[Aurornis]

I addressed this in my comment:

> You don’t write the laws and regulations for a perfectly faultless government that doesn’t exist. You write them for the governments as they do exist, which means they must be written first in a way that makes them resilient to bad governments abusing them.

The answer isn't "Don't regulate anything!". The answer needs to be an approach to regulation that restrains the government from over-reach.

Authoritarian and fascists governments throughout history have taken advantage of the desire for safety and predictability to rise to power. They never let an emergency or concern go to waste to expand their powers, which almost never retract once the initial societal panic is gone.

[sph]

> The answer needs to be an approach to regulation that restrains the government from over-reach.

This is restating the ‘who watches the watchmen?’ problem, which by definition has no solution. The government writes the laws, no one can stop it from writing overreaching laws, unless there is no separation from the concept of government and citizens themselves.

[lII1lIlI11ll]

> This is restating the ‘who watches the watchmen?’ problem, which by definition has no solution. The government writes the laws, no one can stop it from writing overreaching laws, unless there is no separation from the concept of government and citizens themselves.

I have been pondering about this issue due to the ongoing fall from grace of EU with ChatControl debacle. I think the good approach can be to enshrine a strong and modern protections in a constitution-like foundation that requires some very high majority threshold to change. US constitution (especially the original one practically forbidding individual income tax) was great for its time and many European states and EU itself intentionally don't have one. UK and EU and two great cautionary tales of what happens when a group of bureaucrats can just decide that their subjects don't actually have any rights to communicate online in private or post politically-undesirable opinions anonymously on Internet.

[beepbooptheory]

OK but then this just feels like an ultimately empty, universally acceptable thing to argue for. No one wants overreach. Its like: "we should prevent regulations that actively harm people." I agree with that! This is precisely what I mean about it just all feeling like a mostly empty dismissal, not something people can use.

[SpicyLemonZest]

Ok, but this is so abstract that it fails to connect to the issue at hand. Ancient Athenians would have been quite mystified by the idea that certain metals are so dangerous that nobody must be allowed to own even a small piece of them; we don’t restrict uranium because our democracy is more tyrannical than theirs, we do it because we’ve discovered important facts about nuclear physics they didn’t know.

I think it would be quite sad if the mechanics of AI end up being such that people can’t be trusted with powerful compute, but sometimes sad things are true.

[Aurornis]

> Ok, but this is so abstract that it fails to connect to the issue at hand. Ancient Athenians…

There is actually a lot to learn from history on this topic. There is a reason why most successful governments are founded with documents outlining the rights that people have and limiting the powers of the government.

Your comparison to radioactivity doesn’t hold because you’re trying to compare physical harms to information freedom. Once you go down the path of outlawing access to general knowledge unless the government decides you’re worthy of being able to access the knowledge you’re just signing up for government control of knowledge.

We’re not talking about restricting uranium or nuclear bombs in this thread. We’re talking about government control over words (or weights and tokens). This almost turning into a new “think of the children” where we’re asked to consider surrendering access to knowledge and freedom to learn because that knowledge might harm someone. If you aren’t thinking about how inviting the government to become the arbiter of safe knowledge access would go wrong you can look to many of the other governments throughout history that have restricted knowledge access in the name of protecting the people.

[SpicyLemonZest]

Again, you're going very deep into incomplete abstractions. If I say the words "100% peanut free!", even though I know my food in fact contains peanuts, I'm going to get into serious trouble and it will do me no good to object that it's tyrannical to punish me for words. Perhaps there's some philosophical sense in which the words were not harmful themselves, but the action of stating them causes harm in obvious and predictable ways, and any functional society has to prevent such things.