206. On Congressional Hearings On Artificial Intelligence (May 2023)

Follow the science…fiction?

In the AI hearings a panelist suggested the best approach to regulation would be to regulate based on compute or model size. This seems to be the most a-technical and short-sighted way to regulate. 1/8

2/ imagine it is the early 1970s and fear of “databanks” (SQL) sweeps across the industrialized world. In 1980 disk drives held 30MB. Imagine the downstream effects of capping / regulating drives over 30MB?

3/ How would this have changed the innovation trajectory? Would anyone have kept making large drives? Would the only government have access to large drives? Would we ever have 100,000 of our own photos? Even CD-ROM?

4/ A cynic would say this is just the incumbent trying to define the market / regulatory boundary to their advantage as it exists today. We saw this happen with energy companies. We saw this with healthcare/pharma. With transportation.

5/ this is a shelf of books from the 80s on risks of computers and privacy. Only at the highest altitude were these predictions close. But imagine if we capped network bandwidth, storage, or processing power to “prevent” these risks?

Some books I own from the 1980s or so on the risks of databases and privacy.

6/ Everyone, no matter where you are on any issue, should be wary of when industry leaders call for regulation that happens to align [sic] with what they might claim is a competitive advantage in other contexts at this moment.

7/ one question I wish would get asked more is what hypothetical concerns about AI usage are not already covered by existing regulations? AI does not exist nor is it used independent of any system, just as storage isn’t about privacy itself.

8/ Regulation needs to respond to real and not hypothetical concerns (v theoretical concerns based on physics as we see in construction or based on biology as we see in pharma). Above all it should not be designed around some obvious point in time technology known to grow/change.

PS:/ Full link to hearing and transcript here.

https://www.c-span.org/video/?528117-1/openai-ceo-testifies-artificial-intelligence