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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 11, 2024

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The European Union has passed the Artificial Intelligence Act

The new rules ban certain AI applications that threaten citizens’ rights, including biometric categorisation systems based on sensitive characteristics and untargeted scraping of facial images from the internet or CCTV footage to create facial recognition databases. Emotion recognition in the workplace and schools, social scoring, predictive policing (when it is based solely on profiling a person or assessing their characteristics), and AI that manipulates human behaviour or exploits people’s vulnerabilities will also be forbidden.

...

Clear obligations are also foreseen for other high-risk AI systems (due to their significant potential harm to health, safety, fundamental rights, environment, democracy and the rule of law). Examples of high-risk AI uses include critical infrastructure, education and vocational training, employment, essential private and public services (e.g. healthcare, banking), certain systems in law enforcement, migration and border management, justice and democratic processes (e.g. influencing elections). Such systems must assess and reduce risks, maintain use logs, be transparent and accurate, and ensure human oversight. Citizens will have a right to submit complaints about AI systems and receive explanations about decisions based on high-risk AI systems that affect their rights.

...

Clear obligations are also foreseen for other high-risk AI systems (due to their significant potential harm to health, safety, fundamental rights, environment, democracy and the rule of law). Examples of high-risk AI uses include critical infrastructure, education and vocational training, employment, essential private and public services (e.g. healthcare, banking), certain systems in law enforcement, migration and border management, justice and democratic processes (e.g. influencing elections). Such systems must assess and reduce risks, maintain use logs, be transparent and accurate, and ensure human oversight. Citizens will have a right to submit complaints about AI systems and receive explanations about decisions based on high-risk AI systems that affect their rights.

This is an extremely restrictive law that will really hold the EU back economically if AI becomes an important technology. It imposes huge burdens on all uses, for both the users and developers, and outright bans many very useful applications.

The law tries to mandate transparency, while at the same time discouraging it by restricting or banning certain uses. An AI specifically made for social scoring, for example, would be illegal, while a general purpose AI would almost certainly do something like social scoring internally as part of a more general ability. For example, if you have an AI run a company in its head, so to speak, how would anyone know what it is doing? How would you know how it is selecting job applicants? It would be a black box and current attempts to figure out how large language models actually work would be the only way to find out what they're doing. But continuing that line of research would expose the developers and users of these systems to liability.

The fines are also enormous.

Fines for non-compliance can be up to 35 million Euros or 7% of worldwide annual turnover.

This would be devastating for a small or low margin business. Many are just not going to do use this extremely valuable technology. Lots of online services are just not going to be available in the EU. In fact, this is already the case with Gemini and Claude, probably because of privacy laws.

I've long argued that the AI safety movement is unlikely to do anything for existential risk and will, if anything, increase it, while assuredly greatly limiting the benefits, and this is strong evidence that I'm right. The regulatory state does not have the capacity to deal with existential risk from AI, whereas it has a long history of stifling technological development.

Is this not intentional, banning AI? It might be about making sure robots don’t take our jobs and not about safety.

Or, more likely in a European context, making sure robots don't provide a reason to halt the flow of infinity migrants into Europe.

You’ve been making a habit of hyperbole when it comes to the culture war. Please resist the urge to cast your enemies as cartoon villains.