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Outside of self driving cars (which imo can and should be regulated by the ntsa), the thing that has never killed zero people probably shouldn't be regulated by

Outside of self driving cars (which imo can and should be regulated by the ntsa), the thing that has never killed zero people probably shouldn't be regulated by the thing that has killed... a lot more than that until there's a clear and obvious safety concern with something specific within the "AI" category of technology (would love if we de-scifi'd this and called it machine learning but I'm picking my battles here).

balls187 3y ago
Is your POV (US/Federal) government should only be allowed to regulate in cases of lethality because the government itself has carried lethal behvaior?
_-____-_ 3y ago
> Outside of self driving cars This is what I find so hilariously suspicious about Elon Musk's sudden anxiety about the dangers of AI chatbots. Like, dude, you've spent the better part of two decades making cars that drive themselves and have _already_ killed people with their faulty, ironically oversold "AI." Now all of a sudden someone else's AI, which isn't in the drivers seat of vehicles capable of 100mph+ speeds, and which actually works, is an existential danger to humanity?
joe_the_user 3y ago
I don't think "it hasn't killed people yet" is a very good criteria. There are a lot of plausible dangers that existing and imaginable large-machine-learning could involve. I can't see how one could do the regulating of AI but I don't think one can limit the worry-area to "clear and obvious" situations.
- staleStatefile 3y ago
  If “has killed people” was a viable argument for regulation we’d have a lot more regulation. Which is fine; engineers are not divine beings. They can have their figurative value deflated like everyone else is these days. Engineered devices have killed a lot of people.
- kyledrake 3y ago
  > plausible dangers Name three. There are 50,000 gun related deaths in the United States per year, are any of them a bigger threat than gun violence? I struggle to find a single thing AI can do, sans being hooked up to nuclear weapons and time travelling robots with german accents, that's even imaginatively more dangerous than what this country already allows and decides doesn't require useful regulations. I'm sorry if that's too political for HN but you know what, it actually does matter to compare real dangers (car accidents, gun violence) to conceived and made up ones (gender indifferent bathrooms, AI) when deciding how governments should prioritize policy and regulations.
  - JohnFen 3y ago
    So, because we haven't been able to resolve a highly political and divisive issue (gun deaths), that means we shouldn't try to resolve other dangerous issues? > I struggle to find a single thing AI can do How about job loss? If AI can do what proponents say, then it's easy to see that a large amount of job loss will result. If even 20% of people can no longer earn a living, people will die.
    - mrguyorama 3y ago
      It's also important to note here that even if you believe that all these ML models are not even close to "AI", that doesn't stop your naive boss from buying their hype and replacing you with it. There's good reason to talk about how society should handle that even if ChatGPT is all hot air.
    - kyledrake 3y ago
      > How about job loss? This is called creative destruction, and it's not even remotely a new problem created by this particular technology, it's a constant and ongoing mechanism of market capitalism by which technology streamlines or improves something that then requires less labor to accomplish. When the 400k+ telephone switch operators lost their jobs to digitization, it didn't cause a mass die off of humans, and while I won't say it was a zero bad consequences event, they mostly found other work, work that was probably more interesting and more productive. We certainly could have regulated telephone digitization to prevent this "danger" and instead employed 4.5 million people, or about 3 percent of the labor force, to operate the phone network today as it would have existed technologically in the 1970s, but I'm happy we skipped the scare mongering and went the digitization route, which probably also was a prerequisite for the internet to be able to be used by.. users (which mostly used digital phone services via modems to connect). Would even consumer internet access exist today if they decided to regulate the "danger" of losing analog phone operator jobs? Either way, I fail to see how allowing only licensed and government regulated companies to work on machine learning will do anything to improve anyone's job prospects moving forward, as increasingly onerous requirements created by people that like to say things like "the internet is a bunch of tubes" make it so only a few rent-seeking monopolies will be able to do anything (legally) with the technology. I'm not 100% against government regulation, but it's early, things are relatively benign so far (sans self driving cars), let's wait until there's some actual non-sci-fi concerns that emerge and then tackle them as specific things to regulate, rather than wrapping the whole thing into a giant regulatory framework that incorrectly calls it AI before we even learn what the problems are going to be.
boringPragma 3y ago
If “has killed someone” is a criteria for extreme regulation then fossil fuel and banking would be nationalized by now.
skybrian 3y ago
A minor correction: it’s not unambiguously zero since there was a suicide blamed on a chatbot. But sure, most of the concern about AI is about stuff people imagine happening in the future. So the question is whether future safety concerns are worrisome enough to want to get a head start on regulation. Also, it’s not just deaths. Generative AI is, among other things, potentially an unlimited supply of disgusting imagery. That’s likely to be a big legal headache for lots of organizations.
laratied 3y ago
No one seems to care about this obvious absurdity. We are not bothering to regulate AI controlling a 3500lb death machine that goes from 0 to 60 in 2 seconds but we are worried about the dangers of a chatbot. So typical of our society to be captured by the more compelling narrative and ignore actual reality.

balls187 3y ago

Is your POV (US/Federal) government should only be allowed to regulate in cases of lethality because the government itself has carried lethal behvaior?

_-____-_ 3y ago

> Outside of self driving cars This is what I find so hilariously suspicious about Elon Musk's sudden anxiety about the dangers of AI chatbots. Like, dude, you've spent the better part of two decades making cars that drive themselves and have _already_ killed people with their faulty, ironically oversold "AI." Now all of a sudden someone else's AI, which isn't in the drivers seat of vehicles capable of 100mph+ speeds, and which actually works, is an existential danger to humanity?

joe_the_user 3y ago

I don't think "it hasn't killed people yet" is a very good criteria. There are a lot of plausible dangers that existing and imaginable large-machine-learning could involve. I can't see how one could do the regulating of AI but I don't think one can limit the worry-area to "clear and obvious" situations.

staleStatefile 3y ago
If “has killed people” was a viable argument for regulation we’d have a lot more regulation. Which is fine; engineers are not divine beings. They can have their figurative value deflated like everyone else is these days. Engineered devices have killed a lot of people.
kyledrake 3y ago
> plausible dangers Name three. There are 50,000 gun related deaths in the United States per year, are any of them a bigger threat than gun violence? I struggle to find a single thing AI can do, sans being hooked up to nuclear weapons and time travelling robots with german accents, that's even imaginatively more dangerous than what this country already allows and decides doesn't require useful regulations. I'm sorry if that's too political for HN but you know what, it actually does matter to compare real dangers (car accidents, gun violence) to conceived and made up ones (gender indifferent bathrooms, AI) when deciding how governments should prioritize policy and regulations.
- JohnFen 3y ago
  So, because we haven't been able to resolve a highly political and divisive issue (gun deaths), that means we shouldn't try to resolve other dangerous issues? > I struggle to find a single thing AI can do How about job loss? If AI can do what proponents say, then it's easy to see that a large amount of job loss will result. If even 20% of people can no longer earn a living, people will die.
  - mrguyorama 3y ago
    It's also important to note here that even if you believe that all these ML models are not even close to "AI", that doesn't stop your naive boss from buying their hype and replacing you with it. There's good reason to talk about how society should handle that even if ChatGPT is all hot air.
  - kyledrake 3y ago
    > How about job loss? This is called creative destruction, and it's not even remotely a new problem created by this particular technology, it's a constant and ongoing mechanism of market capitalism by which technology streamlines or improves something that then requires less labor to accomplish. When the 400k+ telephone switch operators lost their jobs to digitization, it didn't cause a mass die off of humans, and while I won't say it was a zero bad consequences event, they mostly found other work, work that was probably more interesting and more productive. We certainly could have regulated telephone digitization to prevent this "danger" and instead employed 4.5 million people, or about 3 percent of the labor force, to operate the phone network today as it would have existed technologically in the 1970s, but I'm happy we skipped the scare mongering and went the digitization route, which probably also was a prerequisite for the internet to be able to be used by.. users (which mostly used digital phone services via modems to connect). Would even consumer internet access exist today if they decided to regulate the "danger" of losing analog phone operator jobs? Either way, I fail to see how allowing only licensed and government regulated companies to work on machine learning will do anything to improve anyone's job prospects moving forward, as increasingly onerous requirements created by people that like to say things like "the internet is a bunch of tubes" make it so only a few rent-seeking monopolies will be able to do anything (legally) with the technology. I'm not 100% against government regulation, but it's early, things are relatively benign so far (sans self driving cars), let's wait until there's some actual non-sci-fi concerns that emerge and then tackle them as specific things to regulate, rather than wrapping the whole thing into a giant regulatory framework that incorrectly calls it AI before we even learn what the problems are going to be.

boringPragma 3y ago

If “has killed someone” is a criteria for extreme regulation then fossil fuel and banking would be nationalized by now.

skybrian 3y ago

A minor correction: it’s not unambiguously zero since there was a suicide blamed on a chatbot. But sure, most of the concern about AI is about stuff people imagine happening in the future. So the question is whether future safety concerns are worrisome enough to want to get a head start on regulation. Also, it’s not just deaths. Generative AI is, among other things, potentially an unlimited supply of disgusting imagery. That’s likely to be a big legal headache for lots of organizations.

laratied 3y ago

No one seems to care about this obvious absurdity. We are not bothering to regulate AI controlling a 3500lb death machine that goes from 0 to 60 in 2 seconds but we are worried about the dangers of a chatbot. So typical of our society to be captured by the more compelling narrative and ignore actual reality.