AI is not very regulated. For instance, Max Tegmark notes that AI is less regulated than a sandwich shop in the US. This seems kind of wild for an industry where most relevant scientists think there is a serious chance of it destroying humanity. Even for something that occasionally encourages children to kill themselves. Shouldn’t it at least be as regulated as paroxetine?
The kinds of things I hear people say about why it shouldn’t be regulated I think mostly apply to everything—’technology is usually good on net’, ‘the government might not be able to regulate it well’ etc. So why in fact is this so unusually unregulated?
I speculate that the real reason AI isn’t very regulated is that it’s on computers, and regulating the motion of numbers on computers feels unnatural to most people. We have already seen that the world of software and the internet is a much freer place than the physical world. That’s one thing I like about it—I can just set up shop and write blog posts without even having to acquire a blogging permit. People have intuitions that ideas, information, thoughts should be free, and aren’t really real anyway, and can’t really do anything on their own. Are you seriously going to regulate the doing of math? Even wanting to seems kind of absurd—both hopeless and overcontrolling.
But if you do work in a virtual world, you do work in real life. These intuitions of the unreality and passivity of virtual things are wrong, and once the ‘ideas’ and ‘information’ become elaborate calculations that change the real world, their wrongness starts to get intense. We already live in a reality where physical things constantly move as a result of virtual activity. And while we’ve regulated a few virtual areas for this reason (for instance things that involve money or Europe), I’d say we haven’t reckoned with this much yet: the virtual worlds we have created in recent decades remain a wild west, with the help of our intuitions that they should be.
As David has pointed out to me: imagine if companies were breeding new biological entities that were already as capable as humans at many tasks—would the world be responding in remotely the same way? Would that be unregulated? Why is it different on computers?
I think this might change soon—as the impetus for important real world occurrences starts to come from patterns on computers, I think virtual worlds might rapidly start to feel like the proper realm of government control. Ideally we would make that adjustment before we start to pay a lot of costs for the error.
I'm not sure it's accurate that we don't regulate "stuff on computers". For instance, banking largely occurs online now but is also one of the most regulated parts of the economy.
My theory is that it's because AI is new. If you read about 18th century capitalism many industries that are highly regulated today face much less regulation. Even with social media, we're just now starting to see real regulations pass in recent years, but the tech is 20 years old at this point.
This is tangential, but, one of the odd things about the law regarding computers and the internet is how it often is like a parallel virtual world, but the law of the internet, when it comes to crimes, doesn't have the same level of specificity and texture as offline criminal law. (I think this might be less the case with civil law?) Offline, we have theft, vandalism, destruction of property, etc; online everything's just a violation of the fairly nonspecific Computer Fraud and Abuse act. One can imagine a world where instead of creating a one-size-fits-all crime for everything bad done on the internet, the CFAA instead imported real-world crimes to the internet; or one where it created new parallels to the old crimes. Instead we got the most boring and least thoughtful option!
I think there is something of a cause in common here, though -- namely, it's hard to get legislatures to do much of anything, and they don't know a lot about the internet (especially due to the US's current case of "wow, all the lawmakers are really old" -- something that has not historically always been the case to the same extent).
That, and a lot of the old laws (murder, etc) really originally come out of common law rather than statute, and we don't let judges just invent new common-law crimes these days, which uh, yeah, we really shouldn't. :P