But suppose the government dropped the hammer and banned any AI. Is it even possible to enforce? It kind of seems like the genie is out of the bottle here.
It’s next to impossible to ban outcomes. That’s why the idiotic war on drugs is all about banning ingredients for drugs, and still doesn’t work.
The only practical way to ban AI is to ban the hardware that makes it possible. Maybe ban silicon with more than X transistors, or ban clusters with more than Y total transistors.
It would be dumb and would not work (you can still AI on a one CPU, just very slowly). But that would be the angle prohibitionists would have to take.
It's very possible to enforce when you realize most AI stems from a very select bunch of platforms, and even "rogue" AI makers rely on these choke points. In the current stage, enforcing a ban against current AI tools would be quite devastating.
For clarity, I'm not in favor of banning, just that we're still a very long way away from the genie being out of the bottle here. Maybe within the next 5 years if pace keeps up.
Not a chance. But it can be added to the list of laws that everybody breaks all the time, that can come in handy when law enforcement wants to get you for other reasons.
>> But suppose the government dropped the hammer and banned any AI. Is it even possible to enforce? It kind of seems like the genie is out of the bottle here.
> We enforce copyright law, even though the actual act of copying is technologically trivially easy these days.
Exactly. Many software engineers have this weird misunderstanding of law that seems to come from misapplying mathematical standards to the legal system. A law isn't a fucking proof, it doesn't have to be 100% airtight, completely preventing all cases of the undesired behavior to work and be valuable.
I'll make up an analogy on how we enforce it. Imagine that you're watching a bunch of unruly kids on a playground and you have a strict 'no violence' set of rules. The problem is all these children are straight out of hell and just love hitting each other as much as possible. You'd be physically worn out trying to cover lessor acts of violence your actual rule is "If there is bloodshed there is punishment"
That is more how enforcement of copyright actually works. You really, really have to screw up pretty big time for it to be enforced.
Now imagine the "Copyright Absurdism Universe". This is a place where any copyright infringement is immediately detectable by magic the moment it occurs. Do you think this universe would have anything even close to the laws we have? I do not believe so at all. Effectively it would cause society to fall apart very quickly since society and civilization are built on the sharing of all kinds of ideas including language and imagery where any form of copyright maximalism would cause people to be afraid to use any new ideas for fear of being fined by the owner of said ideas.
Maybe this actually a good idea, then "AI" companies will say things like "It's not AI, it's Machine Learning" instead of everyone claiming everything they do is AI.
The only practical way to ban AI is to ban the hardware that makes it possible. Maybe ban silicon with more than X transistors, or ban clusters with more than Y total transistors.
It would be dumb and would not work (you can still AI on a one CPU, just very slowly). But that would be the angle prohibitionists would have to take.