10 ms·

Let's be realistic, just like building codes, medical procedures and car manufacturing sooner or later we will also be subject to regulations. The times where h

Let's be realistic, just like building codes, medical procedures and car manufacturing sooner or later we will also be subject to regulations. The times where hacking culture and tech was left unbothered are over. Twenty years ago we were free to do whatever we want, because it didn't matter. Nowadays everyone uses tech as much as they use stairs. You can't build stairs without railings though. Keeping the window for abuse small is beneficial to the whole industry. Otherwise bad press will put pressure on politicians to "do something about it" resulting in faster and more excessive regulations.

zarzavat 4y ago
Buildings don’t cross borders. Code is information, and information wants to, and will be free. Short of a North Korea like setup, regulations can only slow down the spread of information around the world.
- ouid 4y ago
  slow might be nice
- freedom2099 4y ago
  Informations is just that… has no will nor wants
  - 9dev 4y ago
    Ah, come on. That’s the exact same argument as „guns don’t kill people, humans do“ - factually correct, but misses the entire point far and wide.
    - colejohnson66 4y ago
      Not really. Guns serve one purpose, really: shooting at things, while possibly killing it (ignoring gun ranges). It’s why they were created in the first place. That’s why the “guns don’t kill people, people kill people” argument is bogus. “Information,” OTOH, doesn’t serve any particular purpose. On its own, information is just bits; it’s how those bits are used that matters. Those bits can be arranged to say “Hello, world”, but they can also be arranged to make the Stuxnet virus.
      - bumby 4y ago
        Nuclear fissile material is similarly morally agnostic. It’s just matter, right? So is smallpox. It’s just DNA code at its heart, right? But it’s also recognized that wide access to some things creates a lopsided risk/reward profile.
        colejohnson66 4y ago
        Correct. I’m not arguing that wide access is a good thing; Just that the comparison to the tired gun argument is wrong. Hence why I brought up a “bad” usage of the agnostic item. It’s not the best example, but it’s what I thought of on the spot.
      - akimball 4y ago
        A remotely operated hole punch. I have used one to quickly make small round holes in hard materials on several occasions. Also to install small lead weights into things. Mostly though, they are good for humanely harvesting meat.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  - sdiupIGPWEfh 4y ago
    It gets tiring playing word games to avoid the suggestion that certain natural pressures have personal agency. Water "wants" to flow downhill. Gasses "want" to expand to fill their container. Genes "wanting" to replicate drive animals literally wanting to reproduce, and the incidental awareness of that drive in some species comes down to a certain molecular arrangement brought about by said genes. The genes are data, the minds are data, and the natural pressure is that that data which succeeds in reproducing will tend to keep reproducing. So in the original sense of the notion of memes as proposed by Dawkins, yes, information "wants" to be free, as that is its tendency. The only other option is that said data ultimately dies out.
- oriolid 4y ago
  Drugs, dangerously poor quality consumer products and other unwanted stuff does cross borders, and most countries are making efforts to stop them too.
  - Turing_Machine 4y ago
    Neither drugs nor consumer products are speech.
    - pixl97 4y ago
      Is code speech or action? If you're old, you say speech. If you're younger and watch any integration modern technology into life, you'd say both. But at the end of the day, your viewpoint doesn't matter. What does matter is when the 'average person' feels unsafe by this 'informational speech' as you like to call it, that it will be banned and restricted and you will be punished under the full force of the law for trafficking in it. Your neighbors will cheer as you're dragged out of your house by a swat team for being an evil terrorist. SCOTUS will make whatever finding is politically expedient for the majority parties point of view that is the majority at the time, and you will rot in prison until you die of old age. So, your choices are attempting to setup a regulatory framework to minimize the dystopian hellscape your ideas will create or embrace the dystopian hellscape.
      - Turing_Machine 4y ago
        > Your neighbors will cheer as you're dragged out of your house by a swat team for being an evil terrorist. You have a cite for this actually happening with respect to a work of art in the United States in recent years?
    - oriolid 4y ago
      I'm quite sure it is not "speech" in the sense they knew when freedom of speech laws were written.
      - Turing_Machine 4y ago
- bigbillheck 4y ago
  > Buildings don’t cross borders I'm not sure that's factual, but even if it were, built objects certainly do.
  - b112 4y ago
    There are indeed buildings all over the place that do. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_house https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_house
- ehnto 4y ago
  Code is also machinery and infrastructure though, it can interact with the physical world in material ways, and because of that it will probably end up regulated. AI is all fun and games when it's data, but if it's being used to make decisions about how to take actions in the physical world I think it's fair that it follows some protocols each society gives it. Making a picture of a cat from a learned model, writing a book with a model, cool, whatever. Deciding who gets their house raided, or when to apply the brakes on an EV, or what drugs should be administered to a patient, we probably want to make sure the apparatus that does this, which includes the code, the data and the models, is held to some rules a society agrees upon.
  - t-3 4y ago
    And those rules seem to be: nobody gets to inspect, question, or even see the model. Just accept the output without any recourse, like good little peasants.
  - throwaway049 4y ago
    I recently saw a presentation from someone trying to build a predictive model for violent incidents in mental healthcare settings. They took steps to prevent the model considering race because this could potentially lead to less favorable treatment for some groups. The model was unable to give any useful predictions. I don't know if it would perform better without the deliberate limitations, but I do know that healthcare staff are making their own judgements in it's absence.
  - zarzavat 4y ago
    I completely agree with the principle that legal entities: businesses and governments should have their use of AI restricted. Facial recognition, for example, is a danger to society. But the development and proliferation of AI by extralegal entities cannot be stopped. Individuals, foreign researchers, foreign business, etc will keep pushing the frontier of AI forward indefinitely. AI can be regulated but it cannot be controlled.
- bumby 4y ago
  We regulate all kinds of things that cross borders.
- z9znz 4y ago
  > Buildings don’t cross borders "A metal strip on the floor of Eurode Business Center marks the border between Germany and the Netherlands. On one side of the building, there's a German mailbox and a German policeman. On the other side, a Dutch mailbox and a Dutch policeman." https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2012/08/09/158375183/the-building-thats-in-two-countries-at-once https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2012/08/09/158375183/the-...
  - pc86 4y ago
    You've missed the point by an impressive margin.
    - z9znz 4y ago
      No, I got the point. But I also thought that it was fun (in the usual HN way) to point out a factually incorrect absolute statement.
catiopatio 4y ago
This is paternalistic, overbearing, culturally-corrosive nonsense. Substandard buildings, medical procedures, and cars maim and kill. AI image generation is speech. I won’t accept prior restraint on speech as being necessary or inevitable.
- rubidium 4y ago
  You’re free bud. You can make it and release. But you have no standing to just complain about it.
  - tdehnel 4y ago
    Your comment equates to “stop talking” as if talking and ideas were somehow not the basic unit of democracy.
    - zdragnar 4y ago
      Ah yes, the classic democratic debate of "I don't like your justifications, you should give away all your work for free!"
      - tdehnel 4y ago
        It’s a democracy bub
  - catiopatio 4y ago
    The parent comment argues for the necessity and inevitability of legal regulation. We all have standing to debate our shared culture and ethics.
  - Turing_Machine 4y ago
    You're allowed to complain about anything you want. And others are allowed to either ignore your complants, or act on them.
- datavirtue 4y ago
Aerroon 4y ago
>You can't build stairs without railings though. Yes you can. Your hammer doesn't magically stop functioning when it discovers that you're building stairs without railings. You don't want tools to discriminate on what you can and can't do with it, because if you can discriminate, then you will get hammers from Hammer Co that can only use nails from Hammer Co.
- jevgeni 4y ago
  Do you want to take a test and get a license to work on AI? Because that's how you are going to get there.
  - hellojesus 4y ago
    This doesn't seem enforceable. Plus this would be a good use case for 2A.
    - bumby 4y ago
      I would say it's fairly easily enforceable if the government simply passes a law that requires a "licensed AI Engineer" to approve a design before it gets used commercially. This is how many other engineering disciplines work. Most people don't realize most engineers actually work under an exemption to this rule. But the mechanisms exist. I don't think this is the way it will unfold though. Giving licenses to SWEs gives them even more leverage in the job market, which I don't think software companies will want to do and would fight that type of regulation tooth-and-nail.
      - celdon25 4y ago
        That would likely accelerate the fall of society as we know it. I can’t think of a stronger financial incentive to go underground, or simply pack up and leave the country. Before the recent AI boom in the US, China was known to have better opportunities for AI researchers. Hugo de Garis and Ben Goertzel both went over to China for that reason some time ago. Interestingly, De Garis predicted that a world war would eventually start over the issue of AI prohibition.
jnovek 4y ago
This is particularly visible with the sorry state of accessibility options for disabled individuals. I deal with a moderate vision impairment and everything I do to make computers more usable is bespoke hacks and workarounds I’ve put together myself. In MacOS, for example, I can’t even replace the system fonts with more readable options, or increase the font size of system tools. Most software ships with fixed font sizes (electron is exceptionally bad here — why is it that I can easily resize fonts in web browsers and not electron?) and increasingly new software doesn’t render correctly with an effective resolution below 1080p. Games don’t care at all about the vision impaired. E.g. RDR2 cost half a billion dollars to make yet there is no way to size fonts up large enough for me to read. I welcome regulation if it means fixing these sorts of problems.
- concordDance 4y ago
  You don't need regulation, you need technologies that can be freely modified by their users and the changes distributed.
  - paulryanrogers 4y ago
    Regulations and user modifiably aren't mutually exclusive. In fact the former is one way to ensure the latter.
  - jnovek 4y ago
    This is what I do. I primarily use Linux because it has the most flexibility with typeface and scaling, but it’s still not perfect (e.g. all electron apps) and it’s definitely bespoke and hard to reproduce. I routinely open tickets with software vendors and open source projects asking for things that ought to be low-hanging fruit and I’m either blown off or directed to tools that don’t make sense for me (usually magnifier or text-to-speech). The appetite for fixing issues that limit my access to software is essentially null. I’ve dealt with these problems for two decades and I really believe that there is very little economic incentive to make software accessible. Unless substantially more people become vision impaired in the future, that’s how it will stay. I am pretty certain that only way software companies will really take the vision impaired into account is if they are forced to.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
jstummbillig 4y ago
Imagine everyone used stairs as much as they use tech. Buff people everywhere.
jrm4 4y ago
The sooner the better. Cybersecurity is a mess and 100% the reason is "no skin in the game." If a car manufacturer promises or even implies "safety," and something bad happens, they get sued or they take real action. The big tech companies must be held to do the same.
- hellojesus 4y ago
  Regulation by which only massive players can abide is effectively killing any small or not well funded business. We have civil law. If a company harms you, you can sue. No need to create regulation to make markets less competitive.
  - jrm4 4y ago
    This is an incredibly oversimplified and useless take of the sort that people need to stop parroting. Regulations work very frequently; they're around us ALL the time. Yes, they sometimes fail or don't work perfectly.
    - hellojesus 4y ago
      The parent comment mentions issues with cybersecurity. There are measures companies can take to reduce their likelihood of breach, but we all know they humans make errors that are exploitable all the time. Just the other day there was a thread about an exploitable bit in the Linux kernel that had been there for the prior 10 years. My point is that unless the regulation we're discussing is merely marginal in cost of adoption, there will be definite harm caused to small businesses trying to bootstrap from the ground up. It's not some bogeyman of an argument. It is quite a real possibility.
      - jrm4 4y ago
        Again, what you're saying is potentially and practically equivalent to: "If we put regulations on safety measures in new buildings, such as railings and fire escapes, it will hurt small businesses." Maybe it will. It's still not an intelligent point. Stop.
bumby 4y ago
>just like building codes, medical procedures and car manufacturing... "Self enforced limits" could also be an attempt to avoid formal governmental regulation. The maturity of CS as an industry is still in it's infancy compared to other engineering disciplines. I'm sure if you went back to the 1880s, five or six decades after the start of industrial revolution, there was very little limitation on the design of mechanical equipment. Now, there are all kinds of industry standards and government regulations. We could lament how much this stifles progress, but we're generally not even cognizant of the amount of risk it has reduced. For example, most people don't give a second thought to the idea of their water heater being capable of blowing up their house because it happens so infrequently.
horns4lyfe 4y ago
If that’s the case then innovation in the US can be tossed out the window. Once that ball gets rolling it only ends in crony capitalism and protectionism for existing players.
CM30 4y ago
You can do any of those things for your personal use, the difference is that you can't legally do things like build stairs without railings when taking on construction jobs for clients or customers. The tools you use don't care if you're what you're doing is legal or what not, they work the same way regardless. It's just there are (rightfully) legal restrictions on what you can do with products or services you sell to the public. The difference here is like not being able to own a hammer or car mechanics tools for your own personal use, and only being able to use them under corporate guidelines/surveilance in a restricted area, which is ridiculous.
- SpicyLemonZest 4y ago
  There are many such restrictions on tools and components which could be dangerous to people other than you. Refrigerant, for example, cannot be sold to the general public for personal use (outside of a fully sealed AC system), and licensed refrigerant users must follow specific usage procedures to ensure it doesn't vent to the atmosphere.
  - filoleg 4y ago
    "Being dangerous to people other than you" is not why refrigerant requires a license to purchase at all. The license is required because refrigerant is categorized as an ozone-depleting substance, and the sales restriction is established by the Clean Air Act[0]. All of which is under control of Environmental Protection Agency. I guess you can argue that any pollution-restricting laws are based on the premise of "being dangerous to people other than you," but that's not quite what people have in mind when talking about things being restricted due to being dangerous. We are talking about things like "driving a non-street-legal car" or "owning this one potentially dangerous carpetry tool", not "increasing gas taxes to disincentivise pollution." The potential danger being inflicted in those cases is direct and specific. You can totally drive a non-street-legal car on your farm, even without a registration and a license plate, as long as you do it purely on your own property and not on the actual road. And that's the approach that personally makes sense to me with AI-generated images. Any restrictions on it should be imo on the distribution and the commercial/sales side (e.g., you should not legally be able sell ai-generated posters of your neighbor in an embarrassing situation without their permission or sending them to that neighbor's workplace), not on the creation/usage side (e.g., you should be legally able to generate those images of your neigjbor, with any potential restrictions and legal problems only beginning to come your way at the distribution stage). 0. https://www.epa.gov/section608/refrigerant-sales-restriction https://www.epa.gov/section608/refrigerant-sales-restriction

zarzavat 4y ago

Buildings don’t cross borders. Code is information, and information wants to, and will be free. Short of a North Korea like setup, regulations can only slow down the spread of information around the world.

ouid 4y ago
slow might be nice
freedom2099 4y ago
Informations is just that… has no will nor wants
- 9dev 4y ago
  Ah, come on. That’s the exact same argument as „guns don’t kill people, humans do“ - factually correct, but misses the entire point far and wide.
  - colejohnson66 4y ago
    Not really. Guns serve one purpose, really: shooting at things, while possibly killing it (ignoring gun ranges). It’s why they were created in the first place. That’s why the “guns don’t kill people, people kill people” argument is bogus. “Information,” OTOH, doesn’t serve any particular purpose. On its own, information is just bits; it’s how those bits are used that matters. Those bits can be arranged to say “Hello, world”, but they can also be arranged to make the Stuxnet virus.
    - bumby 4y ago
      Nuclear fissile material is similarly morally agnostic. It’s just matter, right? So is smallpox. It’s just DNA code at its heart, right? But it’s also recognized that wide access to some things creates a lopsided risk/reward profile.
      - colejohnson66 4y ago
        Correct. I’m not arguing that wide access is a good thing; Just that the comparison to the tired gun argument is wrong. Hence why I brought up a “bad” usage of the agnostic item. It’s not the best example, but it’s what I thought of on the spot.
    - akimball 4y ago
      A remotely operated hole punch. I have used one to quickly make small round holes in hard materials on several occasions. Also to install small lead weights into things. Mostly though, they are good for humanely harvesting meat.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- sdiupIGPWEfh 4y ago
  It gets tiring playing word games to avoid the suggestion that certain natural pressures have personal agency. Water "wants" to flow downhill. Gasses "want" to expand to fill their container. Genes "wanting" to replicate drive animals literally wanting to reproduce, and the incidental awareness of that drive in some species comes down to a certain molecular arrangement brought about by said genes. The genes are data, the minds are data, and the natural pressure is that that data which succeeds in reproducing will tend to keep reproducing. So in the original sense of the notion of memes as proposed by Dawkins, yes, information "wants" to be free, as that is its tendency. The only other option is that said data ultimately dies out.
oriolid 4y ago
Drugs, dangerously poor quality consumer products and other unwanted stuff does cross borders, and most countries are making efforts to stop them too.
- Turing_Machine 4y ago
  Neither drugs nor consumer products are speech.
  - pixl97 4y ago
    Is code speech or action? If you're old, you say speech. If you're younger and watch any integration modern technology into life, you'd say both. But at the end of the day, your viewpoint doesn't matter. What does matter is when the 'average person' feels unsafe by this 'informational speech' as you like to call it, that it will be banned and restricted and you will be punished under the full force of the law for trafficking in it. Your neighbors will cheer as you're dragged out of your house by a swat team for being an evil terrorist. SCOTUS will make whatever finding is politically expedient for the majority parties point of view that is the majority at the time, and you will rot in prison until you die of old age. So, your choices are attempting to setup a regulatory framework to minimize the dystopian hellscape your ideas will create or embrace the dystopian hellscape.
    - Turing_Machine 4y ago
      > Your neighbors will cheer as you're dragged out of your house by a swat team for being an evil terrorist. You have a cite for this actually happening with respect to a work of art in the United States in recent years?
  - oriolid 4y ago
    I'm quite sure it is not "speech" in the sense they knew when freedom of speech laws were written.
    - Turing_Machine 4y ago
bigbillheck 4y ago
> Buildings don’t cross borders I'm not sure that's factual, but even if it were, built objects certainly do.
- b112 4y ago
  There are indeed buildings all over the place that do. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_house https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_house
ehnto 4y ago
Code is also machinery and infrastructure though, it can interact with the physical world in material ways, and because of that it will probably end up regulated. AI is all fun and games when it's data, but if it's being used to make decisions about how to take actions in the physical world I think it's fair that it follows some protocols each society gives it. Making a picture of a cat from a learned model, writing a book with a model, cool, whatever. Deciding who gets their house raided, or when to apply the brakes on an EV, or what drugs should be administered to a patient, we probably want to make sure the apparatus that does this, which includes the code, the data and the models, is held to some rules a society agrees upon.
- t-3 4y ago
  And those rules seem to be: nobody gets to inspect, question, or even see the model. Just accept the output without any recourse, like good little peasants.
- throwaway049 4y ago
  I recently saw a presentation from someone trying to build a predictive model for violent incidents in mental healthcare settings. They took steps to prevent the model considering race because this could potentially lead to less favorable treatment for some groups. The model was unable to give any useful predictions. I don't know if it would perform better without the deliberate limitations, but I do know that healthcare staff are making their own judgements in it's absence.
- zarzavat 4y ago
  I completely agree with the principle that legal entities: businesses and governments should have their use of AI restricted. Facial recognition, for example, is a danger to society. But the development and proliferation of AI by extralegal entities cannot be stopped. Individuals, foreign researchers, foreign business, etc will keep pushing the frontier of AI forward indefinitely. AI can be regulated but it cannot be controlled.
bumby 4y ago
We regulate all kinds of things that cross borders.
z9znz 4y ago
> Buildings don’t cross borders "A metal strip on the floor of Eurode Business Center marks the border between Germany and the Netherlands. On one side of the building, there's a German mailbox and a German policeman. On the other side, a Dutch mailbox and a Dutch policeman." https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2012/08/09/158375183/the-building-thats-in-two-countries-at-once https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2012/08/09/158375183/the-...
- pc86 4y ago
  You've missed the point by an impressive margin.
  - z9znz 4y ago
    No, I got the point. But I also thought that it was fun (in the usual HN way) to point out a factually incorrect absolute statement.

catiopatio 4y ago

This is paternalistic, overbearing, culturally-corrosive nonsense. Substandard buildings, medical procedures, and cars maim and kill. AI image generation is speech. I won’t accept prior restraint on speech as being necessary or inevitable.

rubidium 4y ago
You’re free bud. You can make it and release. But you have no standing to just complain about it.
- tdehnel 4y ago
  Your comment equates to “stop talking” as if talking and ideas were somehow not the basic unit of democracy.
  - zdragnar 4y ago
    Ah yes, the classic democratic debate of "I don't like your justifications, you should give away all your work for free!"
    - tdehnel 4y ago
      It’s a democracy bub
- catiopatio 4y ago
  The parent comment argues for the necessity and inevitability of legal regulation. We all have standing to debate our shared culture and ethics.
- Turing_Machine 4y ago
  You're allowed to complain about anything you want. And others are allowed to either ignore your complants, or act on them.
datavirtue 4y ago

Aerroon 4y ago

>You can't build stairs without railings though. Yes you can. Your hammer doesn't magically stop functioning when it discovers that you're building stairs without railings. You don't want tools to discriminate on what you can and can't do with it, because if you can discriminate, then you will get hammers from Hammer Co that can only use nails from Hammer Co.

jevgeni 4y ago
Do you want to take a test and get a license to work on AI? Because that's how you are going to get there.
- hellojesus 4y ago
  This doesn't seem enforceable. Plus this would be a good use case for 2A.
  - bumby 4y ago
    I would say it's fairly easily enforceable if the government simply passes a law that requires a "licensed AI Engineer" to approve a design before it gets used commercially. This is how many other engineering disciplines work. Most people don't realize most engineers actually work under an exemption to this rule. But the mechanisms exist. I don't think this is the way it will unfold though. Giving licenses to SWEs gives them even more leverage in the job market, which I don't think software companies will want to do and would fight that type of regulation tooth-and-nail.
    - celdon25 4y ago
      That would likely accelerate the fall of society as we know it. I can’t think of a stronger financial incentive to go underground, or simply pack up and leave the country. Before the recent AI boom in the US, China was known to have better opportunities for AI researchers. Hugo de Garis and Ben Goertzel both went over to China for that reason some time ago. Interestingly, De Garis predicted that a world war would eventually start over the issue of AI prohibition.

jnovek 4y ago

This is particularly visible with the sorry state of accessibility options for disabled individuals. I deal with a moderate vision impairment and everything I do to make computers more usable is bespoke hacks and workarounds I’ve put together myself. In MacOS, for example, I can’t even replace the system fonts with more readable options, or increase the font size of system tools. Most software ships with fixed font sizes (electron is exceptionally bad here — why is it that I can easily resize fonts in web browsers and not electron?) and increasingly new software doesn’t render correctly with an effective resolution below 1080p. Games don’t care at all about the vision impaired. E.g. RDR2 cost half a billion dollars to make yet there is no way to size fonts up large enough for me to read. I welcome regulation if it means fixing these sorts of problems.

concordDance 4y ago
You don't need regulation, you need technologies that can be freely modified by their users and the changes distributed.
- paulryanrogers 4y ago
  Regulations and user modifiably aren't mutually exclusive. In fact the former is one way to ensure the latter.
- jnovek 4y ago
  This is what I do. I primarily use Linux because it has the most flexibility with typeface and scaling, but it’s still not perfect (e.g. all electron apps) and it’s definitely bespoke and hard to reproduce. I routinely open tickets with software vendors and open source projects asking for things that ought to be low-hanging fruit and I’m either blown off or directed to tools that don’t make sense for me (usually magnifier or text-to-speech). The appetite for fixing issues that limit my access to software is essentially null. I’ve dealt with these problems for two decades and I really believe that there is very little economic incentive to make software accessible. Unless substantially more people become vision impaired in the future, that’s how it will stay. I am pretty certain that only way software companies will really take the vision impaired into account is if they are forced to.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

jstummbillig 4y ago

Imagine everyone used stairs as much as they use tech. Buff people everywhere.

jrm4 4y ago

The sooner the better. Cybersecurity is a mess and 100% the reason is "no skin in the game." If a car manufacturer promises or even implies "safety," and something bad happens, they get sued or they take real action. The big tech companies must be held to do the same.

hellojesus 4y ago
Regulation by which only massive players can abide is effectively killing any small or not well funded business. We have civil law. If a company harms you, you can sue. No need to create regulation to make markets less competitive.
- jrm4 4y ago
  This is an incredibly oversimplified and useless take of the sort that people need to stop parroting. Regulations work very frequently; they're around us ALL the time. Yes, they sometimes fail or don't work perfectly.
  - hellojesus 4y ago
    The parent comment mentions issues with cybersecurity. There are measures companies can take to reduce their likelihood of breach, but we all know they humans make errors that are exploitable all the time. Just the other day there was a thread about an exploitable bit in the Linux kernel that had been there for the prior 10 years. My point is that unless the regulation we're discussing is merely marginal in cost of adoption, there will be definite harm caused to small businesses trying to bootstrap from the ground up. It's not some bogeyman of an argument. It is quite a real possibility.
    - jrm4 4y ago
      Again, what you're saying is potentially and practically equivalent to: "If we put regulations on safety measures in new buildings, such as railings and fire escapes, it will hurt small businesses." Maybe it will. It's still not an intelligent point. Stop.

bumby 4y ago

>just like building codes, medical procedures and car manufacturing... "Self enforced limits" could also be an attempt to avoid formal governmental regulation. The maturity of CS as an industry is still in it's infancy compared to other engineering disciplines. I'm sure if you went back to the 1880s, five or six decades after the start of industrial revolution, there was very little limitation on the design of mechanical equipment. Now, there are all kinds of industry standards and government regulations. We could lament how much this stifles progress, but we're generally not even cognizant of the amount of risk it has reduced. For example, most people don't give a second thought to the idea of their water heater being capable of blowing up their house because it happens so infrequently.

horns4lyfe 4y ago

If that’s the case then innovation in the US can be tossed out the window. Once that ball gets rolling it only ends in crony capitalism and protectionism for existing players.

CM30 4y ago

You can do any of those things for your personal use, the difference is that you can't legally do things like build stairs without railings when taking on construction jobs for clients or customers. The tools you use don't care if you're what you're doing is legal or what not, they work the same way regardless. It's just there are (rightfully) legal restrictions on what you can do with products or services you sell to the public. The difference here is like not being able to own a hammer or car mechanics tools for your own personal use, and only being able to use them under corporate guidelines/surveilance in a restricted area, which is ridiculous.

SpicyLemonZest 4y ago
There are many such restrictions on tools and components which could be dangerous to people other than you. Refrigerant, for example, cannot be sold to the general public for personal use (outside of a fully sealed AC system), and licensed refrigerant users must follow specific usage procedures to ensure it doesn't vent to the atmosphere.
- filoleg 4y ago
  "Being dangerous to people other than you" is not why refrigerant requires a license to purchase at all. The license is required because refrigerant is categorized as an ozone-depleting substance, and the sales restriction is established by the Clean Air Act[0]. All of which is under control of Environmental Protection Agency. I guess you can argue that any pollution-restricting laws are based on the premise of "being dangerous to people other than you," but that's not quite what people have in mind when talking about things being restricted due to being dangerous. We are talking about things like "driving a non-street-legal car" or "owning this one potentially dangerous carpetry tool", not "increasing gas taxes to disincentivise pollution." The potential danger being inflicted in those cases is direct and specific. You can totally drive a non-street-legal car on your farm, even without a registration and a license plate, as long as you do it purely on your own property and not on the actual road. And that's the approach that personally makes sense to me with AI-generated images. Any restrictions on it should be imo on the distribution and the commercial/sales side (e.g., you should not legally be able sell ai-generated posters of your neighbor in an embarrassing situation without their permission or sending them to that neighbor's workplace), not on the creation/usage side (e.g., you should be legally able to generate those images of your neigjbor, with any potential restrictions and legal problems only beginning to come your way at the distribution stage). 0. https://www.epa.gov/section608/refrigerant-sales-restriction https://www.epa.gov/section608/refrigerant-sales-restriction