6 ms·

AI regulations are crony capitalism

96 points by WaitWaitWha 2y ago

Spirograph7 2y ago
How do we protect people’s livelihoods without engraining regulatory capture? Interested in HN’s thoughts. <s> It won’t matter in a few years when AGI kills us all. </s>
- pyuser583 2y ago
  We wait until we have an actual, real problem. Then we try to fix it. Right now, AI-induced unemployment just isn’t a problem. So it’s extremely likely the advocates for regulation are AI corporations, rather than reams of unemployed workers.
  - brookst 2y ago
    And before somebody says “we should address problems before they happen” the challenge with AI is we don’t know exactly what problems will happen or what effective regulation would be. It makes sense to say new buildings have to meet fire safety regulations that are based on learnings from past fires. AI is too new; everyone is either guessing or lobbying for personal benefit. We should be vigilant, but I don’t for a second believe the “any regulation is better than nothing” rhetoric from those who stand to gain.
    - troupo 2y ago
      > AI is too new; It's not. All the learnings we've had from ML (the mistakes, the failures etc.) are just as applicable to AI.
      - brookst 2y ago
        So what learnings do we have that inform whether it is a good idea to regulate e.g. whether a business can use AI to take customer orders?
        troupo 2y ago
        You can read through EU AI Act, or read this excellent article about it: https://softwarecrisis.dev/letters/the-truth-about-the-eu-act/ https://softwarecrisis.dev/letters/the-truth-about-the-eu-ac...
  - xkcd-sucks 2y ago
    Maybe overly cynical but "risks" of "AI" going to Congress seems mostly to be a submarine hype thing
  - dbspin 2y ago
    "AI-induced unemployment just isn’t a problem." I'm not sure how you'd test this hypothesis, but it certainly looks like a tonne of the ongoing FAANG layoffs are based on assumptions about a decreased need for low-mid level programmers.
  - ben_w 2y ago
    When governments make decisions in a rush, the decisions are generally not very well thought out. I therefore think it's a good idea to have a plan for AI induced unemployment before people take to the streets because they have no job, no hope of a job, and no money left to pay the bills. I have no idea how far away economic mass unemployment is, and I'm not convinced the current indicators in specific fields (much as it affects those fields) is "it", but I have seen a lot of news stories about governments getting surprised by things everyone was warning them about and they ignored.
- nosefurhairdo 2y ago
  Should we have protected the livelihoods of horse carriage manufacturers when cars were created?
- startupsfail 2y ago
  Some amount of regulation, in particular in regards to reporting biases installed into the systems is probably worth some merits. What, if, for example, we’ll have a mass information system that would start pushing something that is very beneficial for special interest communities (say community is furries and this increases their dating pool), but tends to result in higher level of depression and suicide in teenagers. And then we also find that overall the system reduces mortality, by providing high quality medical advice. Surely shutting down the system would not be a good idea. And requiring private enterprise to change their messaging infringes on free speech. But at least requiring to properly disclose biases is likely a good idea.
- int_19h 2y ago
  If you mean it in a sense of "what about Skynet?", then you regulate specific uses of AI which carry such danger rather than AI itself. I don't think this even needs to be AI-specific; if we, say, required formal verification of decision making algorithms to match the spec, that would already cover it. If you mean it in a sense of "what about all the lost jobs?", then we should start seriously talking about UBI, and how to fund it by taxing automation.
djbusby 2y ago
Well, these are like other regulations too. Some incumbent gets in, lobbies, makes laws and pulls the ladder up behind them. Similar to how cannabis rolled out in USA. Now many places require single-use RFID from the sole provider. Get in and then form the laws to build your business.
martinbaun 2y ago
Anyone here have some ideas how to avoid crony capitalism / regulatory capture while still make new sensible laws to help society?
- CatWChainsaw 2y ago
  Mutually assured destruction has kept us from nuclear armageddon thus far, so do the same thing for the economy. Threaten to make things really really nasty for companies/politicians unless they play nice. Move away from shareholder value as the be-all-end-all of a company's existence. Reducing the privacy of the big players to almost nothing on pain of financial repercussions that are actually worth a damn would go a long way. Boardroom talks about "exactly how shitty can we make UI to milk maximum revenue out of our users before they just drop X product" should not be a private discussion. After all, as the NSA says, if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear, right? Put a greater emphasis on different parts of education. How computer technologies work, psychology and how marketing, advertising, and social media abuse it, economics and all the stupid Wall Street financial creations that lead to Great Depressions, politics and how people play those games. Increase the level of awareness and jadedness among the general population so bad actors have a harder time getting the benefit of the doubt. Do away with forced arbitration entirely. Enforce actual standards of customer service. Prosecute dark patterns and heavy-handed SaaS terms and EULAs. Maximize right-to-repair and couple it with an extreme reduction in the protection time for IP on things like schematics and software. Treat negligence, noncompliance, and bad-faith compliance as equal crimes. Companies taken to court can contribute to the public good by generously covering the costs of both parties unless they can prove beyond a reasonable doubt that a lawsuit is frivolous. Financial repercussions should be proportionate to annual revenue and be actually punishing. Executives who sign off on decisions that are detrimental to the general public should actually face prison, as should shareholders that pressure those decisions.
- jonkho 2y ago
  Yes, have a market-based legal system (a set of laws that are established via continuous market evaluation) instead of a politics-based legal system (a set of laws established by decisions made via a political system).
Animats 2y ago
What passes for "AI regulation" is an attempt to divert attention from the real problem - arbitrary exercise of corporate power. AIs which just answer questions people pose seem to be mostly harmless. Some people might not like the answers, and some of the answers might be wrong. That's true of web search results now. That's just an extension of the social media controversy. AIs which have authority over people are scary. "AI says No!" This is a corporate power problem, not an AI problem. If corporations or landlords have arbitrary discretionary power to affect people's lives, that's the problem. Not that they delegated that authority to an AI. The EU regulates decisions against individuals made by algorithms. The EU has already stopped Uber from "robo-firing", where the app back end fired underperforming drivers. Few proposed AI laws make this distinction. That's because it would raise the issue of arbitrary exercise of power and collective individual rights. That might lead to political unrest, or even unions.
- buzzert 2y ago
  How do you disarm corporations from having this power without giving it to the government?
  - dns_snek 2y ago
    That's an odd question, a democratically elected government is supposed to have the power to regulate, and they're supposed to exercise that privilege in a way that benefits their constituents - but that's a different debate. Corporations, meanwhile, are not supposed to wield disproportionate power over the laws and regulations. Separate issues.
    - incangold 2y ago
      Indeed. Who else do you give the power to regulate companies to? There are no other options.
      - NavinF 2y ago
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-regulatory_organization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-regulatory_organization Works well for the US financial sector despite claims to the contrary
23B1 2y ago
The irony being that probably some regulation is a good idea - but the only people with sufficient influence to enact top-down regulation are also the ones who hold the purse strings. This is where capitalism breaks down, when it comes to technology that is powerful enough to erode liberty and undermine civilizations.
sumeno 2y ago
A libertarian magazine thinks regulations are bad? I'm shocked!
lolinder 2y ago
The reason why Altman is so intent on regulation is because he knows he has no moat if he can't persuade the government to build him one. OpenAI has a head start, but the technology is very well understood and the only limitation to building new models is budget. Facebook is actively working to undercut them and commoditize the technology and it looks like they will succeed. OpenAI can't keep spending billions to stay ahead of the commoditization, so they need the government to pull up the drawbridge and give them that moat. Altman himself doesn't care one iota about safety and he just pushed out the people that did. This is just a strategic play to him.
- troupo 2y ago
  Altman wants a very specific kind of regulation: the one that entrenches OpenAI. EU AI Act has the following provisions: document foundational models, disclose copyrighted sources, never use AI in critical/dangerous applications etc. Altman threw a fit and threatened to pull out of EU
  - ben_w 2y ago
    > Altman threw a fit and threatened to pull out of EU News to me. Or did you mean the quote from last year that was: > If we can comply, we will, and if we can’t, we’ll cease operating… We will try. But there are technical limits to what’s possible. > The law, Altman said, was “not inherently flawed,” but he went on to say that “the subtle details here really matter.” https://time.com/6282325/sam-altman-openai-eu/ https://time.com/6282325/sam-altman-openai-eu/ Because I find it extremely irritating that for the last year so many people have taken the worst possible interpretation of him saying "we won't break the law". I wish this whole topic wasn't a massive popcorn drama fest; but I suppose that was always wishful thinking for a tech that, at it's friendliest, is going to be a 10x speed-run of the industrial revolution.
    - troupo 2y ago
      > Or did you mean the quote from last year that was That was quite literally, translated from weaseltongue, "we will pull out of the EU because we don't like the law" There's nothing in the law they can't comply with. > so many people have taken the worst possible interpretation of him saying "we won't break the law". People are smarter than you give them credit for. Altman is good at grandstanding about safety, regulation, oversight etc. What he lacks is delivering on that grandstanding. "Oh the law demands the exact things I'm grandstanding about? Oops, we might pull out because somehow we can break the law". Same goes for literally everything else. Open? In name only. Safety? Trust us our best people are on it, can't verify or audit their work though. Government regulation? Oh, we might not comply. And so on.
BA_and_bored 2y ago
[flagged]
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
ecolonsmak 2y ago
This whole article is predicated on AI investor engagement not falling off a cliff in the next 24 months.
- tim333 2y ago
  Dunno. I imagine people will still debate AI regulation whether investment drops or not?
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
petermcneeley 2y ago
This went off the front page immediately.
- 93po 2y ago
  probably because it's a lazy argument and doesn't have much substance to it and is only speculative. it also has ridiculous bias in its writing e.g. uses bootlegger imagery to describe these companies.
  - petermcneeley 2y ago
    The article claims that these AI companies are calling for regulation. This is a factual claim. The speculative claim would be to introspect the mind and determine why they might be asking for regulation. This is a very reasonable Agent simulation.
smountjoy 2y ago
No doubt leadership at OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft are in favor of any regulations that would cement their lead. For the rest of us, the relevant question is: are the costs worth the benefits? > The risk [...] is that radically new products and approaches in the arena never get a chance to be developed and benefit consumers. Totally. And the opposite risk is that these companies deploy technologies that cause massive harm to people, without adequate testing, because they're caught up in a race. I think some regulations would be helpful on balance -- like reporting of large training runs, as in SB 1047 -- and some wouldn't -- like (hypothetically) requiring a license to train small models.
thisgoesnowhere 2y ago
Crony capitalism is such an intellectual cop-out. The people who say this garbage would never let any other ideology weasel its way out of the effects of their system in practice, but for some bizarre reason, the giga brains at Reason are allowed to get a pass and say that this is not true capitalism. The type of capture by regulation outlined in the article is the direct result of a political landscape that prioritizes corporate power over government power. There is nothing "crony" about it; it's just capitalism. P.S. This is not pro or anti-capitalist; it's anti-shitty argument.

96 points by WaitWaitWha 2y ago

How do we protect people’s livelihoods without engraining regulatory capture? Interested in HN’s thoughts. <s> It won’t matter in a few years when AGI kills us all. </s>

pyuser583 2y ago
We wait until we have an actual, real problem. Then we try to fix it. Right now, AI-induced unemployment just isn’t a problem. So it’s extremely likely the advocates for regulation are AI corporations, rather than reams of unemployed workers.
- brookst 2y ago
  And before somebody says “we should address problems before they happen” the challenge with AI is we don’t know exactly what problems will happen or what effective regulation would be. It makes sense to say new buildings have to meet fire safety regulations that are based on learnings from past fires. AI is too new; everyone is either guessing or lobbying for personal benefit. We should be vigilant, but I don’t for a second believe the “any regulation is better than nothing” rhetoric from those who stand to gain.
  - troupo 2y ago
    > AI is too new; It's not. All the learnings we've had from ML (the mistakes, the failures etc.) are just as applicable to AI.
    - brookst 2y ago
      So what learnings do we have that inform whether it is a good idea to regulate e.g. whether a business can use AI to take customer orders?
      - troupo 2y ago
        You can read through EU AI Act, or read this excellent article about it: https://softwarecrisis.dev/letters/the-truth-about-the-eu-act/ https://softwarecrisis.dev/letters/the-truth-about-the-eu-ac...
- xkcd-sucks 2y ago
  Maybe overly cynical but "risks" of "AI" going to Congress seems mostly to be a submarine hype thing
- dbspin 2y ago
  "AI-induced unemployment just isn’t a problem." I'm not sure how you'd test this hypothesis, but it certainly looks like a tonne of the ongoing FAANG layoffs are based on assumptions about a decreased need for low-mid level programmers.
- ben_w 2y ago
  When governments make decisions in a rush, the decisions are generally not very well thought out. I therefore think it's a good idea to have a plan for AI induced unemployment before people take to the streets because they have no job, no hope of a job, and no money left to pay the bills. I have no idea how far away economic mass unemployment is, and I'm not convinced the current indicators in specific fields (much as it affects those fields) is "it", but I have seen a lot of news stories about governments getting surprised by things everyone was warning them about and they ignored.
nosefurhairdo 2y ago
Should we have protected the livelihoods of horse carriage manufacturers when cars were created?
startupsfail 2y ago
Some amount of regulation, in particular in regards to reporting biases installed into the systems is probably worth some merits. What, if, for example, we’ll have a mass information system that would start pushing something that is very beneficial for special interest communities (say community is furries and this increases their dating pool), but tends to result in higher level of depression and suicide in teenagers. And then we also find that overall the system reduces mortality, by providing high quality medical advice. Surely shutting down the system would not be a good idea. And requiring private enterprise to change their messaging infringes on free speech. But at least requiring to properly disclose biases is likely a good idea.
int_19h 2y ago
If you mean it in a sense of "what about Skynet?", then you regulate specific uses of AI which carry such danger rather than AI itself. I don't think this even needs to be AI-specific; if we, say, required formal verification of decision making algorithms to match the spec, that would already cover it. If you mean it in a sense of "what about all the lost jobs?", then we should start seriously talking about UBI, and how to fund it by taxing automation.

djbusby 2y ago

Well, these are like other regulations too. Some incumbent gets in, lobbies, makes laws and pulls the ladder up behind them. Similar to how cannabis rolled out in USA. Now many places require single-use RFID from the sole provider. Get in and then form the laws to build your business.

martinbaun 2y ago

Anyone here have some ideas how to avoid crony capitalism / regulatory capture while still make new sensible laws to help society?

CatWChainsaw 2y ago
Mutually assured destruction has kept us from nuclear armageddon thus far, so do the same thing for the economy. Threaten to make things really really nasty for companies/politicians unless they play nice. Move away from shareholder value as the be-all-end-all of a company's existence. Reducing the privacy of the big players to almost nothing on pain of financial repercussions that are actually worth a damn would go a long way. Boardroom talks about "exactly how shitty can we make UI to milk maximum revenue out of our users before they just drop X product" should not be a private discussion. After all, as the NSA says, if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear, right? Put a greater emphasis on different parts of education. How computer technologies work, psychology and how marketing, advertising, and social media abuse it, economics and all the stupid Wall Street financial creations that lead to Great Depressions, politics and how people play those games. Increase the level of awareness and jadedness among the general population so bad actors have a harder time getting the benefit of the doubt. Do away with forced arbitration entirely. Enforce actual standards of customer service. Prosecute dark patterns and heavy-handed SaaS terms and EULAs. Maximize right-to-repair and couple it with an extreme reduction in the protection time for IP on things like schematics and software. Treat negligence, noncompliance, and bad-faith compliance as equal crimes. Companies taken to court can contribute to the public good by generously covering the costs of both parties unless they can prove beyond a reasonable doubt that a lawsuit is frivolous. Financial repercussions should be proportionate to annual revenue and be actually punishing. Executives who sign off on decisions that are detrimental to the general public should actually face prison, as should shareholders that pressure those decisions.
jonkho 2y ago
Yes, have a market-based legal system (a set of laws that are established via continuous market evaluation) instead of a politics-based legal system (a set of laws established by decisions made via a political system).

Animats 2y ago

What passes for "AI regulation" is an attempt to divert attention from the real problem - arbitrary exercise of corporate power. AIs which just answer questions people pose seem to be mostly harmless. Some people might not like the answers, and some of the answers might be wrong. That's true of web search results now. That's just an extension of the social media controversy. AIs which have authority over people are scary. "AI says No!" This is a corporate power problem, not an AI problem. If corporations or landlords have arbitrary discretionary power to affect people's lives, that's the problem. Not that they delegated that authority to an AI. The EU regulates decisions against individuals made by algorithms. The EU has already stopped Uber from "robo-firing", where the app back end fired underperforming drivers. Few proposed AI laws make this distinction. That's because it would raise the issue of arbitrary exercise of power and collective individual rights. That might lead to political unrest, or even unions.

buzzert 2y ago
How do you disarm corporations from having this power without giving it to the government?
- dns_snek 2y ago
  That's an odd question, a democratically elected government is supposed to have the power to regulate, and they're supposed to exercise that privilege in a way that benefits their constituents - but that's a different debate. Corporations, meanwhile, are not supposed to wield disproportionate power over the laws and regulations. Separate issues.
  - incangold 2y ago
    Indeed. Who else do you give the power to regulate companies to? There are no other options.
    - NavinF 2y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-regulatory_organization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-regulatory_organization Works well for the US financial sector despite claims to the contrary

23B1 2y ago

The irony being that probably some regulation is a good idea - but the only people with sufficient influence to enact top-down regulation are also the ones who hold the purse strings. This is where capitalism breaks down, when it comes to technology that is powerful enough to erode liberty and undermine civilizations.

sumeno 2y ago

A libertarian magazine thinks regulations are bad? I'm shocked!

lolinder 2y ago

The reason why Altman is so intent on regulation is because he knows he has no moat if he can't persuade the government to build him one. OpenAI has a head start, but the technology is very well understood and the only limitation to building new models is budget. Facebook is actively working to undercut them and commoditize the technology and it looks like they will succeed. OpenAI can't keep spending billions to stay ahead of the commoditization, so they need the government to pull up the drawbridge and give them that moat. Altman himself doesn't care one iota about safety and he just pushed out the people that did. This is just a strategic play to him.

troupo 2y ago
Altman wants a very specific kind of regulation: the one that entrenches OpenAI. EU AI Act has the following provisions: document foundational models, disclose copyrighted sources, never use AI in critical/dangerous applications etc. Altman threw a fit and threatened to pull out of EU
- ben_w 2y ago
  > Altman threw a fit and threatened to pull out of EU News to me. Or did you mean the quote from last year that was: > If we can comply, we will, and if we can’t, we’ll cease operating… We will try. But there are technical limits to what’s possible. > The law, Altman said, was “not inherently flawed,” but he went on to say that “the subtle details here really matter.” https://time.com/6282325/sam-altman-openai-eu/ https://time.com/6282325/sam-altman-openai-eu/ Because I find it extremely irritating that for the last year so many people have taken the worst possible interpretation of him saying "we won't break the law". I wish this whole topic wasn't a massive popcorn drama fest; but I suppose that was always wishful thinking for a tech that, at it's friendliest, is going to be a 10x speed-run of the industrial revolution.
  - troupo 2y ago
    > Or did you mean the quote from last year that was That was quite literally, translated from weaseltongue, "we will pull out of the EU because we don't like the law" There's nothing in the law they can't comply with. > so many people have taken the worst possible interpretation of him saying "we won't break the law". People are smarter than you give them credit for. Altman is good at grandstanding about safety, regulation, oversight etc. What he lacks is delivering on that grandstanding. "Oh the law demands the exact things I'm grandstanding about? Oops, we might pull out because somehow we can break the law". Same goes for literally everything else. Open? In name only. Safety? Trust us our best people are on it, can't verify or audit their work though. Government regulation? Oh, we might not comply. And so on.

BA_and_bored 2y ago

[flagged]

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

ecolonsmak 2y ago

This whole article is predicated on AI investor engagement not falling off a cliff in the next 24 months.

tim333 2y ago
Dunno. I imagine people will still debate AI regulation whether investment drops or not?

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

petermcneeley 2y ago

This went off the front page immediately.

93po 2y ago
probably because it's a lazy argument and doesn't have much substance to it and is only speculative. it also has ridiculous bias in its writing e.g. uses bootlegger imagery to describe these companies.
- petermcneeley 2y ago
  The article claims that these AI companies are calling for regulation. This is a factual claim. The speculative claim would be to introspect the mind and determine why they might be asking for regulation. This is a very reasonable Agent simulation.

smountjoy 2y ago

No doubt leadership at OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft are in favor of any regulations that would cement their lead. For the rest of us, the relevant question is: are the costs worth the benefits? > The risk [...] is that radically new products and approaches in the arena never get a chance to be developed and benefit consumers. Totally. And the opposite risk is that these companies deploy technologies that cause massive harm to people, without adequate testing, because they're caught up in a race. I think some regulations would be helpful on balance -- like reporting of large training runs, as in SB 1047 -- and some wouldn't -- like (hypothetically) requiring a license to train small models.

thisgoesnowhere 2y ago

Crony capitalism is such an intellectual cop-out. The people who say this garbage would never let any other ideology weasel its way out of the effects of their system in practice, but for some bizarre reason, the giga brains at Reason are allowed to get a pass and say that this is not true capitalism. The type of capture by regulation outlined in the article is the direct result of a political landscape that prioritizes corporate power over government power. There is nothing "crony" about it; it's just capitalism. P.S. This is not pro or anti-capitalist; it's anti-shitty argument.