Companies should not be responsible for regulating themselves. That’s the whole reason we have government. Why are people still saying that AI regulation is unnecessary when the companies themselves are asking to be regulated? I feel crazy for even needing to point any of this out!
(And before anybody says “lock-in,”1 let me remind you that the purpose of lock-in is to prevent newer and smaller competitors from catching up. Regulating only the most powerful models, as these companies and their employees are suggesting, would be the exact opposite!)
- I’m referring to the phenomenon where large, established companies lobby in favor of tighter industry regulations in order to slow down smaller competitors and/or create barriers to entry for future competitors. If there’s an official term for this, I couldn’t find it–if you know it, please leave a comment!. ↩︎
Help, I’m Arguing With People on the Internet and I Can’t Get Up
“Views” is such a frustrating number to optimize for. What does it matter how many people see what you’ve said or done, if you don’t know how many people you’ve actually affected?
You know what a much more useful metric would be? “Number of minds changed.” That sure would be nice. It is so exhausting when someone’s wrong on the internet in a way that it feels so gosh-danged important to try to correct them, but is it really? You can sometimes tell if the person you’re arguing with changes their mind, but what about all the lurkers who never pitch in? Maybe you helped some other people’s understanding, even if you couldn’t get the OP to budge. Or maybe not! Who knows? It’s maddening!
Anyway, to completely and randomly change the subject: AI doesn’t need a personality or instincts or emotions or a desire for self-preservation or even consciousness to be superintelligent and wipe us all out; just because something has been in fiction a lot and has never happened before doesn’t mean it isn’t about to happen; and if some fatuous nimrod says a thing, that (by itself) is not evidence the thing is false. If you disagree, you are being Wrong On The Internet and if you would please just stop now it would save me a lot of aggravation. Thank you.
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Tagged as being wrong on the Internet, don't read the comments, funny, relatable, Writing