Comment by hermannj314
8 hours ago
When a "right to..." law is passed, there is usually an accompanying narrative that explains a past injustice that will be corrected. Matthew Shepard hate crime, Civil Rights Voting act, etc.
The absence of such a story makes me think this law doesn't protect shit. What exactly did a Montanian get killed or arrested trying to do with a computer that is now protected? Can I use AI during a traffic stop or use AI to surveil and doxx governemnt employees? What exactly is the government giving up by granting me this right?
Or is this just about supressing opposition to data centers?
Yeah I think it's pretty obviously the AI industry trying to ban its own regulation
> Nationally, the Right to Compute movement is gaining traction. Spearheaded by the grassroots group RightToCompute.ai, the campaign argues that computation — like speech and property — is a fundamental human right. “A computer is an extension of the human capacity to think,” the organization states.
Computation however requires a vast supply chain where certain middlemen have a near monopoly on distribution of said "fundamental right". The incentives for lobbyists seems clear.
I don't necessarily disagree with the idea, but until profit is shared with taxpayers, this is a one-way transaction of taxpayers bankrolling AI companies.
I find your claim that there is a monopoly on computing laughable. No other technology has improved in quality or dropped in price as much as computers over the last 40 years. If this what you get from a monopoly, then we need more monopolies.
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Regulation is just regulatory capture by incumbents and also a national security risk.
Looks like this one might be while in general the rule does not hold. Good regulations exist, and so do bad ones. Arguments without nuance often do more harm than good to your side.
You argue that food safety tellregialtikns are just regularity capture?
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This is mostly signaling, but NY is currently considering a law to prevent AI systems from giving legal and medical advice: https://statescoop.com/new-york-bill-would-ban-chatbots-lega...
I don't think that this is a good idea. For medical applications, I can understand that LLMs are not the best solution, since they are so bad with numbers/probabilities. But for legal advice, I think they should be pretty good.
So the only reason I can think of to forbid such use cases is that people in those professions fear being replaced by machines.
Preventable medical errors kill 250,000 American every year, I can imagine LLMs could be both good and bad for that number, but on net, it is hard to say without just guessing. But if you ban the application of LLMs to medical care, you close that door before even seeing the potential on the other side. I think that is absurd.
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Eh, if states can pass restrictive laws on AI in absence of a correspondingly negative motivating event, I don't see any contradiction in doing the opposite.
> if states can pass restrictive laws on AI in absence of a correspondingly negative motivating event...
If you mean besides the extensive harm to air quality, the large land fingerprint of data centers, the massive strain on water resources and treatment facilities, the insane electricity demands resulting in skyrocketing prices pushed onto everyone else, the deafening noise pollution, and what they've done to the price of RAM, then sure. And that's just the data centers!
The usage of AI itself has resulted in all kinds of harm and even actual deaths. AI has wrongfully denied people healthcare coverage they were entitled to preventing or delaying needed surgeries and treatments. There's a growing list of LLM related suicides (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaths_linked_to_chatbots). The use of AI in parole systems has kept people locked behind bars when they shouldn't have been due to biases in the bots making decisions. AI used for self-driving driving cars have killed pedestrians and other drivers. There are thousands of AI generated harms tracked here: https://airisk.mit.edu/ai-incident-tracker
What a load of shit. I have relatives in Ashburn VA, the data center capital of the world, and none of these negative effects are anything but NIMBY bullshit.
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God I hate safetyism
so the jobs have to be lost _first_ , then we can ban it?
Job loss is a horrible reason to ban something. Think about our history if we always did that. We would all be stuck working on farms today, because we didn’t want to allow tractors or other machinery because it would take away farming jobs.
Instead of banning tech to save jobs, pass laws that make sure tech prices in externalities (tax carbon emissions), and find other ways to assist people who lose jobs (UBI, good social safety nets, etc).
Don’t stifle progress just because it makes us have to work less.
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If the idea was that laws must be motivated by a negative occurrence rather than preemptive, then that'd follow yeah (if counting job loss as a reason to ban something, which I think is questionable). But note akersten is saying that it's normal for laws to be preemptive in both cases.
Just like when musicians were on strike and the radio people decided to play a recording over the air (gasp! a record!) rather than live performances.
A nice ban on playing recorded music would have saved those jobs.
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>>absence of a correspondingly negative motivating event.
You don't think there's reasons pass laws banning AI...datacenters?
Because what state is banning the concept of AI? They're banning/restricting the creation of a type of infrastructure within their borders because they feel that is detrimental to their citizens. Maybe it's NIMBY/Luditte BS to you, but people not wanting their resources to go help ensure some dork can have a chat-bot girlfriend seems normal to me.
I'm already running an LLM locally. This is just me renting space in a data center. Since when did we restrict people's ability to do things? For the record my local models run off the solar bolted to my roof. Even including the data center I'm using 1/10th of the energy we were using on tube monitors back in the 90s. This is exhausting. My GPU would be demonstrably using more power by playing a videogame right now than when I run a local LLM.
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Why should we stop there? Let’s ban people flying on vacations, because why should our resources go towards some dork laying out in the sun? Air travel is horribly wasteful. Let’s ban people racing cars, that is also wasteful. We shouldn’t be using our resources to drive in circles.
How do we pick which activities are worth using resources? Which ones are too ‘dorky’ to allow?
Look, I am all for pricing the externalities into resource consumption. Tax carbon production, to make sure energy consumption is sustainable, but don’t dictate which uses of energy are acceptable or ‘worth it’, because I don’t want only mainstream things to be allowed.
I didn't say any of that in my comment nor express an opinion about this whole thing writ large. I'm only pointing out that it's not weird for legislature to preempt a real world use case by way of pointing out similar laws.
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> Maybe it's NIMBY/Luditte BS to you, but people not wanting their resources to go help ensure some dork can have a chat-bot girlfriend seems normal to me.
Why would it be your business, or anyone else's, to stop someone from doing this?
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