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Notes -
How NOT to Regulate the Tech Industry
Hot on the heels of my comment describing the UK's effort to finally rid the IoT market of extremely basic vulnerabilities like "has a default password", Colorado jumps in like Leroy Jenkins to show us how, exactly, tech regulation shouldn't be done. SB 205 is very concerned with "algorithmic discrimination", which it defines as, "any condition in which the use of an artificial intelligence system results in an unlawful differential treatment or impact that disfavors an individual or group of individuals on the basis of their actual or perceived age, color, disability, ethnicity, genetic information, limited proficiency in the English language, national origin, race, religion, reproductive health, sex, veteran status, or other classification protected under the laws of this state or federal law."
Right off the bat, it seems to be embracing the absolute morass of "differential treatment or impact", with the latter being most concerning, given how incomprehensible the similar "disparate impact" test is in the rest of the world. This law makes all use of algorithms in decision-making subject to this utterly incomprehensible test. There are rules for developers, telling them how they must properly document all the things to show that they've apparently done whatever magic must be done to ensure that there is no such discrimination. There are rules for deployers of those algorithms, too, because the job is never done when you need to root out any risk of impacting any group of people differently (nevermind that it's likely mathematically impossible to do so).
Their definitions for what types of algorithms this law will hit are so broad that they already know they captured far too much, so they go on a spree of exempting all sorts of already-existing things that they know about, including:
If your idea for a mundane utility-generating algorithm didn't make the cut two weeks ago, sucks to be you. Worse, they say that these things aren't even exempted if they "are a substantial factor in making a consequential decision". I guess they also exempt things that "perform a narrow procedural task". What does that mean? What counts; what doesn't? Nobody's gonna know until they've taken a bunch of people to court and gotten a slew of rulings, again, akin to the mess of other disparate impact law.
Don't despair, though (/s). So long as you make a bunch of reports that are extremely technologically ill-specified, they will pinky swear that they won't go after you. Forget that they can probably just say, "We don't like the look of this one TPS report in particular," and still take you to court, many of the requirements are basically, "Tell us that you made sure that you won't discriminate against any group that we're interested in protecting." The gestalt requirement can probably be summed up by, "Make sure that you find some way to impose quotas (at least, quotas for whichever handful of groups we feel like protecting) on the ultimate output of your algorithm; otherwise, we will blow your business into oblivion."
This is the type of vague, awful, impossible regulation that is focused on writing politically correct reports and which actually kills innovation. The UK's IoT rules might have had some edge cases that still needed to be worked out, but they were by and large technically-focused on real, serious security problems that had real, practical, technical solutions. Colorado, on the other hand, well, I honestly can't come up with words to describe how violently they've screwed the pooch.
I don't see why regulation is a bad thing here. I don't want AI making hiring decisions, or monitoring what I write on the internet for wrongthink, or deciding verdicts in criminal trials. Anything that helps prevent that (even if imperfect and incomplete) is a good thing in my view.
(You may say that the use of AI in these domains is inevitable and cannot be prevented - but then, why get upset about the regulation in the first place? Why worry about something that you think will have no impact anyway?)
I think there should probably be less innovation in this space.
What, specifically, are you worried about losing or missing out on?
I think that's totally fine, but the problem I have is that youve got politicians writing these laws with little to no outside consultation with experts on AI, so they end up being vague and applying to things that aren't AI.
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