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Notes -
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.
In a sense it's about that, but the people whose jobs are threatened and are protecting themselves here are bureaucrats and politicians, not necessarily who you may have in mind.
AI is a potential tool for a challenger to the ruling elite, and the people who rule the EU know only one way to deal with challengers, and it's to regulate them away. They'll sooner condemn the entire union to a slow fall into irrelevance than compromise on the total power of experts behind desks deciding what ought to happen.
I'd be sad at how much of a joke the old continent has become. But one can only be disappointed so many times.
You think that's a challenge to the ruling elite, rather than tools for them to control us proles even more tightly?
Ask yourself who gets to do "Emotion recognition in the workplace and schools, social scoring" right now. And who would under a new regime of automation.
The same people? I have no reason to think that automation will mean a change in the hands on the levers of power, one reason I'm so suspicious of the push for AI.
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