It's a popular meme in science fiction, dramatized by Arnold Schwartzenegger about the day that Skynet became self-aware. Great movie and scary gloom and doom about computers are going to kill us all.
Now in an Orwellian twist, I see that the tech giants on the forefront of Artificial Intelligence (AI) are asking government to regulate them. That is the most bizarre thig I have ever heard. Huge companies asking government to get involved in their business.
The huge fallacy here is that government is capable of intelligently regulating technology that so few of us understand. My congressman, for example, is incapable of regulating himself. He's an idiot. Come November, he will be out of work, but I don't hold out much hope for his replacement, at least in any technical field. Congress is the last body I want to see regulating AI.
As for these tech giants, are they incapable of regulating themselves? They need Big Brother to keep the genie locked in the bottle?
Lets note the timing. We are less than two months away from the mid-term elections. I'm not a conspiracy theorist, but both the subject matter and timing are suspicious. This whole idea is so bizarre as to beg for conspiracy theories. What is the real play?
Something is afoot and all we are seeing is the smokescreen.
1 comment:
"That is the most bizarre thig I have ever heard. Huge companies asking government to get involved in their business."
But it's very common. When established businesses can get government to place regulations on their industry that they already have the capacity to achieve (or, better yet, already do), but will make it difficult for startups to compete, it ensures their market dominance, assuming some new ground breaking thing doesn't come along and break their stranglehold.
It' happens in virtually every industry to some level or another.
Established nail salons don't lobby for education and licensing of "nail care technicians" because they really believe it's necessary to "protect consumers". They do it because those requirements prevent unlicensed Harriet Housemom from being able to charge half the price to do manicures in her kitchen and steal their business.
Do building codes really need to be so complex and difficult to understand or is the complexity designed specifically to make it more difficult for those damn DIY homeowners to deny contractors business by doing their own work?
Same for laws and the legal profession. You ever try to file a court document on your own? It's ridiculous. "Your petition is denied because of improper formatting: there was an extra space before the date in the heading."
And it's no coincidence that the trade organizations consistently lobby for more rigid regulations and restrictions on the industries they represent.
This version of protectionism is nothing new, the AI stuff just happens to be high profile right now.
It's nothing new, this one is just higher profile at the moment.
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