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by tssva 15 days ago
If AI is going to be regulated those regulations should be debated in public and based upon the resulting laws passed by the legislative process and not determined by royal decree.
2 comments

Executive orders don't regulate AI. They only apply to the Federal Government operations.
The previous administration did same: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_14110

So if we’re going to be rational about it, I think it is better to critique the substance of the EO rather than its mere existence, which is common practice: https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/statistics/data/executive-or...

So in that spirit, what do you think of the substance?

Well sure, the previous administration also abused executive authority. That's not news or controversial in any way.

How does that make it better for the current administration to do it?

Executive Orders are a common practice across presidencies, not just the current and previous: https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/statistics/data/executive-or...

Whether that’s abuse or not I am not equipped to say with any confidence. I’d be curious to understand why you think this particular case is one of abusing executive authority and when an EO might not be such a case?

Well of course as you point out, EOs have gone from single digits, to double-digits, to thousands, and now down to hundreds per POTUS.

Contextually, I think it's a very reasonable (and commonly held, in the academic world) take that the EOs have also gotten far more legislative and legal. This is partly (but only partly) owing to administrative deference delegated by congress.

It's also somewhat specific to technological innovations, which some EOs have sought to occupy the field on before the lumbering process of congress can respond. And it's not limited to published EOs either, but many executive actions, especially in the White House OLC. This was very obvious during the W. Bush administration as regards the (Lotus Domino) email system in place at that time (which was the topic of my thesis, so it kinda serves as a temporal landmark in my consideration of this issue, but I do genuinely think it was a new frontier in executive overreach and obfuscation of interests in terms of how the White House has approached its interactions with the internet).

> The previous administration did the same

Yeah, and I hated that move in the exact same way I hate the one this thread is about.

No, we can be rational and critique its existence. Especially given the current administration’s track record.