That sound you hear is billions of dollars being flushed down the toilet as tech companies pay expert witnesses (and lots of attorneys) to convince judges and j

That sound you hear is billions of dollars being flushed down the toilet as tech companies pay expert witnesses (and lots of attorneys) to convince judges and juries that they're using "algorithms" instead of "artificial intelligence". (Keep telling the shareholders it's AI, though.) This kind of reminds me of the whole DeCSS thing. Everyone ripped their DVDs. Several years too late, it was declared "illegal". Someone golfed it down to a t-shirt. People continued removing the digital restrictions from their media. Physical media is now dead as an industry, and literally nobody minds. Everyone is happier and the content creators make more money than ever before. AI feels like it's going down the same route. I have already seen the "generative AI in 40 lines of C", and those can easily be t-shirts. Whatever efforts are made to make AI illegal at this point are too little too late. The cat is out of the bag. Whatever you think is going to happen because of AI will probably happen. So it's probably time to find some cash to solve those problems, instead of paying expert witnesses to define what "is is". No government in human history has ever succeeded in making math illegal. Canada is unlikely to be the first. (It is even more futile than making alcohol illegal, which still makes me laugh when I think about it. You leave sugar water out in air and it turns into alcohol. You can't solve that "problem" by signing a piece of paper that says a government says so. You are going to need more fungicide than humanity has the capability to produce. It is an unwinnable war. Fighting against AI is going to be like that.) I think the hype about the downfall of humanity is probably overrated (a bold claim, because if I'm wrong you won't be around to make fun of me). The biggest impact will probably be things like banks denying loans to people for the wrong reasons. If that's what we're worried, make some laws that makes that illegal. It shouldn't matter what tools you use to get a result; whether you use AI or a bunch of employees sitting in a room with a pencil and paper to run an illegal business, the outcome is the same, the business has illegal practices and the government should step in.