Asking BigTech to police AI is like asking oil companies to solve climate change(fortune.com)
fortune.com
Asking BigTech to police AI is like asking oil companies to solve climate change
https://fortune.com/2024/04/15/openai-google-microsoft-responsobile-societal-questions-government-responsibility/
9 comments
Is there a single case in history where "government should regulate [xyz sector]" hasn't turned into government passing laws that were ghostwritten by the largest players in that sector to benefit themselves?
Antitrust
First sale doctrine
Telecom
Airlines
Food safety
Transportation safety
Environmental safety
Fish and wildlifeThe old antitrust laws weren't, but they've been narrowed so much over time through court decisions that they're no longer effective, as evidenced by all the industries dominated by less than a dozen major companies.
The first sale doctrine is the thing the industry keeps chipping away at with anti-circumvention laws and ebook licensing etc.
Telecoms are probably the textbook case of regulatory capture. You should be able to start a phone company by installing Asterisk on a VM or installing a cellular base station on your roof and filing a form to get permanently assigned a block of phone numbers for a nominal one-time fee. Needless to say that you can't and the incumbents like it that way.
A lot of aspects of airlines are actually not that heavily regulated, it generally operates as a fairly competitive market. The parts that are the most regulated are the parts where the 737 MAX kind of things are happening, and then we're back to "incumbents like the rules that way because they make it cost prohibitive for smaller competitors to exist."
Food safety is the thing where this happens:
https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=529811...
Also, things involving Monsanto in general.
Transportation safety is pretty thoroughly captured by automakers. Tens of thousands of people die in car crashes every year, it's one of the leading causes of death, and we make dumb responses, like fining people who don't wear seat belts (no effect on automakers) instead of actually effective responses like building more housing near jobs so people drive fewer miles or don't need as many cars (obvious negative effect on automakers).
Environmental safety rules don't seem to apply to oil companies.
Fish and wildlife rules are commonly structured to give large incumbents the right to harvest the disproportionate share. Also, this is one of the cases where the industry wants the rules, because over-fishing is a harm to them rather than an externality their industry imposes on someone else.
The first sale doctrine is the thing the industry keeps chipping away at with anti-circumvention laws and ebook licensing etc.
Telecoms are probably the textbook case of regulatory capture. You should be able to start a phone company by installing Asterisk on a VM or installing a cellular base station on your roof and filing a form to get permanently assigned a block of phone numbers for a nominal one-time fee. Needless to say that you can't and the incumbents like it that way.
A lot of aspects of airlines are actually not that heavily regulated, it generally operates as a fairly competitive market. The parts that are the most regulated are the parts where the 737 MAX kind of things are happening, and then we're back to "incumbents like the rules that way because they make it cost prohibitive for smaller competitors to exist."
Food safety is the thing where this happens:
https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=529811...
Also, things involving Monsanto in general.
Transportation safety is pretty thoroughly captured by automakers. Tens of thousands of people die in car crashes every year, it's one of the leading causes of death, and we make dumb responses, like fining people who don't wear seat belts (no effect on automakers) instead of actually effective responses like building more housing near jobs so people drive fewer miles or don't need as many cars (obvious negative effect on automakers).
Environmental safety rules don't seem to apply to oil companies.
Fish and wildlife rules are commonly structured to give large incumbents the right to harvest the disproportionate share. Also, this is one of the cases where the industry wants the rules, because over-fishing is a harm to them rather than an externality their industry imposes on someone else.
> The old antitrust laws weren't, but they've been narrowed so much over time through court decisions that they're no longer effective, as evidenced by all the industries dominated by less than a dozen major companies.
That's endemic to new markets though. The internet crushed incumbents, the winner of which then became incumbents, and so the cycle continues.
One could argue that this is exactly the point in the cycle when antitrust should start being used. Any earlier and you preemptively regulate.
> The first sale doctrine is the thing the industry keeps chipping away at with anti-circumvention laws and ebook licensing etc.
I'd have gone with rent-instead-of-own and converting purchases into platform subscriptions.
But point being that the original law was against the wishes of the largest players in that sector.
> Telecoms are probably the textbook case of regulatory capture.
I'm sure old ATT would have something to say about that...
> A lot of aspects of airlines are actually not that heavily regulated, it generally operates as a fairly competitive market.
The explicit deregulation of the carrier market and substitution of new rules promoting competition.
I'd say the incumbents were pretty upset about that, considering Southwest spent the first 3 years of its existence in court...
> Food safety is the thing where this happens:
A pile of examples does not an argument make. Otherwise, I'd just be able to link here and call it a day: https://www.fda.gov/safety/recalls-market-withdrawals-safety...
What's your argument?
> Transportation safety is pretty thoroughly captured by automakers. [...] and we make dumb responses [...] instead of actually effective responses like building more housing near jobs so people drive fewer miles or don't need as many cars (obvious negative effect on automakers).
You're suggesting the NHTSA solve the US housing market?
That's a bit outside their remit, which is ensuring that vehicles pass these standards: https://www.nhtsa.gov/laws-regulations/statutory-authorities
And let me tell you, automakers aren't thrilled about CAFE standards...
> Environmental safety rules don't seem to apply to oil companies.
Citation needed.
If your point is that the EPA is under-matched against some of the largest companies on the planet, yes.
But to say say they get a free pass is simply wrong. There are multiple court cases where the EPA is currently fighting to uphold and enforce regulation.
In addition to new rules being enacted. E.g. https://www.epa.gov/system/files/documents/2023-12/epas-fina...
> Fish and wildlife rules are commonly structured to give large incumbents the right to harvest the disproportionate share.
That's called grandfathering, and it exists because there's a realpolitik recognition that if you didn't give the current incumbents a juicy cut of the quota they'd just ignore it.
That's the way the world works.
> Also, this is one of the cases where the industry wants the rules, because over-fishing is a harm to them
Ha! If there weren't fishing quotas, companies would happily deplete fisheries as quickly as they could get them on the boat.
Industrial fishing doesn't care about long term.
That's endemic to new markets though. The internet crushed incumbents, the winner of which then became incumbents, and so the cycle continues.
One could argue that this is exactly the point in the cycle when antitrust should start being used. Any earlier and you preemptively regulate.
> The first sale doctrine is the thing the industry keeps chipping away at with anti-circumvention laws and ebook licensing etc.
I'd have gone with rent-instead-of-own and converting purchases into platform subscriptions.
But point being that the original law was against the wishes of the largest players in that sector.
> Telecoms are probably the textbook case of regulatory capture.
I'm sure old ATT would have something to say about that...
> A lot of aspects of airlines are actually not that heavily regulated, it generally operates as a fairly competitive market.
The explicit deregulation of the carrier market and substitution of new rules promoting competition.
I'd say the incumbents were pretty upset about that, considering Southwest spent the first 3 years of its existence in court...
> Food safety is the thing where this happens:
A pile of examples does not an argument make. Otherwise, I'd just be able to link here and call it a day: https://www.fda.gov/safety/recalls-market-withdrawals-safety...
What's your argument?
> Transportation safety is pretty thoroughly captured by automakers. [...] and we make dumb responses [...] instead of actually effective responses like building more housing near jobs so people drive fewer miles or don't need as many cars (obvious negative effect on automakers).
You're suggesting the NHTSA solve the US housing market?
That's a bit outside their remit, which is ensuring that vehicles pass these standards: https://www.nhtsa.gov/laws-regulations/statutory-authorities
And let me tell you, automakers aren't thrilled about CAFE standards...
> Environmental safety rules don't seem to apply to oil companies.
Citation needed.
If your point is that the EPA is under-matched against some of the largest companies on the planet, yes.
But to say say they get a free pass is simply wrong. There are multiple court cases where the EPA is currently fighting to uphold and enforce regulation.
In addition to new rules being enacted. E.g. https://www.epa.gov/system/files/documents/2023-12/epas-fina...
> Fish and wildlife rules are commonly structured to give large incumbents the right to harvest the disproportionate share.
That's called grandfathering, and it exists because there's a realpolitik recognition that if you didn't give the current incumbents a juicy cut of the quota they'd just ignore it.
That's the way the world works.
> Also, this is one of the cases where the industry wants the rules, because over-fishing is a harm to them
Ha! If there weren't fishing quotas, companies would happily deplete fisheries as quickly as they could get them on the boat.
Industrial fishing doesn't care about long term.
> One could argue that this is exactly the point in the cycle when antitrust should start being used. Any earlier and you preemptively regulate.
Antitrust is about anti-competitive practices, like vendor lock-in, tying, collusion, mergers etc. These are practices non-monopolies use to establish a monopoly. Waiting until there is already a monopoly is too late, and the modern focus on "monopolies" is itself being used as a dodge by large companies, because a market with only two or three competitors is already concentrated enough to hold together a cartel.
Moreover, antitrust isn't like other regulations. You typically don't have to impose any compliance burden ahead of time, instead you declare contracts in restraint of trade to be void and prefer remedies in the form of court orders rather than damages. So for example, if a company (regardless of size) is abusing the DMCA or imposing contractual terms to prevent buyers from installing apps on devices the company sold, that's anti-competitive and no court should enforce the contract, and a customer should be able to sue them not for damages but for a patch to allow them to run their own code.
This isn't a problem for new markets because you're not bankrupting the company if they get it wrong or imposing penalties for not hiring a lawyer, you're just preventing the anti-competitive practice from being effective by ordering it to stop the first time anyone raises the objection.
> I'd have gone with rent-instead-of-own and converting purchases into platform subscriptions.
That's ebook licensing.
> But point being that the original law was against the wishes of the largest players in that sector.
The first sale doctrine was originally created by the courts rather than the legislature.
> I'd say the incumbents were pretty upset about that, considering Southwest spent the first 3 years of its existence in court...
But isn't that the point? The incumbents liked it better when the regulators were captured by the industry and imposing regulations at their behest. When those regulations were removed, they sued and got upset.
> I'm sure old ATT would have something to say about that...
Are you kidding? That's how they got their monopoly to begin with. The original phone network was a thousand companies each running their own wires across the city. Ma Bell took a picture of the rat's nest of cables and said "something must be done" and had their monopoly enshrined into the law. And many of those laws persist even after the company was broken up.
> What's your argument?
The regulators are so captured that the thing they're prohibiting is safety testing because the large incumbents neither want to pay for the testing nor want their competitors to be able to advertise having done it when they won't. It's proof that the regulators are beholden to the industry, quod erat demonstrandum.
> You're suggesting the NHTSA solve the US housing market?
I'm suggesting that the industry captures the relevant regulators. NHTSA does things like require safety equipment customers would have demanded from major car companies regardless. This has minimal cost to the large incumbents and in fact helps them by making it more expensive to start a new car company, because crash testing and certification is a negligible incremental cost for a company making millions of cars but a significant fixed cost for a small manufacturer.
Meanwhile allowing more people to live in areas where they don't need cars would actually cause problems for them, so they make sure national policy is to fund highways and not fund high-density market-rate housing construction.
> And let me tell you, automakers aren't thrilled about CAFE standards...
Which is why they had them neutered. Notice how more than half the "cars" people drive are actually trucks and SUVs? Because they have a lower efficiency requirement.
> If your point is that the EPA is under-matched against some of the largest companies on the planet, yes.
The problem is that those are the ones they need to be effective against, because those are the ones operating at scale.
Meanwhile they impose rules with high compliance costs on smaller companies, which is what those larger companies want.
Moreover, the issue is here is not "should regulations exist" -- you need to prohibit major sources of pollution, there is no way around it. Dumping mercury in the river is bad. The issue is that you shouldn't just create a regulatory agency with the power to continuously create new rules that accumulate but never expire, with no capacity for them to be challenged on the basis of e.g. efficacy or cost/benefit ratio. Which is what we've been doing.
> That's the way the world works.
That's the way politics works, which is the point -- politics ruins everything it touches and therefore should prudently be restrained from touching many things.
> If there weren't fishing quotas, companies would happily deplete fisheries as quickly as they could get them on the boat.
If you took a vote exclusively of fishing companies, do you think they would favor some quota system or no quota system? Regardless of what they would do if there were no quotas, they are not lobbying for the thing they know would put them out of business in a year.
Antitrust is about anti-competitive practices, like vendor lock-in, tying, collusion, mergers etc. These are practices non-monopolies use to establish a monopoly. Waiting until there is already a monopoly is too late, and the modern focus on "monopolies" is itself being used as a dodge by large companies, because a market with only two or three competitors is already concentrated enough to hold together a cartel.
Moreover, antitrust isn't like other regulations. You typically don't have to impose any compliance burden ahead of time, instead you declare contracts in restraint of trade to be void and prefer remedies in the form of court orders rather than damages. So for example, if a company (regardless of size) is abusing the DMCA or imposing contractual terms to prevent buyers from installing apps on devices the company sold, that's anti-competitive and no court should enforce the contract, and a customer should be able to sue them not for damages but for a patch to allow them to run their own code.
This isn't a problem for new markets because you're not bankrupting the company if they get it wrong or imposing penalties for not hiring a lawyer, you're just preventing the anti-competitive practice from being effective by ordering it to stop the first time anyone raises the objection.
> I'd have gone with rent-instead-of-own and converting purchases into platform subscriptions.
That's ebook licensing.
> But point being that the original law was against the wishes of the largest players in that sector.
The first sale doctrine was originally created by the courts rather than the legislature.
> I'd say the incumbents were pretty upset about that, considering Southwest spent the first 3 years of its existence in court...
But isn't that the point? The incumbents liked it better when the regulators were captured by the industry and imposing regulations at their behest. When those regulations were removed, they sued and got upset.
> I'm sure old ATT would have something to say about that...
Are you kidding? That's how they got their monopoly to begin with. The original phone network was a thousand companies each running their own wires across the city. Ma Bell took a picture of the rat's nest of cables and said "something must be done" and had their monopoly enshrined into the law. And many of those laws persist even after the company was broken up.
> What's your argument?
The regulators are so captured that the thing they're prohibiting is safety testing because the large incumbents neither want to pay for the testing nor want their competitors to be able to advertise having done it when they won't. It's proof that the regulators are beholden to the industry, quod erat demonstrandum.
> You're suggesting the NHTSA solve the US housing market?
I'm suggesting that the industry captures the relevant regulators. NHTSA does things like require safety equipment customers would have demanded from major car companies regardless. This has minimal cost to the large incumbents and in fact helps them by making it more expensive to start a new car company, because crash testing and certification is a negligible incremental cost for a company making millions of cars but a significant fixed cost for a small manufacturer.
Meanwhile allowing more people to live in areas where they don't need cars would actually cause problems for them, so they make sure national policy is to fund highways and not fund high-density market-rate housing construction.
> And let me tell you, automakers aren't thrilled about CAFE standards...
Which is why they had them neutered. Notice how more than half the "cars" people drive are actually trucks and SUVs? Because they have a lower efficiency requirement.
> If your point is that the EPA is under-matched against some of the largest companies on the planet, yes.
The problem is that those are the ones they need to be effective against, because those are the ones operating at scale.
Meanwhile they impose rules with high compliance costs on smaller companies, which is what those larger companies want.
Moreover, the issue is here is not "should regulations exist" -- you need to prohibit major sources of pollution, there is no way around it. Dumping mercury in the river is bad. The issue is that you shouldn't just create a regulatory agency with the power to continuously create new rules that accumulate but never expire, with no capacity for them to be challenged on the basis of e.g. efficacy or cost/benefit ratio. Which is what we've been doing.
> That's the way the world works.
That's the way politics works, which is the point -- politics ruins everything it touches and therefore should prudently be restrained from touching many things.
> If there weren't fishing quotas, companies would happily deplete fisheries as quickly as they could get them on the boat.
If you took a vote exclusively of fishing companies, do you think they would favor some quota system or no quota system? Regardless of what they would do if there were no quotas, they are not lobbying for the thing they know would put them out of business in a year.
Labor laws are a huge example too, we didn't emerge from an age of child labor into the modern era because of regulatory capture.
Occupational Safety and Health laws
Any links to the cases of the following and how they weren't part of regulatory capture?
Is there a specific one you're interested in?
The EPA seems to doing good work with things like leaded gas, CFCs, PFASs, etc.
I feel like our atomic energy agencies are pretty above-board too.
I feel like our atomic energy agencies are pretty above-board too.
What you're really getting at is that sometimes the regulation of a sector is captured by the largest players in a different sector, e.g. fossil fuel energy companies want regulation of nuclear power to make it cost prohibitive.
The EPA is a similar story. It justifies itself by banning leaded gas etc., but then doesn't do only that, and soon certain domestic industries are wiped out by environmental impact studies and other administrative overhead. The companies in those industries don't care because they just move their facilities offshore. The ones who are already foreign companies or were going to do that anyway may even prefer it, because then the rules eliminate competition from domestic operations in the US. And similar to the case of nuclear, environmental rules are often abused by NIMBYs to inhibit construction rather than merely ensure that it isn't harming the environment.
The EPA is a similar story. It justifies itself by banning leaded gas etc., but then doesn't do only that, and soon certain domestic industries are wiped out by environmental impact studies and other administrative overhead. The companies in those industries don't care because they just move their facilities offshore. The ones who are already foreign companies or were going to do that anyway may even prefer it, because then the rules eliminate competition from domestic operations in the US. And similar to the case of nuclear, environmental rules are often abused by NIMBYs to inhibit construction rather than merely ensure that it isn't harming the environment.
Tobacco ?
for climate change we should reach out to climate experts to help us
should we reach out to Police or Military for safety? technically this is what they are supposed to do.
should we reach out to Police or Military for safety? technically this is what they are supposed to do.
Tangentially related: "AI safety is not a model property" (https://www.aisnakeoil.com/p/ai-safety-is-not-a-model-proper...)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39939997
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39939997
In January 26th, 2024, Jan Lipavský (Czech pirate party, Minister of Foreign Affairs) said in World economic forum in Devos during interview:
“It needs to be developed such kind of regulation or possession or to control of those technologies (Ai) that the governments will be sure that it is not going against the interest of government.”
This rhetoric was used by communist regime 34 years ago in my country. Governments are genuinely scared by those new technologies.
I prefer to educate children about AI, how it works and what can do. Of course, education system in Czechia basically ignore new technologies at school and still use frontal teaching as it was hundred years ago.
“It needs to be developed such kind of regulation or possession or to control of those technologies (Ai) that the governments will be sure that it is not going against the interest of government.”
This rhetoric was used by communist regime 34 years ago in my country. Governments are genuinely scared by those new technologies.
I prefer to educate children about AI, how it works and what can do. Of course, education system in Czechia basically ignore new technologies at school and still use frontal teaching as it was hundred years ago.
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Is this another (possibly sponsored) bullshit article about "AI Safety"?
No it's like asking Madagascar to enforce jwalking laws in the USA.
The cats out of the bag you could ban BigTech from using AI tomorrow and we'd still have plenty of AI Taylor Swift porn.
The cats out of the bag you could ban BigTech from using AI tomorrow and we'd still have plenty of AI Taylor Swift porn.
That's because the people always know what's important ;)
It's also the reason that any AI product lives and dies (mostly) depending on whether people will pay for it, especially with finite money. AI hype is only not real if it doesn't evidently move some needle for enough people for a long time consistently. In the short term, it can rely alone on people thinking it's important or the future, and it may be, but that sort of has to play out in some meaningful way. Much like every AI wave before it, and things like Web 3, it'll probably change a few things that weren't already completely automated, but beyond that it isn't really inherently a new type of value created, unless it is.
If Madagascar created an AI tool to detect jay walkers, it wouldn't make enforcement of jay walking sensible, it wouldn't stop people from doing it, and it wouldn't even be operational unless the long tail of bylaw enforcement was also completely automated and actionable. If it's not, then you're just spreading some other resource thin or creating more financial problems for more people who just want to cross the street. I'm not going to walk half a KM to the next light if I can see it's safe to do otherwise, so to solve that problem you want to make driving much cheaper and efficient, then people will never feel safe to jay walk since there will always be traffic, and why would people not be driving anyway!?
AirBnB built tools that made it as easy as possible for people to convert housing into short term rentals, and maximize their return using ML to price them. That's great for them, except the original inspiration was ostensibly to recoup some of the insane rent they were already paying in SF because of existing political nonsense and too many people making too much money. The result ended up being spreading SFs problem to everywhere else instead of solving anything while SF continues being an absolute human catastrophe. Incidentally, now cities are realizing both AirBnB and terrible housing policy just vacuums up their economy, killing their population and productivity along the way until it costs 100% of the average salary to live in a place, and most of that cash ends up sitting idle, being invested elsewhere, or continually intensifying the same problem until living in a tent city seems like a high prospect. You can extract more money more efficiently, but if there isn't money to replace it, people just end up not spending that money on things that are equally important, like raising their kids, food, medication.
It's also the reason that any AI product lives and dies (mostly) depending on whether people will pay for it, especially with finite money. AI hype is only not real if it doesn't evidently move some needle for enough people for a long time consistently. In the short term, it can rely alone on people thinking it's important or the future, and it may be, but that sort of has to play out in some meaningful way. Much like every AI wave before it, and things like Web 3, it'll probably change a few things that weren't already completely automated, but beyond that it isn't really inherently a new type of value created, unless it is.
If Madagascar created an AI tool to detect jay walkers, it wouldn't make enforcement of jay walking sensible, it wouldn't stop people from doing it, and it wouldn't even be operational unless the long tail of bylaw enforcement was also completely automated and actionable. If it's not, then you're just spreading some other resource thin or creating more financial problems for more people who just want to cross the street. I'm not going to walk half a KM to the next light if I can see it's safe to do otherwise, so to solve that problem you want to make driving much cheaper and efficient, then people will never feel safe to jay walk since there will always be traffic, and why would people not be driving anyway!?
AirBnB built tools that made it as easy as possible for people to convert housing into short term rentals, and maximize their return using ML to price them. That's great for them, except the original inspiration was ostensibly to recoup some of the insane rent they were already paying in SF because of existing political nonsense and too many people making too much money. The result ended up being spreading SFs problem to everywhere else instead of solving anything while SF continues being an absolute human catastrophe. Incidentally, now cities are realizing both AirBnB and terrible housing policy just vacuums up their economy, killing their population and productivity along the way until it costs 100% of the average salary to live in a place, and most of that cash ends up sitting idle, being invested elsewhere, or continually intensifying the same problem until living in a tent city seems like a high prospect. You can extract more money more efficiently, but if there isn't money to replace it, people just end up not spending that money on things that are equally important, like raising their kids, food, medication.