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.
"That is the most bizarre thig I have ever heard. Huge companies asking government to get involved in their business."
ReplyDeleteBut 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.
This. They want a moat to defend themselves from competition, both of the start up and foreign variety.
DeleteSailor beat me to it. The big boys can endure regulation, especially if they help write it. The startups can't.
ReplyDeleteThese companies are burning bucketloads of cash and haven't made a nickel yet. Probably won't. They changed their pricing model not too long ago and now the value to business is dubious.
We have a software function on a package I support that if it doesn't know what to do it can go use AI, Gemini in this case. But we were told to tell the customers to use it lightly. So basically, we can use AI but the tab will make the whole process not profitable.
B'rer Rabbit begging to not be thrown into the briar patch.
ReplyDeleteRE construction regs: to be fair, Hammurabi had a point.
'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?
ReplyDeleteTwo people have said to me "doesn't this sound like Y2K fantasy". Can't say I hadn't had that thought also. Lots of noise about nothing.