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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

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...

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...