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We can debate the details and implementation but EU legislature is, at least in spirit, trying to protect human rights. What does it say about progress that the

We can debate the details and implementation but EU legislature is, at least in spirit, trying to protect human rights. What does it say about progress that the same laws that protect human rights also stifle innovation?

BjoernKW 4mo ago
> We can debate the details and implementation but EU legislature is, at least in spirit, trying to protect human rights That's an unfounded assertion. Of course, politicians will claim this to be the case. I don't see how patronising citizens protects their human rights, though.
- bluefirebrand 4mo ago
  You don't see how protecting the commons from being exploited by hypercapitalists for their own profit is protecting the rights of the average person?
  - BjoernKW 4mo ago
    I don't subscribe to ideological categories such as "hypercapitalists". So, no, I don't see that.
    - frollogaston 4mo ago
      These questions are getting more loaded each time. "You don't see how the EU fighting pure evil is a good thing?"
  - frollogaston 4mo ago
    It's not even doing that
- moffkalast 4mo ago
  It's certainly a good question. On the idealistic side it's the right choice, people should have the right to have a say in their own data since it's implicitly copyrighted. GDPR has done wonders to prevent careless personal data leaks that are so common in the US, and other kinds of abuse. In a more practical view though I'm not sure if it'll do anything to stop job replacement from automation as such. Most corporations seem all to eager to make deals with OAI or Anthropic here anyway, and if not that it'll be Chinese ones. There is a question of "representation", like if a model cannot be trained on the data of one specific country with a specific language, then it does not learn it and the people of that country are now at a disadvantage when trying to leverage the result. Maybe that's a good thing, maybe not, depending on the perspective of how the model is being applied relative to the average person. If it's something that makes their job easier then it's a negative, if it's used by the government to automate scanning all chats then it would be beneficial for it to suck. For widespread languages that doesn't apply of course, so the UK and Spain might as well be exempt. In general I think it's good for the EU to try and slow down adoption of bleeding edge tech so the US population with its lack of regulations can act as guinea pigs and absorb most of the early damage until we figure out what is the best approach when we get around to adopting it. Even if that means missing out on potential early upsides too. An old example is lots of late adopters going straight to gigabit fiber instead of being stuck on copper DSL.
  - BjoernKW 4mo ago
    > GDPR has done wonders to prevent careless personal data leaks that are so common in the US, and other kinds of abuse. Has it? I still have to see evidence of that. What GDPR definitely has achieved, though, is people engaging in pointless busywork out of fear some busybody is trying to have them fined for being in violation of GDPR. > In a more practical view though I'm not sure if it'll do anything to stop job replacement from automation as such. Again, I fail to see how automating jobs is supposed to be something negative. If a job can be automated that means humans ultimately can engage in more worthwhile endeavours. Most modern jobs would have been completely alien to someone from the 19th century. The same applies conversely. How many farriers do you know personally? > In general I think it's good for the EU to try and slow down adoption of bleeding edge tech so the US population with its lack of regulations can act as guinea pigs and absorb most of the early damage until we figure out what is the best approach when we get around to adopting it. Quite frankly, by that point there might be not be enough left of the EU to make such a (very) late adoption possible or even relevant at all. We're talking about a timescale of just a few years for a revolution that'll dwarf the Industrial Revolution (which took an entire century, give or take). Up until now, the benefits by far outweigh the downsides and if we're talking about catastrophic damage (essentially, the SkyNet scenario), EU regulation certainly won't stop a US AI from killing Europeans. > An old example is lots of late adopters going straight to gigabit fiber instead of being stuck on copper DSL. That's actually a very good example of how overly cautious behaviour in European countries leads to those countries being left behind. Up until very recently, for example, Germany's last mile Internet infrastructure was largely DSL-based (perhaps, still is; at least they're trying to make more use of fibre optics now).
    - moffkalast 4mo ago
      Hmm well the practical point of GDPR is twofold from where I see it: the process being too convoluted and risky turns off some corporations from storing data entirely (maybe it's not complicated enough yet in that regard), and the deletion requests where I can send anyone holding my data an email saying they have to delete it all. I do it sometimes, maybe it's just a placebo and half I secretly hope it is because once someone inevitably whistleblows it, they'll be appropriately fined in the billions like Google gets regularly. > If a job can be automated that means humans ultimately can engage in more worthwhile endeavours Yeah if that were actually the case. Seems like the plan is to just automate everything we can in broad strokes, then wait if anything happens to turns up to occupy that portion of the workforce. Nobody seems to have any idea what to do with vast amounts of unemployed people who aren't qualified to do anything anymore. I think the very possible end result is that there won't be any immediate new jobs in a meaningful volume in the time span when they're needed. As you say, the timeline can be very short, and in the US it certainly will be. The idealistic future is that UBI gets implemented, automation gets taxed and redistributed, so the economy continues to work. But that's a fantasy with the current ring wing wave across the world where any kind of social service is seen as communist money burning for some reason, pocketing that extra wealth through corruption will be the priority. We've seen this again and again in countries where most of the income is dug from the ground in some form, which is economically the same as a few companies making it all through automation. The end result is usually not great for the population. With the AI Act being very anti-authoritarian, banning credits cores, facial recognition, etc. it's a step in the right direction to compensate. The likely result is probably gonna be some kind of army service and an increase of international tensions to justify a draft when we realize there's only so many extra Wolt drivers a population needs, and then those will go to Starship too. With a war economy you can do pretty much anything to maintain stability, the numbers are made up and the protests don't matter. If a delay in adoption can help bridge this intermediate gap without complete chaos, millions will suffer a lot less.
beernet 4mo ago
> What does it say about progress that the same laws that protect human rights also stifle innovation? Claiming that GDPR and the EU AI Act "protect human rights" is very, very far-fetched. How does the training of, say, Claude or GPT-X models, hurt human rights?
- sdoering 4mo ago
  [dead]
- fragmede 4mo ago
  It might or might not be legal, but who's getting paid when ChatGPT uses knowledge from a phpbb forum from 2008? Is that human person well taken care of in today's society? I use ChatGPT too, but if ChatGPT's coming for all jobs, don't the humans that fed the machine have a right to not be lost and forgotten?
  - JumpCrisscross 4mo ago
    > don't the humans that fed the machine have a right to not be lost and forgotten? Honest answer, no, not if it was publicly published and available for free, not indefinitely. From an ethical (not legal) perspective, 18 years seems long enough for something like that to enter the public domain.
    - beernet 4mo ago
      Exactly. Even the German "Urheberrecht" has a deadline (70 years afaik, outdated and too long obviously).
- atraac 4mo ago
  We forgot already that getting paid for your work is your right and LLMs were trained on stolen property?
  - vintermann 4mo ago
    I didn't "forget". I never agreed that I had some natural right to exclude anyone from or demand payment for using bits of information I "made". It's not also actually "getting paid for your work" when you're talking about copyright. It's "collecting rent for your property". Once upon a time, artists and writers got conned into thinking that was a good deal for them, forgoing payment for work in return for a dangling promise of rent extraction. The vast majority of them were wrong.
boothby 4mo ago
> What does it say about progress that the same laws that protect human rights also stifle innovation? Innovative methods to destroy human life are "stifled" by measures intended to preserve human life. What to you mean by "progress" -- the betterment of the human condition, or the enrichment of the few and powerful?
- philipallstar 4mo ago
  If someone gets rich because they provide an affordable useful service to millions then that is definitely progress. They should get rich.
  - deleted 4mo ago
    [deleted]
  - satvikpendem 4mo ago
    And that is the difference in philosophy between the European and American mindset, and why America actually innovates.
    - Gud 4mo ago
      Europe innovates too.
    - lwhi 4mo ago
      That's why American will become a full dystopia before Europe.
      - philipallstar 4mo ago
        Europe isn't a dystopia because it could import American innovation. There's a reason Germany car manufacturers were never going to electrify by themselves.
        lwhi 4mo ago
nradov 4mo ago
And yet the EU legislature seems to be actively hostile to some human rights, such as the right to free expression and the right to keep and bear arms. How do you account for that discrepancy?
- mnewme 4mo ago
  European countries have higher freedom of press than the US. Bearing arms is not a human right in Europe, different culture. Europe has more human rights protections than the US and stronger enforcement of them, even against the state, by many metrics. Freedom of expression ends where other human rights begin, is protecting hate speech and Holocaust denial really something worthwhile?
  - nradov 4mo ago
    So are you claiming that human rights are subjective and not universal? Or that it's acceptable for the EU to violate human rights if the USA is worse in some ways? Belarus is a European country. How is freedom of the press doing there?
    - mnewme 4mo ago
      I don’t know why you think the American definition of human rights is universal? It is. Look at the freedom of press index for example. And as the US doesn’t accept foreign courts, there is not really a legal apparatus against the state outside of the US, which many European countries do have. Belarus is not part of the EU, nor did it sign many of the international human rights
      - nradov 4mo ago
        I don't know why you think the EU definition of human rights matters at all? The comment I responded to was about Europe. Belarus is part of Europe. As are Serbia, Moldova, etc.
        4mo ago
JumpCrisscross 4mo ago
> EU legislature is, at least in spirit, trying to protect human rights. What does it say about progress that the same laws that protect human rights also stifle innovation? As you said, in spirit. In fact the EU’s AI Act is not really human rights legislation. (It exempts military and national-security uses.) Where it comes close, e.g. in seeking to ban facial recognition or social scoring, it does so clumsily. So in practice, the EU has passed a series of laws that essentially make AI a monopoly of military and intelligence-community interests while forcing its consumers to use foreign products. Not exactly a win.
- cccbbbaaa 4mo ago
  > (It exempts military and national-security uses.) The EU cannot legislate on national security matters.
  - JumpCrisscross 4mo ago
    > EU cannot legislate on national security matters Sure. Legally, makes sense. Practically, if you want to do all those things the legislation purports to be doing for human rights, you just have to get the right general or spy or police chief on your side. That makes the whole scheme a bit of a boondoggle. Lots of friction. Remarkably little tangible benefit.
    - overfeed 4mo ago
      > Sure. Legally, makes sense. Practically, if you want to do all those things... If you had just owned up to how you were mistaken about EU legislative limits - confidently stated - I probably would have taken everything else in your initial comment at face value. Your doubling down into unfalsifiable territory has me thinking your arguments are feelings-based with post-facto justifications.
      - JumpCrisscross 4mo ago
        > how you were mistaken about EU legislative limits I’m not making any legal arguments. The fact that the EU can’t legislate on those issues doesn’t change that its AI Act has those loopholes. > unfalsifiable territory No, I’m not. If the AI Act constrained any actual risks, that would falsify my assertion. I’m saying it in practice doesn’t. Those capabilities are still being built, just not in Europe. And they’ll still be sold to Europe, just to its governments to use however they want, not to its people. The EU doesn’t have the power to write AI legislation for human rights purposes. It does have the power to throw gum into its AI industry’s works. It did what it could. Which is very little of the former (by constraining B2C and B2B, sort of). It did a lot of the latter. Congress can’t do a lot of things. Passing something stupid and then complaining that the reason it isn’t competently written is because of Constitutional limits doesn’t absolve the stupid bill. I’m not an expert on EU law or AI. But I do make capital-allocation decisions around this stuff, and I know enough to know that as currently configured the only main AI business to do in the EU is in selling it things that kill or surveil.
retinaros 4mo ago
no its not. its about mass surveillance and mass population control. regulating, watching, punishing and jailing the taxpayers while letting millions of people enter illegally and destroy the society from both sides. europe is huxley nightmarish utopia worst parts without any of the bright ones.
- deleted 4mo ago
  [deleted]
mmarq 4mo ago
EU legislature is an actual corpus of laws. It’s imperfect, but it’s arguably better than having a guy that can block a model or threat companies because they crossed him.
- bluegatty 4mo ago
  No it's not. Europe has no models to even block. The US has a guy who occasionally can screw things up for a few weeks, but who will be gone in a while. You have it upside down: the innovation and the stuff is the valuable thing, the laws are there to help us organize ourselves a bit after the fact. They're always a secondary concern to the extent that the vast majority of civilization is working with one another, doing material things wherein the law usually is there as a backstop. There are some ugly things here and there but by and large - 'cookie settings' has not materially improved people's lives - and not nearly as much as the innovations on the web themselves. Doing is primacy, regulating is always secondary, with only a few exceptions. The EU is in really really bad shape on industrial issues on a continental scale - 'too many regulations' is actually not a root cause (it's a big drag, but not root), but it's also not for the most part some kind of advantage. You see the same thing play out with defence and other things. Having to beg the US for help with Ukraine, for Patriot munitions, Starlink, advanced intel, for 5th Gen gear, mid range ballistic missiles - it's an existentially disempowering posture. Human rights won't matter in the areas where the Russians have conquerd or destroyed. Again, here EU/Euro governance issues loom large. 'Do the thing' then as you go along, think about some guardrails or whatever, but the 'do the thing' is the hard part that deserves most of the focus.
  - sajithdilshan 4mo ago
    Exactly, it’s quite funny that everyone equate US and US legal system to Trump. The founding fathers created a constitution that can whit-stand and survive people like Trump and still the Republic would thrive. Trump would be gone in few years but US would still be there like it has been for the past 250 years for the people by the people. On the other hand EU started as an economic union and has rotten into a behemoth that tries to control every aspect of Europeans. It was not created by the people for the people, rather a bunch of bureaucrats to exert their power and establish authority. At the start EU has done a lot of good things as an economic union, but at its current form, it does more harm for the growth of Europe rather than helping
michaelt 4mo ago
> What does it say about progress that the same laws that protect human rights also stifle innovation? Perhaps it merely says that certain good positive things stifle other good, positive things? Having 24 languages is a good, positive thing for the EU's cultural distinctiveness, respect for citizens' heritage, and the fairness of the nexus of power not excluding speakers of any country's language. And yet it's a major barrier to cross-border trade, military cooperation, popular support of closer political ties, and the prospects of any EU companies growing large enough to counterbalance the amazons and facebooks of the world. A ban on cracking eggs serves the interests of eggs, while stifling the omelette industry.
nekitamo 4mo ago
You can protect human rights without stifling progress. It's not a "pick one of the above" situation. The EU can and should reform many parts of its sclerotic laws and bureaucracies. Whether it can do so before it becomes a subservient puppet state which serves as a battleground for competing powers remains to be seen.
- cess11 4mo ago
  The usian 'frontier' "AI" corporations are involved in severe human rights abuses and war crimes. I'm not so sure the ideal should be to substitute for those.
MattDamonSpace 4mo ago
“Human rights” as defined by the continent that brought you both The Enlightenment and The Holocaust Feels like a reaaaaal roll of the dice
- frollogaston 4mo ago
  It's ok, they fixed the second one by making hatred illegal
deleted 4mo ago
[deleted]
red75prime 4mo ago
> EU legislature is, at least in spirit, trying to protect human rights Protect human rights as defined by EU legislature, obviously. And privacy in public places, for example, doesn't seem to be an undebatable human right. Heck, I hate street views disfigured by huge privacy blobs.
- mopsi 4mo ago
  > Heck, I hate street views disfigured by huge privacy blobs. Why should you - from the other side of the planet - have an unrestricted view into my front garden at your fingertips?
  - red75prime 4mo ago
    Why shouldn't I? Your garden is not of a particular interest to me. It's just one of millions of gardens that I might look at as a part of scenery, or to get my bearings if I happen to be in the area. You'd be better off fighting street views in general, unless you are OK with the Streisand effect.
    - mopsi 4mo ago
      I prefer not to have views of my home permanently archived and made available to anyone in the world, unless they can present a reasonable need for it. City planners? Go ahead. Local people for navigation purposes? Go ahead. But some random bloke from another continent? That's clearly too far. Services like Street View should have distance-based friction to preserve privacy. The further you are, the less (or at lower quality) should be available, to keep it proportional with the effort required to inspect the place in the real world.
      - red75prime 4mo ago
        OK, feel free to ruin experience for millions of people.
        4mo ago
poszlem 4mo ago
That's a bit like arguing that the USSR was, in spirit, trying to defend workers' rights, and therefore we should not have opposed it. At some point, the gap between what something claims to be "in spirit" and what it actually is in practice becomes too large to ignore.
- noddybear 4mo ago
  Right, the purpose of a system is what it does.
jimbokun 4mo ago
That bureaucrats can kill any kind of progress with the best of intentions.
- nxm 4mo ago
  "I'm from the government, and I'm here to help"
frollogaston 4mo ago
That's a loaded question.
yeoyeo42 4mo ago
this is true, but in practice the EU and its local governments have a giant issue with incompetence when it comes to the specifics of regulation. it's overregulated and sometimes even in such ways that it doesn't even achieve the protection it seeks to generate, so a net loss in both directions.
clear-octopus 4mo ago
[dead]

BjoernKW 4mo ago

> We can debate the details and implementation but EU legislature is, at least in spirit, trying to protect human rights That's an unfounded assertion. Of course, politicians will claim this to be the case. I don't see how patronising citizens protects their human rights, though.

bluefirebrand 4mo ago
You don't see how protecting the commons from being exploited by hypercapitalists for their own profit is protecting the rights of the average person?
- BjoernKW 4mo ago
  I don't subscribe to ideological categories such as "hypercapitalists". So, no, I don't see that.
  - frollogaston 4mo ago
    These questions are getting more loaded each time. "You don't see how the EU fighting pure evil is a good thing?"
- frollogaston 4mo ago
  It's not even doing that
moffkalast 4mo ago
It's certainly a good question. On the idealistic side it's the right choice, people should have the right to have a say in their own data since it's implicitly copyrighted. GDPR has done wonders to prevent careless personal data leaks that are so common in the US, and other kinds of abuse. In a more practical view though I'm not sure if it'll do anything to stop job replacement from automation as such. Most corporations seem all to eager to make deals with OAI or Anthropic here anyway, and if not that it'll be Chinese ones. There is a question of "representation", like if a model cannot be trained on the data of one specific country with a specific language, then it does not learn it and the people of that country are now at a disadvantage when trying to leverage the result. Maybe that's a good thing, maybe not, depending on the perspective of how the model is being applied relative to the average person. If it's something that makes their job easier then it's a negative, if it's used by the government to automate scanning all chats then it would be beneficial for it to suck. For widespread languages that doesn't apply of course, so the UK and Spain might as well be exempt. In general I think it's good for the EU to try and slow down adoption of bleeding edge tech so the US population with its lack of regulations can act as guinea pigs and absorb most of the early damage until we figure out what is the best approach when we get around to adopting it. Even if that means missing out on potential early upsides too. An old example is lots of late adopters going straight to gigabit fiber instead of being stuck on copper DSL.
- BjoernKW 4mo ago
  > GDPR has done wonders to prevent careless personal data leaks that are so common in the US, and other kinds of abuse. Has it? I still have to see evidence of that. What GDPR definitely has achieved, though, is people engaging in pointless busywork out of fear some busybody is trying to have them fined for being in violation of GDPR. > In a more practical view though I'm not sure if it'll do anything to stop job replacement from automation as such. Again, I fail to see how automating jobs is supposed to be something negative. If a job can be automated that means humans ultimately can engage in more worthwhile endeavours. Most modern jobs would have been completely alien to someone from the 19th century. The same applies conversely. How many farriers do you know personally? > In general I think it's good for the EU to try and slow down adoption of bleeding edge tech so the US population with its lack of regulations can act as guinea pigs and absorb most of the early damage until we figure out what is the best approach when we get around to adopting it. Quite frankly, by that point there might be not be enough left of the EU to make such a (very) late adoption possible or even relevant at all. We're talking about a timescale of just a few years for a revolution that'll dwarf the Industrial Revolution (which took an entire century, give or take). Up until now, the benefits by far outweigh the downsides and if we're talking about catastrophic damage (essentially, the SkyNet scenario), EU regulation certainly won't stop a US AI from killing Europeans. > An old example is lots of late adopters going straight to gigabit fiber instead of being stuck on copper DSL. That's actually a very good example of how overly cautious behaviour in European countries leads to those countries being left behind. Up until very recently, for example, Germany's last mile Internet infrastructure was largely DSL-based (perhaps, still is; at least they're trying to make more use of fibre optics now).
  - moffkalast 4mo ago
    Hmm well the practical point of GDPR is twofold from where I see it: the process being too convoluted and risky turns off some corporations from storing data entirely (maybe it's not complicated enough yet in that regard), and the deletion requests where I can send anyone holding my data an email saying they have to delete it all. I do it sometimes, maybe it's just a placebo and half I secretly hope it is because once someone inevitably whistleblows it, they'll be appropriately fined in the billions like Google gets regularly. > If a job can be automated that means humans ultimately can engage in more worthwhile endeavours Yeah if that were actually the case. Seems like the plan is to just automate everything we can in broad strokes, then wait if anything happens to turns up to occupy that portion of the workforce. Nobody seems to have any idea what to do with vast amounts of unemployed people who aren't qualified to do anything anymore. I think the very possible end result is that there won't be any immediate new jobs in a meaningful volume in the time span when they're needed. As you say, the timeline can be very short, and in the US it certainly will be. The idealistic future is that UBI gets implemented, automation gets taxed and redistributed, so the economy continues to work. But that's a fantasy with the current ring wing wave across the world where any kind of social service is seen as communist money burning for some reason, pocketing that extra wealth through corruption will be the priority. We've seen this again and again in countries where most of the income is dug from the ground in some form, which is economically the same as a few companies making it all through automation. The end result is usually not great for the population. With the AI Act being very anti-authoritarian, banning credits cores, facial recognition, etc. it's a step in the right direction to compensate. The likely result is probably gonna be some kind of army service and an increase of international tensions to justify a draft when we realize there's only so many extra Wolt drivers a population needs, and then those will go to Starship too. With a war economy you can do pretty much anything to maintain stability, the numbers are made up and the protests don't matter. If a delay in adoption can help bridge this intermediate gap without complete chaos, millions will suffer a lot less.

beernet 4mo ago

> What does it say about progress that the same laws that protect human rights also stifle innovation? Claiming that GDPR and the EU AI Act "protect human rights" is very, very far-fetched. How does the training of, say, Claude or GPT-X models, hurt human rights?

sdoering 4mo ago
[dead]
fragmede 4mo ago
It might or might not be legal, but who's getting paid when ChatGPT uses knowledge from a phpbb forum from 2008? Is that human person well taken care of in today's society? I use ChatGPT too, but if ChatGPT's coming for all jobs, don't the humans that fed the machine have a right to not be lost and forgotten?
- JumpCrisscross 4mo ago
  > don't the humans that fed the machine have a right to not be lost and forgotten? Honest answer, no, not if it was publicly published and available for free, not indefinitely. From an ethical (not legal) perspective, 18 years seems long enough for something like that to enter the public domain.
  - beernet 4mo ago
    Exactly. Even the German "Urheberrecht" has a deadline (70 years afaik, outdated and too long obviously).
atraac 4mo ago
We forgot already that getting paid for your work is your right and LLMs were trained on stolen property?
- vintermann 4mo ago
  I didn't "forget". I never agreed that I had some natural right to exclude anyone from or demand payment for using bits of information I "made". It's not also actually "getting paid for your work" when you're talking about copyright. It's "collecting rent for your property". Once upon a time, artists and writers got conned into thinking that was a good deal for them, forgoing payment for work in return for a dangling promise of rent extraction. The vast majority of them were wrong.

boothby 4mo ago

> What does it say about progress that the same laws that protect human rights also stifle innovation? Innovative methods to destroy human life are "stifled" by measures intended to preserve human life. What to you mean by "progress" -- the betterment of the human condition, or the enrichment of the few and powerful?

philipallstar 4mo ago
If someone gets rich because they provide an affordable useful service to millions then that is definitely progress. They should get rich.
- deleted 4mo ago
  [deleted]
- satvikpendem 4mo ago
  And that is the difference in philosophy between the European and American mindset, and why America actually innovates.
  - Gud 4mo ago
    Europe innovates too.
  - lwhi 4mo ago
    That's why American will become a full dystopia before Europe.
    - philipallstar 4mo ago
      Europe isn't a dystopia because it could import American innovation. There's a reason Germany car manufacturers were never going to electrify by themselves.
      - lwhi 4mo ago

nradov 4mo ago

And yet the EU legislature seems to be actively hostile to some human rights, such as the right to free expression and the right to keep and bear arms. How do you account for that discrepancy?

mnewme 4mo ago
European countries have higher freedom of press than the US. Bearing arms is not a human right in Europe, different culture. Europe has more human rights protections than the US and stronger enforcement of them, even against the state, by many metrics. Freedom of expression ends where other human rights begin, is protecting hate speech and Holocaust denial really something worthwhile?
- nradov 4mo ago
  So are you claiming that human rights are subjective and not universal? Or that it's acceptable for the EU to violate human rights if the USA is worse in some ways? Belarus is a European country. How is freedom of the press doing there?
  - mnewme 4mo ago
    I don’t know why you think the American definition of human rights is universal? It is. Look at the freedom of press index for example. And as the US doesn’t accept foreign courts, there is not really a legal apparatus against the state outside of the US, which many European countries do have. Belarus is not part of the EU, nor did it sign many of the international human rights
    - nradov 4mo ago
      I don't know why you think the EU definition of human rights matters at all? The comment I responded to was about Europe. Belarus is part of Europe. As are Serbia, Moldova, etc.
      - 4mo ago

JumpCrisscross 4mo ago

> EU legislature is, at least in spirit, trying to protect human rights. What does it say about progress that the same laws that protect human rights also stifle innovation? As you said, in spirit. In fact the EU’s AI Act is not really human rights legislation. (It exempts military and national-security uses.) Where it comes close, e.g. in seeking to ban facial recognition or social scoring, it does so clumsily. So in practice, the EU has passed a series of laws that essentially make AI a monopoly of military and intelligence-community interests while forcing its consumers to use foreign products. Not exactly a win.

cccbbbaaa 4mo ago
> (It exempts military and national-security uses.) The EU cannot legislate on national security matters.
- JumpCrisscross 4mo ago
  > EU cannot legislate on national security matters Sure. Legally, makes sense. Practically, if you want to do all those things the legislation purports to be doing for human rights, you just have to get the right general or spy or police chief on your side. That makes the whole scheme a bit of a boondoggle. Lots of friction. Remarkably little tangible benefit.
  - overfeed 4mo ago
    > Sure. Legally, makes sense. Practically, if you want to do all those things... If you had just owned up to how you were mistaken about EU legislative limits - confidently stated - I probably would have taken everything else in your initial comment at face value. Your doubling down into unfalsifiable territory has me thinking your arguments are feelings-based with post-facto justifications.
    - JumpCrisscross 4mo ago
      > how you were mistaken about EU legislative limits I’m not making any legal arguments. The fact that the EU can’t legislate on those issues doesn’t change that its AI Act has those loopholes. > unfalsifiable territory No, I’m not. If the AI Act constrained any actual risks, that would falsify my assertion. I’m saying it in practice doesn’t. Those capabilities are still being built, just not in Europe. And they’ll still be sold to Europe, just to its governments to use however they want, not to its people. The EU doesn’t have the power to write AI legislation for human rights purposes. It does have the power to throw gum into its AI industry’s works. It did what it could. Which is very little of the former (by constraining B2C and B2B, sort of). It did a lot of the latter. Congress can’t do a lot of things. Passing something stupid and then complaining that the reason it isn’t competently written is because of Constitutional limits doesn’t absolve the stupid bill. I’m not an expert on EU law or AI. But I do make capital-allocation decisions around this stuff, and I know enough to know that as currently configured the only main AI business to do in the EU is in selling it things that kill or surveil.

retinaros 4mo ago

no its not. its about mass surveillance and mass population control. regulating, watching, punishing and jailing the taxpayers while letting millions of people enter illegally and destroy the society from both sides. europe is huxley nightmarish utopia worst parts without any of the bright ones.

deleted 4mo ago
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mmarq 4mo ago

EU legislature is an actual corpus of laws. It’s imperfect, but it’s arguably better than having a guy that can block a model or threat companies because they crossed him.

bluegatty 4mo ago
No it's not. Europe has no models to even block. The US has a guy who occasionally can screw things up for a few weeks, but who will be gone in a while. You have it upside down: the innovation and the stuff is the valuable thing, the laws are there to help us organize ourselves a bit after the fact. They're always a secondary concern to the extent that the vast majority of civilization is working with one another, doing material things wherein the law usually is there as a backstop. There are some ugly things here and there but by and large - 'cookie settings' has not materially improved people's lives - and not nearly as much as the innovations on the web themselves. Doing is primacy, regulating is always secondary, with only a few exceptions. The EU is in really really bad shape on industrial issues on a continental scale - 'too many regulations' is actually not a root cause (it's a big drag, but not root), but it's also not for the most part some kind of advantage. You see the same thing play out with defence and other things. Having to beg the US for help with Ukraine, for Patriot munitions, Starlink, advanced intel, for 5th Gen gear, mid range ballistic missiles - it's an existentially disempowering posture. Human rights won't matter in the areas where the Russians have conquerd or destroyed. Again, here EU/Euro governance issues loom large. 'Do the thing' then as you go along, think about some guardrails or whatever, but the 'do the thing' is the hard part that deserves most of the focus.
- sajithdilshan 4mo ago
  Exactly, it’s quite funny that everyone equate US and US legal system to Trump. The founding fathers created a constitution that can whit-stand and survive people like Trump and still the Republic would thrive. Trump would be gone in few years but US would still be there like it has been for the past 250 years for the people by the people. On the other hand EU started as an economic union and has rotten into a behemoth that tries to control every aspect of Europeans. It was not created by the people for the people, rather a bunch of bureaucrats to exert their power and establish authority. At the start EU has done a lot of good things as an economic union, but at its current form, it does more harm for the growth of Europe rather than helping

michaelt 4mo ago

> What does it say about progress that the same laws that protect human rights also stifle innovation? Perhaps it merely says that certain good positive things stifle other good, positive things? Having 24 languages is a good, positive thing for the EU's cultural distinctiveness, respect for citizens' heritage, and the fairness of the nexus of power not excluding speakers of any country's language. And yet it's a major barrier to cross-border trade, military cooperation, popular support of closer political ties, and the prospects of any EU companies growing large enough to counterbalance the amazons and facebooks of the world. A ban on cracking eggs serves the interests of eggs, while stifling the omelette industry.

nekitamo 4mo ago

You can protect human rights without stifling progress. It's not a "pick one of the above" situation. The EU can and should reform many parts of its sclerotic laws and bureaucracies. Whether it can do so before it becomes a subservient puppet state which serves as a battleground for competing powers remains to be seen.

cess11 4mo ago
The usian 'frontier' "AI" corporations are involved in severe human rights abuses and war crimes. I'm not so sure the ideal should be to substitute for those.

MattDamonSpace 4mo ago

“Human rights” as defined by the continent that brought you both The Enlightenment and The Holocaust Feels like a reaaaaal roll of the dice

frollogaston 4mo ago
It's ok, they fixed the second one by making hatred illegal

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red75prime 4mo ago

> EU legislature is, at least in spirit, trying to protect human rights Protect human rights as defined by EU legislature, obviously. And privacy in public places, for example, doesn't seem to be an undebatable human right. Heck, I hate street views disfigured by huge privacy blobs.

mopsi 4mo ago
> Heck, I hate street views disfigured by huge privacy blobs. Why should you - from the other side of the planet - have an unrestricted view into my front garden at your fingertips?
- red75prime 4mo ago
  Why shouldn't I? Your garden is not of a particular interest to me. It's just one of millions of gardens that I might look at as a part of scenery, or to get my bearings if I happen to be in the area. You'd be better off fighting street views in general, unless you are OK with the Streisand effect.
  - mopsi 4mo ago
    I prefer not to have views of my home permanently archived and made available to anyone in the world, unless they can present a reasonable need for it. City planners? Go ahead. Local people for navigation purposes? Go ahead. But some random bloke from another continent? That's clearly too far. Services like Street View should have distance-based friction to preserve privacy. The further you are, the less (or at lower quality) should be available, to keep it proportional with the effort required to inspect the place in the real world.
    - red75prime 4mo ago
      OK, feel free to ruin experience for millions of people.
      - 4mo ago

poszlem 4mo ago

That's a bit like arguing that the USSR was, in spirit, trying to defend workers' rights, and therefore we should not have opposed it. At some point, the gap between what something claims to be "in spirit" and what it actually is in practice becomes too large to ignore.

noddybear 4mo ago
Right, the purpose of a system is what it does.

jimbokun 4mo ago

That bureaucrats can kill any kind of progress with the best of intentions.

nxm 4mo ago
"I'm from the government, and I'm here to help"

frollogaston 4mo ago

That's a loaded question.

yeoyeo42 4mo ago

this is true, but in practice the EU and its local governments have a giant issue with incompetence when it comes to the specifics of regulation. it's overregulated and sometimes even in such ways that it doesn't even achieve the protection it seeks to generate, so a net loss in both directions.

clear-octopus 4mo ago

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