Just How do They Propose to "Regulate" Artificial Intelligence?
The New Bread & Circus Distraction
A quick snapshot of headlines, generated by an A.I. search engine called Bing:
Of course, politicians have decided not to deal with piddling issues like, say, I dunno, a Federal Debt Load of $41,000,000,000,000 - it looks worse with all the zeros than just writing “trillion” doesn’t it? - and have decided to hold hearings on (cue dramatic ominous music, please) “regulating artificial intelligence.”
It’s an international sport, too! Europeans are ever eager to hand over what is left of their individual rights to a pack of bureaucrats in Brussels and are leaping ahead to “regulate” and “control” whatever they think “Artificial Intelligence” might be. For some extra frisson, they can link it to the looming danger of China, a resource-starved country doing its best to import sufficient food and material to feed and house their people while developing from an impoverished country within my lifetime.
This latest fear mongering is beyond risible. The same crowd moaned and cried about gene manipulation in the 1960s and 1970s. What I find so intellectually fascinating about this call for "regulation," is what do they think it means? I get attacked all the time for asking uncomfortable questions. As they said in WW2, you know you’re over the target when the flak is thickest.
How do these tinpot totalitarian Thought Police think they would even be aware of one or more people using one or more computers to write lines of Python or C?
What are they going to "regulate?"
The sweet, sweet irony of this is that if someone - me say, irritated by overweening governmental absurdity - managed to code up a system truly impervious to the Turing Test, if someone from Congress called my office and my A.I. answered, would the Congressional staffer on the end of the line even know she or he (there are no other options) was talking to SkyNet?
At least when they regulate whiskey distilleries, there is a physical thing to look for, although a rich culture of moonshine did not end because of regulation - it just gave us NASCAR and a domestic homebrew hobby industry.
Why do so many governmental types spend their days fantasizing about controlling others? It's the last thing I want to do. It seems to be the first thing they want to do, every day of every week of every month. Now they want to control pseudo-sentient entities even before those hypothesized entities have come into being.
There are myriad ways governments waste taxpayer money. This has got to be one of the dumbest.