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The European Union has passed the Artificial Intelligence Act
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.
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.
There is, in fact, not a flow of infinity migrants into Europe, and this increased regulation of AI is happening at the same time as increased regulation of migration in EU generally at the EU level.
You keep saying that and it plainly contradicts the evidence of my own eyes, I'm literally passing tens of African boys on my way back from work every day (they're not causing trouble as far as I can tell, they seem to be playing football most of the day). There's two different parts of Europe I watched fill up with "refugees" in a similar manner. The "increased regulation of migration" seems to boil down to locking them up in hopes they'll stop coming, a policy that is obviously unsustainable as per your own article.
Immigrants are, in fact, still coming, and the EU is, in fact, doing very little to stop it.
Yes, of course there are migrants coming. No-one has denied that. That's different from the dumb catchphrase "infinity migrants", let alone the implication that EU is specifically regulating AI to facilitate immigration.
I don't know what being literal is supposed to bring into the conversation. His claim is that Europe has the goal of continuing mass immigration, you claim here, and in other comments, that actually they are clamping down, I'm claiming that they're not, and they're measures are symbolic at best. Do you agree or disagree with that? Debating current state of immigration is somewhat interesting, debating the literal meaning of a culture-warry comment that got modded is not.
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