban AI signal processing for anything related to government? They'll have to ban Tesla as well, there's a ton of AI in every unit. Will there be a single automobile in 10 years that won't have AI components? The EU is going to ban all of them from use in public service? Even today, AI is almost universal in every day systems, that is only going to increase quite a lot. In 5 years, you literally won't be able to use any tech without it touching some form of AI. Mr. Leufeur has no understanding of what he is talking about.
- seanmcdirmid 6y ago
  > And if Switzerland goes its own way and allows citizenship for AIs. I'm pretty sure not being a member of the EU, Switzerland will go its own way.
- 908B64B197 6y ago
  Am-I the only one that finds is odd how the British government brags about Alan Turing after what they did to him? The man saved women, men, children, of all races and orientations from an horrible end. I wish the British government had extended the favor to Turing himself.
  - mbroncano 6y ago
    Or to that extent Oscar Wilde and many, many others.
  - visarga 6y ago
    Nobody's above being cancelled, that's what happens when righteous people set to work. They know best and are willing to educate society by example.
  - watwut 6y ago
    That is literally what happens with historical figures everywhere. Americans now celebrate Martin Luther King for example.
- thebackup 6y ago
  I don’t believe in BDUF:ing even regulations too much, better to get a toothless first version out in the wild and then tweak it when in place.
- birdsbirdsbirds 6y ago
  The limits are a convenient way to escape the challenge. By opting out, nobody can ask why European companies don't have state of the art AI technology. If Europe cannot offer more than €6.7 billion to create an alternative infrastructure to AWS, GCP and Azure then they better prepare an excuse for why they haven't managed to create AI. [1] https://ec.europa.eu/digital-single-market/en/european-cloud-initiative https://ec.europa.eu/digital-single-market/en/european-cloud...
quotemstr 6y ago
Luddites. If you look at the course of history, every attempt to slow the adoption of new technology has been a disaster for human welfare. This policy move is just like trying to ban the telephone or the printing press.
- tppiotrowski 6y ago
  I see this more along the lines of preventing nuclear proliferation, chemical and biological warfare.
  - quotemstr 6y ago
    This is more like banning the production of chlorine gas because someone might put it in an artillery shell --- never mind all the other useful things you can do with chlorine gas. If you want to regulate externalities, regulate externalities: don't ban technology itself.
    - KineticLensman 6y ago
      > don't ban technology itself The EU isn't planning to ban underlying AI technologies, but instead to control its use in applications such as credit worthiness assessment
      - ThomPete 6y ago
        ai need training data. Its not just a technology play.
      - throwawaysea 6y ago
        ...which is basically banning people from measuring risk for themselves and deciding how to react to that risk themselves. How is this not authoritarian?
        La1n 6y ago
        >How is this not authoritarian Authoritatian can mean so many things, could you define it further. Cause how I read your comment I could call seatbelt laws authoritatian, and I guess you didn't mean that.
RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago
>those designed or used in a manner that manipulates human behaviour, opinions or decisions ...causing a person to behave, form an opinion or take a decision to their detriment Would this mean that A/B testing of news article headlines would be banned if it was powered by software?
sneak 6y ago
> The use of AI in the military is exempt, as are systems used by authorities in order to safeguard public security. I'm fairly sure this excludes nearly 100% of the most risky uses of AI that exist today.
tppiotrowski 6y ago
I thought this article would be about software in heavy machinery like self driving cars but it's more aimed at applications of AI that are incompatible with human rights: social scores, surveillance, crime-prediction, etc.
- dalbasal 6y ago
  This is the problem: they don't really understand what they're trying to regulate. A lot of it is (a) data-privacy issues or (b) using data to make automated decisions. The "AI" part is superfluous, as far as I can see. Lawmakers appear as caught up in labeling stuff "AI" as investors. It's going to make them less effective by letting them avoid actually defining what they're trying to prevent. Consider: "those (AIs) designed or used in a manner that manipulates human behaviour, opinions or decisions ...causing a person to behave, form an opinion or take a decision to their detriment" It's clearly about advertising and social media. If you want regulation to be effective, specifics are good. Platitudes don't make good regulations.
ThomPete 6y ago
the only outcome of this is that Europe will fall even further behind the US and China. How sad.
- clownpenis_fart 6y ago
  Since there have been and will be exactly zero useful ai application anytime soon other than bias laundering (aka "systematic discrimination is ok when a computer does it"), I think it's ok.
  - Engineering-MD 6y ago
    While I don’t necessarily disagree, can you elaborate a bit more? AI is likely to make some significant impacts especially in computer vision applications among others.
  - anticristi 6y ago
    I share your concern: Train AI to reject CVs with "Ahmed" and accept CVs with "Smith". Then blame racial bias on the difficulty to explain DNN.
  - ThomPete 6y ago
    And with that approach there wont be in europe anytime soon :)
prof-dr-ir 6y ago
Does anybody have a link to the actual draft this article is based on? In my limited experience the proposals by the EU commission are often readable and interesting. I might not agree with them, but I do appreciate that the thought process is made public years before ideas become laws. (As the article states, that is also very much the expectation here.)
- noshaker 6y ago
  Here is the draft https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ZaBPsfor_aHKNeeyXxk9uJfTru747EOn/view https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ZaBPsfor_aHKNeeyXxk9uJfTru7...
  - anticristi 6y ago
    Thanks! 81 pages and no executive summary?!?! I'm interested to read it, but this is likely to have the same effect as sleeping pills.
    - noshaker 6y ago
      You can check out this tech crunch article where I got the draft from. It is a bit more detailed than the bbc article. https://techcrunch.com/2021/04/14/eu-plan-for-risk-based-ai-rules-to-set-fines-as-high-as-4-of-global-turnover-per-leaked-draft/ https://techcrunch.com/2021/04/14/eu-plan-for-risk-based-ai-...
    - f137 6y ago
      Well, just run it thru an AI summarizer )
refraincomment 6y ago
Europe != Obscure department of the European Commission issuing unsolicited opinions
- anticristi 6y ago
  I beg to differ. "AI" is already rejecting CVs and untransparently keeping people unemployed. People do care about how to use this tool responsibility.
  - La1n 6y ago
    I think OP was referring specifically to the HN title.
bitL 6y ago
Here we go, it didn't take long... Anyone still thinking ML won't be regulated? ML licenses to purchase GPUs next?
joe_the_user 6y ago
The listed examples seem reasonably good. * systems which establish priority in the dispatching of emergency services * systems determining access to or assigning people to educational institutes * recruitment algorithms * those that evaluate credit worthiness * those for making individual risk assessments * crime-predicting algorithms While I'd also like to see autonomous military devices banned, banned AI that makes opaque life-changing decisions about individuals seems reasonable. We already say that these shouldn't discriminate and we've seen ways AI can allow discrimination through the back door.
- tomp 6y ago
  > we've seen ways AI can allow discrimination through the back door. Do you have any concrete examples of these, in particular where the use of statistics or AI enables more discrimination than using human decisions?
  - _1 6y ago
    https://weaponsofmathdestructionbook.com/ https://weaponsofmathdestructionbook.com/
  - YeGoblynQueenne 6y ago
    Why does it have to be "more"?
    - tomp 6y ago
      Parent mentioned that AI is used to sneak in discrimination through the back door, implying that discrimination wouldn’t be there (or there would be less) without AI.
      - nix0n 6y ago
        Here's an example: mortgages (in the USA) used to be approved or denied by humans, but there were certain neighborhoods where only white people were allowed. Now, there's a law against that. In the future, there will be an AI system to approve or deny mortgages, based off of historical training data. Since that data includes the redlining era, the AI will learn to make racist decisions. Most people do not understand how it is possible for a computer to be racist. (Other than against all humans like in Terminator 2.) This is why it's "through the back door", because it's not obvious how it's possible or where it's coming from.
goatcode 6y ago
>The use of AI in the military is exempt, as are systems used by authorities in order to safeguard public security. Of course.
- modeless 6y ago
  The problem with government regulation of AI is that the biggest threat is government use of AI. Rules for thee but not for me!
  - goatcode 6y ago
    Any governing body seems to leave a lot of room for "except for pigs" when they write down their rules. The bigger the body, the more potential pigs there are.
    - brobdingnagians 6y ago
      Your use of "pigs" reminds me of: "All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others"
      - gramakri 6y ago
        It's meant to remind you of that quote :) because the rules are made by pigs in the book Animal farm. Your quote comes from the same book
  - geraneum 6y ago
    Government (ab)use of AI is is of course a serious threat. But I’d say big corporations abuse of AI is even worse. Assuming we are talking about a democratic state, at least there are some checks and balances on governments whereas people cannot elect a FAANG CEO or go to a ‘.gov’ website to read a transcript of board meetings. Edit: I am by no means advocating for government’s use of AI in any form.
    - trutannus 6y ago
rndude 6y ago
The title should read "Europe seeks to limit use of AI because they can't build any AI system themself" The state of AI in Europe is a sad joke and we already think about regulation.
- capableweb 6y ago
  > The state of AI in Europe is a sad joke and we already think about regulation. Yeah, fuck people who want to think about and limit the consequences of what they are working on. Like who would ever want to draft up laws around nuclear weapons before researching and developing nuclear weapons, that removes all the fun?
CFA178B 6y ago
Europe can hardly implement a crud application, but they like to talk their heads off about the risks of AI - painful.
- nkl58 6y ago
  What a fruitful reply
imapeopleperson 6y ago
No one actually wants a society being ruled by computers, except maybe the people running those computers. This is at least a step in the right direction.
- pelorat 6y ago
  Speak for yourself. I take AI over EU politicians any day of the week.
  - tgv 6y ago
    You can't be serious. EU leadership has always been a bit weak, with a lot of compromises, and not a hard stance on foreign policy, but to prefer an unknown oracle? The current state of AI would even have it overfitted on a small relevant corpus padded with arbitrary other material. How can you expect that to produce better government?
    - systemvoltage 6y ago
      Perhaps OP meant "I take AI computer scientists over EU politicians"?
- avz 6y ago
  > No one actually wants a society being ruled by computers, except maybe the people running those computers. Humans in charge are known for injustice, kickbacks, favor trading, selective enforcement and other forms of corruption and abuse. Properly engineered and regularly reviewed open source systems with balance checks might just get us closer to a rules-based system that provides a level playing field for everyone. Given all the known biases of current AI systems, we are certainly far from ready for it, but the prospect of transforming large parts of government into an open source "social operating system" that automatically and fairly offers basic services according to clearly coded and broadly enforced rules looks like a desirable goal in the (very) long term. Many laws can be expressed as computer code. Where they cannot is often due to deliberate vagueness built in to leave scope for future interpretation as new cases arise. This suggests that we could express laws in computer code that raises a HumanInputRequiredException in the cases currently handled with deliberate vagueness. The resulting reduction in vagueness would remove a huge amount of discretion that currently facilitates corruption and abuse of power while ensuring ultimate human control and human-directed evolution of the law.
vngzs 6y ago
> those designed or used in a manner that manipulates human behaviour, opinions or decisions ...causing a person to behave, form an opinion or take a decision to their detriment This appears to obviously apply to the Facebook wall. You can find a high-profile example of this in [0], but [1] explains how this manipulation, which optimizes "engagement", is built deep into Facebook's design. I think the case that it causes users to form opinions and take decisions to their detriment is obvious, so these new laws should apply. Am I wrong? [0]: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jun/29/facebook-users-emotions-news-feeds https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jun/29/facebook-... [1]: https://qz.com/1039910/how-facebooks-news-feed-algorithm-sells-our-fear-and-outrage-for-profit/ https://qz.com/1039910/how-facebooks-news-feed-algorithm-sel...
- enchiridion 6y ago
  Seems like books fit that description.
FredPret 6y ago
Big organization seeks to dam water with sieve, says "this time will be different"
zitterbewegung 6y ago
This just feels like a play for large tech companies to be out regulated from the European market.
throwawaysea 6y ago
A restriction on computation and processing of information seems like a restriction on speech, expression, and thought. The list named in this article is just bizarre. For example it mentions that the following would be covered by the proposed policy: > those designed or used in a manner that manipulates human behaviour, opinions or decisions ...causing a person to behave, form an opinion or take a decision to their detriment Can't all of marketing, politics, and activism be constructed to fall under this broad statement? It feels to me like this unfairly allows only certain means to achieving the same ends, which ends up favoring certain segments of society at the expense of others. As an example, what makes shaping political opinions using AI inappropriate but shaping it via disruptive protesting appropriate? A person who few responsibilities and enough time to spend protesting is allowed to influence society, and someone who wants to do the same through a different means that makes more sense for them isn't permitted to do so? Similarly, credit worthiness and crime risk assessment are plainly logical ways for individuals, corporations, and governments to contain risks, incentivize the correct behavior, and make smart decisions for themselves. Getting rid of credit scoring is equivalent to income redistribution, since less risky individuals will be forced to subsidize others. I don't think blanket regulation like this is the answer. The answer lies in ensuring healthy markets with sufficient competition (enforcing anti-trust law), in relying on federalism so that local governments can decide which technologies they want to use or not use, and in privacy controls for users to retain control of their data. Not in restricting math.
JoeAltmaier 6y ago
We will have to face everything everybody thinks up. Legislation is whistling in the dark (pissing in the wind; closing the barn door...). Its too easy to create and deploy these things. Anybody who finds a reason to do so, will. It will take social changes of some kind, to adapt to this new reality. Not draconian laws.
eivarv 6y ago
These issues should solved by making problematic AI-use in breach of individual rights (e.g. privacy), rather than regulating the technology itself (with govt. exceptions) – which increases the power-imbalance between the state and the citizen.
thepangolino 6y ago
Is this a remake of the PGP debacle? If the GDPR and the so called EU cookie law are to be taken seriously then yes, it is.
timme 6y ago
By the geniuses that brought us ePrivacy Directive and GDPR. Might be cheaper to just tell tech companies they're not welcome in the EU.
roomey 6y ago
It's been in Irish law for some time (which makes it applicable to the majority of US tech giants). Unfortunately Ireland isn't hq for a lot of the big finance and insurance firms which would probably be more useful in this situation. Anyway, here is the latest version of the law: TLDR; if it impacts you it should require a human decision and be appeal-able. Also there is a right to review code but I'm not sure how that works: the right of a data subject not to be subject to a decision based solely on automated processing, including profiling, which produces legal effects concerning him or her or similarly significantly affects him or her shall, in addition to the grounds identified in Article 22(2)(a) and (c), not apply where— (a) the decision is authorised or required by or under an enactment, and (b) either— (i) the effect of that decision is to grant a request of the data subject, or (ii) in all other cases (where subparagraph (i) is not applicable), adequate steps have been taken by the controller to safeguard the legitimate interests of the data subject which steps shall include the making of arrangements to enable him or her to— (I) make representations to the controller in relation to the decision, (II) request human intervention in the decision-making process, (III) request to appeal the decision.
sturza 6y ago
China brings hardware. US brings software. EU brings the regulation.
- YeGoblynQueenne 6y ago
  Or, China brings the matches, US brings the gasoline, EU brings the good sense to keep them apart.
intricatedetail 6y ago
I'll vote for any party that will make tracking illegal. I am sick and tired of being stalked by all those multibillion corporations who don't even give anything back. They are the cancer on the society.
bloak 6y ago
Let me try to summarise. Tell me if I've got this roughly right. A journalist has waffled about someone tweeting that an out-of-date 80-page draft from January of ... something ... the journalist can't be bothered to tell us its proper title ... has been "leaked" but not actually published for us to read. However, an up-to-date version of whatever it is will be officially published next week. So perhaps I'll just wait till then before trying to form an opinion.
arcanon 6y ago
Luddites
nikonyrh 6y ago
I wonder if we are still allowed to use statistics (or math) in these contexts, where do you draw the line?

156 points by anticristi 6y ago

Bonus points if they name the overseeing organization the Turing Police. And if Switzerland goes its own way and allows citizenship for AIs. In all seriousness, I’m not sure if these legal restrictions will actually be effective. They are too broad, vague, and will likely just result in technological stagnation.

daenney 6y ago
Laws aren’t immutable and right now this is just a proposal. We’ll have to see what its final form ends up being. > will likely just result in technological stagnation. Nothing in this stops any kind of research nor does it ban its use. It just limits how effortlessly you can invade people’s privacy and discriminate against them. It may very well help research in underinvested areas of AI, and it’s ethical consequences.
- Aerroon 6y ago
  >Laws aren’t immutable You could've fooled me. About the only thing that seems to change laws in places like the EU is when the courts decide to strike something down. Everything else seems to just go ahead the way the EU politicians envisioned. Consequences be damned.
mc32 6y ago
But, what good is technology for the sake of technology if it’s detrimental to people’s well-being? Technology to conquer ills, yes. Technology which alienates people, no. It’s kind of like the goths vs the romans or the inuit vs europeans. Is the value of progress more than the value of self-worth?
- keiferski 6y ago
  That’s a different question. Even if you think certain technologies are overall negative, you may be forced to adopt them in order to remain competitive with other nation states. Nuclear weapons are probably the classic example here. AI seems similar to me.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - quotemstr 6y ago
    Nuclear weapons are a huge net positive for humanity. Have we had another big industrial war since WWII? No. Why not? Because the combatants understand that nowadays total war means total annihilation. Now we resolve our disputes in other ways. Nuclear weapons gave us an age of peace.
    - thoughtstheseus 6y ago
      There’s a survivorship bias here. If nuclear weapons did totally annihilate society we could not have this conversation.
      - kube-system 6y ago
        Their point is that anyone who can develop a nuclear weapon also is aware of this. It might be a survivorship bias, but it is also self-fulfilling. The biggest threat, as I can see it, is a truly irrational actor. Luckily they're hard enough to build that this prerequisite has so far filtered out anyone truly irrational.
- shadowgovt 6y ago
  I'm more concerned about these two aspects of it from the reporting: > Experts said the rules were vague and contained loopholes. > The use of AI in the military is exempt, as are systems used by authorities in order to safeguard public security. Sounds like it's keyed to build stagnation in public tools, but state-actor tools can go right on ahead becoming more sophisticated (and harder to understand or predict).
  - overscore 6y ago
    There are almost always these exemptions for military/law enforcement use cases in EU Directives and Regulations, because while the constituent countries in the EU have miltary and law enforcement co-operation, they would veto new legislation that impacts their independence in those areas.
- quotemstr 6y ago
  How do you know that these technologies are detrimental to people's well-being? Some activists claim that things like facial recognition, ad targeting, and personalized risk scoring are detrimental, but are these activists correct? I don't think so! All these technologies give us new capabilities and allow us to more precisely understand and shape the world. Every single time humanity has gained new abilities --- from the Acheulean stone ax to the modern deep neural network --- humans in general have benefited and prospered, because any increase in our ability to understand and manipulate the world is a boon. There is no such thing as a net-negative technology.
  - WitCanStain 6y ago
    > All these technologies give us new capabilities and allow us to more precisely understand and shape the world. Allow who to shape the world, exactly? Because it's not me, and it's probably not you. Technology gives power to those who control it, and control over face-recognition tech, personalized risk-scoring and ad tech is in the best cases behind several layers of bureaucratic abstraction. Our world is being shaped by megacorporations and governments, not those whose lives these technologies have the potential of having the most negative impact on.
    - visarga 6y ago
      Our lives are being shaped by powerful organizations so we should shun progress because it helps them too! Let's all burn our phones and dismantle the internet, it's the root of all evil, I tell you. After we destroy AI we should make sure nobody does any data analysis by hand or other means. Just to be sure. Because there are people who would justify the exact same decisions even without AI. They just use data to do what they want. So let's destroy data too, and math so nobody can do anything biased or wrong.
  - ncallaway 6y ago
    > There is no such thing as a net-negative technology Explain to me the benefits of a gatling gun, other than being a more effective tool for killing humans. Is all of humanity really better off for all those that have been killed by this invention? That's a lot of deaths that start out as a massive negative balance against. Tell me the overall improvement to society that the gatling gun brought us that was "worth" those deaths.
- visarga 6y ago
  > Is the value of progress more than the value of self-worth? Why is self worth put in antithesis with progress? Was past progress a cause of loss of self worth?
  - mc32 6y ago
    Progress brings good: vaccines, decreased infant mortality, etc. But we also get to live in cities, disconnected from some realities, like food and self sufficiency. In civilization you are counting on other people doing things for you. Farming, housing, transportation, care, education, etc. Yes it’s fancy and advanced and most of us will choose modern life, but not everyone has gone that route (goths in roman times, inuit in present times). Some people see value in being connected to nature, not necessarily in some artificial romantic way, but more visceral ways and forgoing modern progressive life.
londons_explore 6y ago
> will likely just result in technological stagnation. I believe that is the goal of the legislation. By stagnating the field of AI within the EU one can encourage any negative effects to happen in other countries, so they can suffer and discover the potential downsides.
8fGTBjZxBcHq 6y ago
My perspective is that our technological advancement has well outpaced our ability to adapt to the changes or bring our legal and social tools effectively to bear on them. A decade or two of stagnation would be frustrating for those in the field but probably overall a good thing. Plus I don't think this would affect research at all so not even.
- RankingMember 6y ago
  Agreed 100%. I appreciate the hacker mindset, but when things approach society-altering scale, "just because you can doesn't mean you should" should be the mantra, not "move fast and break things".
  - quotemstr 6y ago
    And who decides when that "should" condition is met? Over the past few years, I've seen far too many activists react to algorithms that notice true but politically inconvenient things by trying to shut down the algorithms, to pull wool over our eyes, to continue the illusion that things are other than what they are. Why should we keep doing that? I have zero faith in the ability of activists or states to decide when it's safe to deploy some new technology. Only the people can decide that.
    - 8fGTBjZxBcHq 6y ago
      Decisions like these need to made slowly and societally and over time. Tension between small-c conservatism that resists change and innovators who push for it before the results can be known is very important! No one person or group needs to or will decide. Definitely not states. "Activists" both in favor of and opposed to changes will be part of it. The last few decades in tech the conservative impulse has been mostly missing (at least in terms of the application of technology to our society lol) and look where we are. A techno-dystopian greed powered corporate surveillance state. We're not going to vote on it. Arguments like the one happening in this comments section _is_ the process for better or worse.
flohofwoe 6y ago
It's a good thing that it is brought into the light and discussed though, because most people probably don't realize how much power "automated decision making" already has over their lives, and it will only get worse if tech giants and oppressive governments have their way.
jariel 6y ago
" will actually be effective" Effective in doing what? Everyone is caught up in ridiculous AI mythology, and misunderstanding the nature of the tech. AI is just one approach to solving a problem, and will invariably make up just a small part of more complex systems involving mostly classically approaches. Not only is AI not hugely special, nothing we do or use is mostly 'AI' to begin with. From the article: "AI systems used for indiscriminate surveillance applied in a generalised manner" So does this mean as long as we're not using Deep Learning, we can indiscriminately surveil? And what if the 'surveillance system' doesn't use AI, but the cameras themselves have AI embedded within to adjust focus? Does that count? What if the system doesn't use AI, but the supporting services do? It's basically ridiculous. If the government wants to regulate 'mass surveillance' - that sounds like a good thing so do that. If they want to ensure privacy in certain domains - great - but it has nothing to do with 'AI'. Edit: Futhermore: "Mr Leufer added that the proposals should "be expanded to include all public sector AI systems, regardless of their assigned risk level". "This is because people typically do not have a choice about whether or not to interact with an AI system in the public sector."" This is laughably bad, because again, there is not such thing as an 'AI System'. A broad ban on on AI in the public sector would almost guarantee European stagnation in every sector, for no good reason at all. Will they ban Google Search in public service? Google assistant? Google navigation? Those use AI. Will they ban AI signal processing for anything related to government? They'll have to ban Tesla as well, there's a ton of AI in every unit. Will there be a single automobile in 10 years that won't have AI components? The EU is going to ban all of them from use in public service? Even today, AI is almost universal in every day systems, that is only going to increase quite a lot. In 5 years, you literally won't be able to use any tech without it touching some form of AI. Mr. Leufeur has no understanding of what he is talking about.
seanmcdirmid 6y ago
> And if Switzerland goes its own way and allows citizenship for AIs. I'm pretty sure not being a member of the EU, Switzerland will go its own way.
908B64B197 6y ago
Am-I the only one that finds is odd how the British government brags about Alan Turing after what they did to him? The man saved women, men, children, of all races and orientations from an horrible end. I wish the British government had extended the favor to Turing himself.
- mbroncano 6y ago
  Or to that extent Oscar Wilde and many, many others.
- visarga 6y ago
  Nobody's above being cancelled, that's what happens when righteous people set to work. They know best and are willing to educate society by example.
- watwut 6y ago
  That is literally what happens with historical figures everywhere. Americans now celebrate Martin Luther King for example.
thebackup 6y ago
I don’t believe in BDUF:ing even regulations too much, better to get a toothless first version out in the wild and then tweak it when in place.
birdsbirdsbirds 6y ago
The limits are a convenient way to escape the challenge. By opting out, nobody can ask why European companies don't have state of the art AI technology. If Europe cannot offer more than €6.7 billion to create an alternative infrastructure to AWS, GCP and Azure then they better prepare an excuse for why they haven't managed to create AI. [1] https://ec.europa.eu/digital-single-market/en/european-cloud-initiative https://ec.europa.eu/digital-single-market/en/european-cloud...

quotemstr 6y ago

Luddites. If you look at the course of history, every attempt to slow the adoption of new technology has been a disaster for human welfare. This policy move is just like trying to ban the telephone or the printing press.

tppiotrowski 6y ago
I see this more along the lines of preventing nuclear proliferation, chemical and biological warfare.
- quotemstr 6y ago
  This is more like banning the production of chlorine gas because someone might put it in an artillery shell --- never mind all the other useful things you can do with chlorine gas. If you want to regulate externalities, regulate externalities: don't ban technology itself.
  - KineticLensman 6y ago
    > don't ban technology itself The EU isn't planning to ban underlying AI technologies, but instead to control its use in applications such as credit worthiness assessment
    - ThomPete 6y ago
      ai need training data. Its not just a technology play.
    - throwawaysea 6y ago
      ...which is basically banning people from measuring risk for themselves and deciding how to react to that risk themselves. How is this not authoritarian?
      - La1n 6y ago
        >How is this not authoritarian Authoritatian can mean so many things, could you define it further. Cause how I read your comment I could call seatbelt laws authoritatian, and I guess you didn't mean that.

RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago

>those designed or used in a manner that manipulates human behaviour, opinions or decisions ...causing a person to behave, form an opinion or take a decision to their detriment Would this mean that A/B testing of news article headlines would be banned if it was powered by software?

sneak 6y ago

> The use of AI in the military is exempt, as are systems used by authorities in order to safeguard public security. I'm fairly sure this excludes nearly 100% of the most risky uses of AI that exist today.

tppiotrowski 6y ago

I thought this article would be about software in heavy machinery like self driving cars but it's more aimed at applications of AI that are incompatible with human rights: social scores, surveillance, crime-prediction, etc.

dalbasal 6y ago
This is the problem: they don't really understand what they're trying to regulate. A lot of it is (a) data-privacy issues or (b) using data to make automated decisions. The "AI" part is superfluous, as far as I can see. Lawmakers appear as caught up in labeling stuff "AI" as investors. It's going to make them less effective by letting them avoid actually defining what they're trying to prevent. Consider: "those (AIs) designed or used in a manner that manipulates human behaviour, opinions or decisions ...causing a person to behave, form an opinion or take a decision to their detriment" It's clearly about advertising and social media. If you want regulation to be effective, specifics are good. Platitudes don't make good regulations.

ThomPete 6y ago

the only outcome of this is that Europe will fall even further behind the US and China. How sad.

clownpenis_fart 6y ago
Since there have been and will be exactly zero useful ai application anytime soon other than bias laundering (aka "systematic discrimination is ok when a computer does it"), I think it's ok.
- Engineering-MD 6y ago
  While I don’t necessarily disagree, can you elaborate a bit more? AI is likely to make some significant impacts especially in computer vision applications among others.
- anticristi 6y ago
  I share your concern: Train AI to reject CVs with "Ahmed" and accept CVs with "Smith". Then blame racial bias on the difficulty to explain DNN.
- ThomPete 6y ago
  And with that approach there wont be in europe anytime soon :)

prof-dr-ir 6y ago

Does anybody have a link to the actual draft this article is based on? In my limited experience the proposals by the EU commission are often readable and interesting. I might not agree with them, but I do appreciate that the thought process is made public years before ideas become laws. (As the article states, that is also very much the expectation here.)

noshaker 6y ago
Here is the draft https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ZaBPsfor_aHKNeeyXxk9uJfTru747EOn/view https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ZaBPsfor_aHKNeeyXxk9uJfTru7...
- anticristi 6y ago
  Thanks! 81 pages and no executive summary?!?! I'm interested to read it, but this is likely to have the same effect as sleeping pills.
  - noshaker 6y ago
    You can check out this tech crunch article where I got the draft from. It is a bit more detailed than the bbc article. https://techcrunch.com/2021/04/14/eu-plan-for-risk-based-ai-rules-to-set-fines-as-high-as-4-of-global-turnover-per-leaked-draft/ https://techcrunch.com/2021/04/14/eu-plan-for-risk-based-ai-...
  - f137 6y ago
    Well, just run it thru an AI summarizer )

refraincomment 6y ago

Europe != Obscure department of the European Commission issuing unsolicited opinions

anticristi 6y ago
I beg to differ. "AI" is already rejecting CVs and untransparently keeping people unemployed. People do care about how to use this tool responsibility.
- La1n 6y ago
  I think OP was referring specifically to the HN title.

bitL 6y ago

Here we go, it didn't take long... Anyone still thinking ML won't be regulated? ML licenses to purchase GPUs next?

joe_the_user 6y ago

The listed examples seem reasonably good. * systems which establish priority in the dispatching of emergency services * systems determining access to or assigning people to educational institutes * recruitment algorithms * those that evaluate credit worthiness * those for making individual risk assessments * crime-predicting algorithms While I'd also like to see autonomous military devices banned, banned AI that makes opaque life-changing decisions about individuals seems reasonable. We already say that these shouldn't discriminate and we've seen ways AI can allow discrimination through the back door.

tomp 6y ago
> we've seen ways AI can allow discrimination through the back door. Do you have any concrete examples of these, in particular where the use of statistics or AI enables more discrimination than using human decisions?
- _1 6y ago
  https://weaponsofmathdestructionbook.com/ https://weaponsofmathdestructionbook.com/
- YeGoblynQueenne 6y ago
  Why does it have to be "more"?
  - tomp 6y ago
    Parent mentioned that AI is used to sneak in discrimination through the back door, implying that discrimination wouldn’t be there (or there would be less) without AI.
    - nix0n 6y ago
      Here's an example: mortgages (in the USA) used to be approved or denied by humans, but there were certain neighborhoods where only white people were allowed. Now, there's a law against that. In the future, there will be an AI system to approve or deny mortgages, based off of historical training data. Since that data includes the redlining era, the AI will learn to make racist decisions. Most people do not understand how it is possible for a computer to be racist. (Other than against all humans like in Terminator 2.) This is why it's "through the back door", because it's not obvious how it's possible or where it's coming from.

goatcode 6y ago

>The use of AI in the military is exempt, as are systems used by authorities in order to safeguard public security. Of course.

modeless 6y ago
The problem with government regulation of AI is that the biggest threat is government use of AI. Rules for thee but not for me!
- goatcode 6y ago
  Any governing body seems to leave a lot of room for "except for pigs" when they write down their rules. The bigger the body, the more potential pigs there are.
  - brobdingnagians 6y ago
    Your use of "pigs" reminds me of: "All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others"
    - gramakri 6y ago
      It's meant to remind you of that quote :) because the rules are made by pigs in the book Animal farm. Your quote comes from the same book
- geraneum 6y ago
  Government (ab)use of AI is is of course a serious threat. But I’d say big corporations abuse of AI is even worse. Assuming we are talking about a democratic state, at least there are some checks and balances on governments whereas people cannot elect a FAANG CEO or go to a ‘.gov’ website to read a transcript of board meetings. Edit: I am by no means advocating for government’s use of AI in any form.
  - trutannus 6y ago

rndude 6y ago

The title should read "Europe seeks to limit use of AI because they can't build any AI system themself" The state of AI in Europe is a sad joke and we already think about regulation.

capableweb 6y ago
> The state of AI in Europe is a sad joke and we already think about regulation. Yeah, fuck people who want to think about and limit the consequences of what they are working on. Like who would ever want to draft up laws around nuclear weapons before researching and developing nuclear weapons, that removes all the fun?

CFA178B 6y ago

Europe can hardly implement a crud application, but they like to talk their heads off about the risks of AI - painful.

nkl58 6y ago
What a fruitful reply

imapeopleperson 6y ago

No one actually wants a society being ruled by computers, except maybe the people running those computers. This is at least a step in the right direction.

pelorat 6y ago
Speak for yourself. I take AI over EU politicians any day of the week.
- tgv 6y ago
  You can't be serious. EU leadership has always been a bit weak, with a lot of compromises, and not a hard stance on foreign policy, but to prefer an unknown oracle? The current state of AI would even have it overfitted on a small relevant corpus padded with arbitrary other material. How can you expect that to produce better government?
  - systemvoltage 6y ago
    Perhaps OP meant "I take AI computer scientists over EU politicians"?
avz 6y ago
> No one actually wants a society being ruled by computers, except maybe the people running those computers. Humans in charge are known for injustice, kickbacks, favor trading, selective enforcement and other forms of corruption and abuse. Properly engineered and regularly reviewed open source systems with balance checks might just get us closer to a rules-based system that provides a level playing field for everyone. Given all the known biases of current AI systems, we are certainly far from ready for it, but the prospect of transforming large parts of government into an open source "social operating system" that automatically and fairly offers basic services according to clearly coded and broadly enforced rules looks like a desirable goal in the (very) long term. Many laws can be expressed as computer code. Where they cannot is often due to deliberate vagueness built in to leave scope for future interpretation as new cases arise. This suggests that we could express laws in computer code that raises a HumanInputRequiredException in the cases currently handled with deliberate vagueness. The resulting reduction in vagueness would remove a huge amount of discretion that currently facilitates corruption and abuse of power while ensuring ultimate human control and human-directed evolution of the law.

vngzs 6y ago

> those designed or used in a manner that manipulates human behaviour, opinions or decisions ...causing a person to behave, form an opinion or take a decision to their detriment This appears to obviously apply to the Facebook wall. You can find a high-profile example of this in [0], but [1] explains how this manipulation, which optimizes "engagement", is built deep into Facebook's design. I think the case that it causes users to form opinions and take decisions to their detriment is obvious, so these new laws should apply. Am I wrong? [0]: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jun/29/facebook-users-emotions-news-feeds https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jun/29/facebook-... [1]: https://qz.com/1039910/how-facebooks-news-feed-algorithm-sells-our-fear-and-outrage-for-profit/ https://qz.com/1039910/how-facebooks-news-feed-algorithm-sel...

enchiridion 6y ago
Seems like books fit that description.

FredPret 6y ago

Big organization seeks to dam water with sieve, says "this time will be different"

zitterbewegung 6y ago

This just feels like a play for large tech companies to be out regulated from the European market.

throwawaysea 6y ago

A restriction on computation and processing of information seems like a restriction on speech, expression, and thought. The list named in this article is just bizarre. For example it mentions that the following would be covered by the proposed policy: > those designed or used in a manner that manipulates human behaviour, opinions or decisions ...causing a person to behave, form an opinion or take a decision to their detriment Can't all of marketing, politics, and activism be constructed to fall under this broad statement? It feels to me like this unfairly allows only certain means to achieving the same ends, which ends up favoring certain segments of society at the expense of others. As an example, what makes shaping political opinions using AI inappropriate but shaping it via disruptive protesting appropriate? A person who few responsibilities and enough time to spend protesting is allowed to influence society, and someone who wants to do the same through a different means that makes more sense for them isn't permitted to do so? Similarly, credit worthiness and crime risk assessment are plainly logical ways for individuals, corporations, and governments to contain risks, incentivize the correct behavior, and make smart decisions for themselves. Getting rid of credit scoring is equivalent to income redistribution, since less risky individuals will be forced to subsidize others. I don't think blanket regulation like this is the answer. The answer lies in ensuring healthy markets with sufficient competition (enforcing anti-trust law), in relying on federalism so that local governments can decide which technologies they want to use or not use, and in privacy controls for users to retain control of their data. Not in restricting math.

JoeAltmaier 6y ago

We will have to face everything everybody thinks up. Legislation is whistling in the dark (pissing in the wind; closing the barn door...). Its too easy to create and deploy these things. Anybody who finds a reason to do so, will. It will take social changes of some kind, to adapt to this new reality. Not draconian laws.

eivarv 6y ago

These issues should solved by making problematic AI-use in breach of individual rights (e.g. privacy), rather than regulating the technology itself (with govt. exceptions) – which increases the power-imbalance between the state and the citizen.

thepangolino 6y ago

Is this a remake of the PGP debacle? If the GDPR and the so called EU cookie law are to be taken seriously then yes, it is.

timme 6y ago

By the geniuses that brought us ePrivacy Directive and GDPR. Might be cheaper to just tell tech companies they're not welcome in the EU.

roomey 6y ago

It's been in Irish law for some time (which makes it applicable to the majority of US tech giants). Unfortunately Ireland isn't hq for a lot of the big finance and insurance firms which would probably be more useful in this situation. Anyway, here is the latest version of the law: TLDR; if it impacts you it should require a human decision and be appeal-able. Also there is a right to review code but I'm not sure how that works: the right of a data subject not to be subject to a decision based solely on automated processing, including profiling, which produces legal effects concerning him or her or similarly significantly affects him or her shall, in addition to the grounds identified in Article 22(2)(a) and (c), not apply where— (a) the decision is authorised or required by or under an enactment, and (b) either— (i) the effect of that decision is to grant a request of the data subject, or (ii) in all other cases (where subparagraph (i) is not applicable), adequate steps have been taken by the controller to safeguard the legitimate interests of the data subject which steps shall include the making of arrangements to enable him or her to— (I) make representations to the controller in relation to the decision, (II) request human intervention in the decision-making process, (III) request to appeal the decision.

sturza 6y ago

China brings hardware. US brings software. EU brings the regulation.

YeGoblynQueenne 6y ago
Or, China brings the matches, US brings the gasoline, EU brings the good sense to keep them apart.

intricatedetail 6y ago

I'll vote for any party that will make tracking illegal. I am sick and tired of being stalked by all those multibillion corporations who don't even give anything back. They are the cancer on the society.

bloak 6y ago

Let me try to summarise. Tell me if I've got this roughly right. A journalist has waffled about someone tweeting that an out-of-date 80-page draft from January of ... something ... the journalist can't be bothered to tell us its proper title ... has been "leaked" but not actually published for us to read. However, an up-to-date version of whatever it is will be officially published next week. So perhaps I'll just wait till then before trying to form an opinion.

arcanon 6y ago

Luddites

nikonyrh 6y ago

I wonder if we are still allowed to use statistics (or math) in these contexts, where do you draw the line?