[ramraj07]

I don't see your analogy here. You want ML to be unregulated like woodworking as opposed to medicine. That's actually not a good analogy at all, since even woodworking in service of people is quite regulated via building codes, you're just free to practice as a hobby.

Medicine and law are fields where being a hobby is much harder without using other people as guinea pigs rather than yourself, so it's regulated in any sane country. So it seems regulation follows to fields which can have significant impact on regular people's lives and is more dependent on the nature of the field itself than of some bad actors. Of course bad actors are often what prompts the regulation but it's not exactly a great argument to say we don't need speed limits if no one ever crossed it.

Does AI need regulation? Probably. If copilot accelerates that process then good. But it's also outrageous how much more this community cares about the non-violation of perceived open-source-code-freedom than all the other evil crap AI is used for (like in literal concentration camps). The amount of shit GitHub is getting over this is magnitudes larger than for all the evil stuff Google and Facebook have done with AI. But no comment from here. Presumably because you weren't the customer (or so you thought). When women were mailed material telling them they're pregnant even before they themselves knew but no one batted an eye here. But woe be someone who steals code you _already released for free _ now that's a step too far! Zuckerberg was right, y'all care more about the dead squirrel in your yard than a genocide across the world.

[pessimizer]

> The amount of shit GitHub is getting over this is magnitudes larger than for all the evil stuff Google and Facebook have done with AI. But no comment from here.

This is not true. It's trivial to find probably two orders of magnitude more complaints about those larger companies on this site than the two or three days of Github bashing. It's also trivial to find hundreds of posts in threads saying "Everybody starts screaming when [Google/Apple/Facebook/the Government] does something like this, but people just let [Google/Apple/Facebook/the Government] get away with doing far worse."

When you do this, what you're doing is trying to shut down debate.

[harikb]

> When women were mailed material telling them they're pregnant even before they themselves knew but no one batted an eye here

This is example often quoted. This wasn’t AI. I believe it was Target and it was simple correlation with search keywords

Moreover the issue was her parents finding out before she herself told them. The result would have been same if she had setup a baby registry at Target and the company assumed the news wasn’t a secret.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-targ...

[kbenson]

As a nitpick, it is AI, it's just bit different than the current crop of what most people think of as AI. Expert systems and evolutionary programming are also in the same spectrum as ML, as steps along the path to what we think true AI will be (even if not necessarily a straight path).

Noticing statistical correlations and acting on them automatically in a recommendation engine is definitely a type of AI.