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The funny thing is that Europeans will just be blocked from accessing AI applications. And EU citizens will complain why they don't have access to some AI prod

by max_ 2y ago

The funny thing is that Europeans will just be blocked from accessing AI applications. And EU citizens will complain why they don't have access to some AI products.

fetzu 2y ago
For better or worse, that’s exactly what’s going to happen mostly. And as a non EU European citizen, thank you for saying « Europeans » and not « EU Citizens »! We get most of the downsides, but none of the upsides..
- oytis 2y ago
  This regulation shouldn't affect you if you are not in the EU though
  - fetzu 2y ago
    I unfortunately live in a small and « complicated » (3 languages for less than 9 million inhabitants) country landlocked in the EU. So in theory I shouldn’t be affected, but in reality either companies don’t care enough to make the distinction, or the EU ends up strong arming my government into adopting their regulation.
    - mike_hearn 2y ago
      Yes for those of us who live in Switzerland it is quite annoying to be conflated with the EU and then be blocked from stuff for no reason. For anyone reading this who gets assigned to work on compliance blocking, please remember at all times that there are quite a few countries in Europe that are not EU members - and often it's because of the EU's heavy handed approach to things, as visible here!
  - max_ 2y ago
    What if you have a software product you are selling to EU citizens?
    - drtgh 2y ago
      To avoid the recent fashion of using people as guinea pigs for alpha and beta versions of immature products if they endanger lives, for example. To avoid deploy subliminal techniques beyond a person’s consciousness or purposefully manipulative or deceptive techniques, with the objective, or the effect of materially distorting the behavior of a person. And so on.
viraptor 2y ago
Do you want to expand on how you think that will happen? So far GDPR was quite successful in limiting some bad behaviour from the US companies with next to no access issues. Why would the AI act be different?
- max_ 2y ago
  When bard launched for example it wasn't available to people living in Europe. This is Google a large corporation with lots of resources. Smaller firms will find it more convenient just block access to European citizens instead of keeping up with the legal gymnastics.
  - viraptor 2y ago
    The staged rollouts are extremely common, so unless it's mentioned explicitly, I wouldn't put it on GDPR. Online services were doing that for ages.
    - mike_hearn 2y ago
      Bard launched nearly everywhere except the EU. Staged rollout are intended to catch bugs, you don't do a staged rollout and and then wait for a year with half the servers upgraded.
- mike_hearn 2y ago
  GDPR led directly to many US local news sites blocking access to Europe, but that was at the start of the EU Commission's anti-tech turn. Back then the GDPR's percentage-of-global-revenue based fine was novel and shocking, now they're doing it for nearly everything. In the mean time the costs of excluding the EU have been going down as RoW grows economically, whilst the fines generated by being in the market keep going up. And the perception has become in the US that GDPR wasn't a one-off motivated by genuinely different beliefs about privacy in Europe, it was just a politically and financially motivated grab at US firms from a government that has proven itself uninterested in enabling a competitive tech landscape, meaning engaging in compliance activities just invites yet more onerous regulation. This is then doubled up by a second problem. The EU is an ideology and HN is full of "EU citizens" who deny this basic problem, but a lot of people have direct experience now of working on regulatory compliance for the EU and have come away baffled by rules that appear literally impossible to follow no matter what you do. Even the most obvious good faith attempts will be mysteriously revealed years later to have been illegal from the start, amongst a chorus of cheers from those who claimed that everyone should have always known that. Facebook being told "advertising is bad, don't do it" so they added an option to pay and get rid of ads, then being told "no that's illegal too" even as many German news companies do the exact same thing is a prototypical example of this. The search engine right to be forgotten that was unexpectedly discovered by judges in law that made no mention of it is another example, that one killed off any ability to compete with Google/Bing in the EU by creating huge compliance costs on day 1 of running any new search engine. In highly competitive and fast moving markets executives in the US face a choice: allocate people to compliance activities to enable launches in the EU and quite possibly face crippling fines anyway, or allocate those same people to core tech R&D that enables you to keep your existing market position and grow faster everywhere else. The EU Commission works on the assumption that it's big enough that companies will tolerate any level of regulatory overhead in order to retain market access, but increasingly what we're seeing now is that this assumption is false, in the same way that it was false for China also in the past.
imiric 2y ago
This is a good thing. Applications that violate these regulations actively harm their users, and have no place in modern society. Deploying AI with the same "move fast and break things" mentality is fundamentally dangerous, and this industry needs strict regulation like this.
- max_ 2y ago
  Why can't consumers be allowed to choose for themselves what they want and what they don't want? Why does the government need to decide everything?
  - imiric 2y ago
    Because consumers can't decide what's good for them or society at large, if companies sell products designed to be as addicting as possible. Following your logic, there should be no regulation in the tobacco and pharma industries either. Surely consumers can decide on their own what they want to put in their bodies. Advertisements don't lie, right?
    - max_ 2y ago
      Lies are everywhere. There some linguists and philosophers who even think the Human mind is not capable of grasping absolute "truth". Yes. I believe customers should be allowed to buy what ever they want if they are adults. If consumers who are human can't decide what's good for them. How will regulators who are also human decide what's good for them? If someone wants to smoke cigarettes they should do it provided it doesn't interfere directly with other people's lives.
      - imiric 2y ago
        > If consumers who are human can't decide what's good for them. How will regulators who are also human decide what's good for them? Because it's their job to ensure the well-being of their citizens. This is not about ability; _some_ people certainly have the ability and self-control to make decisions that positively benefit their lives. But when companies rely on psychological manipulation to push their addicting products that harm not only individuals, but society as a whole, we can't rely on everyone to resist the machinations of billion-dollar companies and make the right decision. And individual decisions don't impact the rest of society, as individuals don't have the full picture as governments do. I'm not saying that governments are benevolent, or should make all decisions for citizens, but when it comes to Big <industry>, it's their responsibility to protect us from corporations. This often doesn't happen as well as it should, as some governments have a symbiotic relationship with corporations (lobbying practices in the US are a clear example of corruption), but I'm still glad that some governments at least try to do the right thing. > If someone wants to smoke cigarettes they should do it provided it doesn't interfere directly with other people's lives. Agreed. But would you agree that heavily restricting access to cigarettes with strong regulations and taxation is a good thing for society? Or would you rather go back to the "freedom" consumers had in the 1960s, with the cancer rates that went along with it?
pjmlp 2y ago
Great, we get to keep the jobs and not use products with spyware.
- GardenLetter27 2y ago
  "Keep the jobs" I'm sure you would've said the same thing when the Commissars banned and controlled computer access in the USSR and Cuba, etc.
  - pjmlp 2y ago
    It is doing wonders on the Chinese market.
sebazzz 2y ago
This is not only about consumer products. This is also about limiting or completely preventing governments from doing classification on you with an AI model. Something we know in the Netherlands as the toeslagenschandaal where civilians got their children taken away because an algorithm said so.
drtgh 2y ago
After reading the directives, if people see a ML application that blocks the EU, they should be concerned about the intentionality of the application, and its use as a consumer. On the other hand, if they leave free a market spot as big as the EU, others who comply with the directives will go for it, which may progressively eat the market to the non-EU compliant by the same reasons.

by max_ 2y ago

The funny thing is that Europeans will just be blocked from accessing AI applications. And EU citizens will complain why they don't have access to some AI products.

fetzu 2y ago

For better or worse, that’s exactly what’s going to happen mostly. And as a non EU European citizen, thank you for saying « Europeans » and not « EU Citizens »! We get most of the downsides, but none of the upsides..

oytis 2y ago
This regulation shouldn't affect you if you are not in the EU though
- fetzu 2y ago
  I unfortunately live in a small and « complicated » (3 languages for less than 9 million inhabitants) country landlocked in the EU. So in theory I shouldn’t be affected, but in reality either companies don’t care enough to make the distinction, or the EU ends up strong arming my government into adopting their regulation.
  - mike_hearn 2y ago
    Yes for those of us who live in Switzerland it is quite annoying to be conflated with the EU and then be blocked from stuff for no reason. For anyone reading this who gets assigned to work on compliance blocking, please remember at all times that there are quite a few countries in Europe that are not EU members - and often it's because of the EU's heavy handed approach to things, as visible here!
- max_ 2y ago
  What if you have a software product you are selling to EU citizens?
  - drtgh 2y ago
    To avoid the recent fashion of using people as guinea pigs for alpha and beta versions of immature products if they endanger lives, for example. To avoid deploy subliminal techniques beyond a person’s consciousness or purposefully manipulative or deceptive techniques, with the objective, or the effect of materially distorting the behavior of a person. And so on.

viraptor 2y ago

Do you want to expand on how you think that will happen? So far GDPR was quite successful in limiting some bad behaviour from the US companies with next to no access issues. Why would the AI act be different?

max_ 2y ago
When bard launched for example it wasn't available to people living in Europe. This is Google a large corporation with lots of resources. Smaller firms will find it more convenient just block access to European citizens instead of keeping up with the legal gymnastics.
- viraptor 2y ago
  The staged rollouts are extremely common, so unless it's mentioned explicitly, I wouldn't put it on GDPR. Online services were doing that for ages.
  - mike_hearn 2y ago
    Bard launched nearly everywhere except the EU. Staged rollout are intended to catch bugs, you don't do a staged rollout and and then wait for a year with half the servers upgraded.
mike_hearn 2y ago
GDPR led directly to many US local news sites blocking access to Europe, but that was at the start of the EU Commission's anti-tech turn. Back then the GDPR's percentage-of-global-revenue based fine was novel and shocking, now they're doing it for nearly everything. In the mean time the costs of excluding the EU have been going down as RoW grows economically, whilst the fines generated by being in the market keep going up. And the perception has become in the US that GDPR wasn't a one-off motivated by genuinely different beliefs about privacy in Europe, it was just a politically and financially motivated grab at US firms from a government that has proven itself uninterested in enabling a competitive tech landscape, meaning engaging in compliance activities just invites yet more onerous regulation. This is then doubled up by a second problem. The EU is an ideology and HN is full of "EU citizens" who deny this basic problem, but a lot of people have direct experience now of working on regulatory compliance for the EU and have come away baffled by rules that appear literally impossible to follow no matter what you do. Even the most obvious good faith attempts will be mysteriously revealed years later to have been illegal from the start, amongst a chorus of cheers from those who claimed that everyone should have always known that. Facebook being told "advertising is bad, don't do it" so they added an option to pay and get rid of ads, then being told "no that's illegal too" even as many German news companies do the exact same thing is a prototypical example of this. The search engine right to be forgotten that was unexpectedly discovered by judges in law that made no mention of it is another example, that one killed off any ability to compete with Google/Bing in the EU by creating huge compliance costs on day 1 of running any new search engine. In highly competitive and fast moving markets executives in the US face a choice: allocate people to compliance activities to enable launches in the EU and quite possibly face crippling fines anyway, or allocate those same people to core tech R&D that enables you to keep your existing market position and grow faster everywhere else. The EU Commission works on the assumption that it's big enough that companies will tolerate any level of regulatory overhead in order to retain market access, but increasingly what we're seeing now is that this assumption is false, in the same way that it was false for China also in the past.

imiric 2y ago

This is a good thing. Applications that violate these regulations actively harm their users, and have no place in modern society. Deploying AI with the same "move fast and break things" mentality is fundamentally dangerous, and this industry needs strict regulation like this.

max_ 2y ago
Why can't consumers be allowed to choose for themselves what they want and what they don't want? Why does the government need to decide everything?
- imiric 2y ago
  Because consumers can't decide what's good for them or society at large, if companies sell products designed to be as addicting as possible. Following your logic, there should be no regulation in the tobacco and pharma industries either. Surely consumers can decide on their own what they want to put in their bodies. Advertisements don't lie, right?
  - max_ 2y ago
    Lies are everywhere. There some linguists and philosophers who even think the Human mind is not capable of grasping absolute "truth". Yes. I believe customers should be allowed to buy what ever they want if they are adults. If consumers who are human can't decide what's good for them. How will regulators who are also human decide what's good for them? If someone wants to smoke cigarettes they should do it provided it doesn't interfere directly with other people's lives.
    - imiric 2y ago
      > If consumers who are human can't decide what's good for them. How will regulators who are also human decide what's good for them? Because it's their job to ensure the well-being of their citizens. This is not about ability; _some_ people certainly have the ability and self-control to make decisions that positively benefit their lives. But when companies rely on psychological manipulation to push their addicting products that harm not only individuals, but society as a whole, we can't rely on everyone to resist the machinations of billion-dollar companies and make the right decision. And individual decisions don't impact the rest of society, as individuals don't have the full picture as governments do. I'm not saying that governments are benevolent, or should make all decisions for citizens, but when it comes to Big <industry>, it's their responsibility to protect us from corporations. This often doesn't happen as well as it should, as some governments have a symbiotic relationship with corporations (lobbying practices in the US are a clear example of corruption), but I'm still glad that some governments at least try to do the right thing. > If someone wants to smoke cigarettes they should do it provided it doesn't interfere directly with other people's lives. Agreed. But would you agree that heavily restricting access to cigarettes with strong regulations and taxation is a good thing for society? Or would you rather go back to the "freedom" consumers had in the 1960s, with the cancer rates that went along with it?

pjmlp 2y ago

Great, we get to keep the jobs and not use products with spyware.

GardenLetter27 2y ago
"Keep the jobs" I'm sure you would've said the same thing when the Commissars banned and controlled computer access in the USSR and Cuba, etc.
- pjmlp 2y ago
  It is doing wonders on the Chinese market.

sebazzz 2y ago

This is not only about consumer products. This is also about limiting or completely preventing governments from doing classification on you with an AI model. Something we know in the Netherlands as the toeslagenschandaal where civilians got their children taken away because an algorithm said so.

drtgh 2y ago

After reading the directives, if people see a ML application that blocks the EU, they should be concerned about the intentionality of the application, and its use as a consumer. On the other hand, if they leave free a market spot as big as the EU, others who comply with the directives will go for it, which may progressively eat the market to the non-EU compliant by the same reasons.