[Applejinx]

Very much this. One of the dark patterns of Silicon Valley is the working out of how to take behavior that would be a big problem if you had humans directly doing it, and delegate it to an algorithm.

There are a lot of things in society where you can gain an edge and/or profit by doing crime: either straight up stealing, or extorting/assault/bullying, or subtler things like playing into long-standing biases for your own benefit through hiring (say, for a sales force?) only the demographic that people most expect to see in positions of power, and refusing anyone who wouldn't fit that image on the behalf of your most prejudiced customers. They're all variations on crimes to the extent that they're coded into current law.

If you plausibly build these crimes into the algorithms in any way, you benefit from committing them while being able to pretend you're not doing it. Stands to reason that the law-makers are interested.

In the absence of regulation it's a race to see who can commit the most profitable crimes the most enthusiastically, with much hiring competition for whoever is the best at doing it. With regulation, it's more about competition for whoever is the best at HIDING it :)

If it wasn't somewhat (or very) adversarial by nature, we wouldn't need to have regulators in the first place… they're a natural part of a system that inherently tries to grow by any means necessary and can't regulate itself in any meaningful sense. Sounds like things are proceeding as they have to proceed.