There's a very common belief that things like regulations and especially liability simply halts all innovation. You can see some evidence for this point of view from aerospace with its famous "if it hasn't already flown, it can't fly" mentality. It's why we are still using leaded gasoline in small planes, though this is finally being phased out... but it took an unreasonably long time due to certification requirements and bureaucracy.
If airplanes weren't so heavily regulated we'd have seen leaded gasoline vanish there around the same time it did in cars, but you also might have had a few crashes due to engine failures as the bugs were worked out with changes and retrofits.
I'm a little on the fence here. I don't want a world where we basically conduct human sacrifice for progress, but I also don't want a world that is frozen in time. We really need to learn how to have responsible, careful progress, but still actually do things. Right now I think we are bad at this.
Edit: I think it's related to some extent to the fact that nuanced positions are hard in politics. In popular political discourse positions become more and more simple, flat, and extreme. There's a kind of context collapse that happens when you try to scale human organizations, what I want to call "nuance collapse," that makes it very hard to do anything but all A or all B. For innovation it's "full speed ahead" vs "stop everything."
Yes. It's also worth thinking about the sharp cliff effect. Things either fall into the category of "medical device" (expensive, heavily regulated, scarce, uninnovative), or they don't, in which case it's a free for all of unregulated supplements and unsupported claims.
The home brew "automatic pancreas" by making a bluetooth control loop between a glucose monitor and an insulin pump counts as a "medical device". Somehow a computer system that encourages people to take bromide isn't. There ought to be a middle ground.
I think they were suggesting that LLMs are a nascent technology and we’d expect them to kill a bunch of people in preventable accidents before being heavily regulated.
Look back. At no point did I suggest AI should be banned or outlawed. My remedy for washing machines burning down houses isn't to ban washing machines. It's to ensure there are appropriate incentives in place (legal, financial, reputational) to encourage private industry to consider the potential negative externalities of what they're doing.
api|6 months ago
If airplanes weren't so heavily regulated we'd have seen leaded gasoline vanish there around the same time it did in cars, but you also might have had a few crashes due to engine failures as the bugs were worked out with changes and retrofits.
I'm a little on the fence here. I don't want a world where we basically conduct human sacrifice for progress, but I also don't want a world that is frozen in time. We really need to learn how to have responsible, careful progress, but still actually do things. Right now I think we are bad at this.
Edit: I think it's related to some extent to the fact that nuanced positions are hard in politics. In popular political discourse positions become more and more simple, flat, and extreme. There's a kind of context collapse that happens when you try to scale human organizations, what I want to call "nuance collapse," that makes it very hard to do anything but all A or all B. For innovation it's "full speed ahead" vs "stop everything."
pjc50|6 months ago
The home brew "automatic pancreas" by making a bluetooth control loop between a glucose monitor and an insulin pump counts as a "medical device". Somehow a computer system that encourages people to take bromide isn't. There ought to be a middle ground.
qwertylicious|6 months ago
throwaway173738|6 months ago
tim333|6 months ago
qwertylicious|6 months ago
Look back. At no point did I suggest AI should be banned or outlawed. My remedy for washing machines burning down houses isn't to ban washing machines. It's to ensure there are appropriate incentives in place (legal, financial, reputational) to encourage private industry to consider the potential negative externalities of what they're doing.