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Regulations Keep AI Companies From Killing Your Children [1]

['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']

Date: 2023-11-08  

I want you to keep this story in mind every time some tech executive or apologist whines about not being allowed to innovate just as they please:

Driverless Cruise cars struggled to detect large holes in the road and have so much trouble recognizing children in certain scenarios that they risked hitting them. Yet, until it came under fire this month, Cruise kept its fleet of driverless taxis active, maintaining its regular reassurances of superhuman safety.

That is right: Cruise put self-driving cars on the road that could not properly deal with the presence of children. Does that sound like people we should trust to “innovate” on our streets? What are a few tiny little corpses, I suppose, on the path to glorious profits — I mean, a glorious self-driving future (gloriousness not guaranteed for people who need any assistance getting in or out of cars, of course, or help lifting their luggage).

Some things are simply too important to be left to businesspeople. They simply have too many incentives pointing them to disregard what is best for their fellow humans and pointing them toward only what is in their own short-term interest. At best, you could argue that their incentives are in the short-term interest of the shareholders, but that is hardly any better. The desire to make money has always been an incentive to do bad things, but it has been hyper-charged by the dual pathologies of shareholder capitalism and the notion that businesspeople are somehow better at life because they are occasionally good at making money. We have created instruments that allow them to increase their wealth and thus power — limited liability corporations — and then abdicated almost all control of our economy to them. And thus: self-driving cars that don’t seem to know that running over children is bad.

When a business leader tells you that a regulation is preventing them from innovating, what they too often mean is that a regulation is preventing them from making money by harming someone not them. Self-driving cars are just the latest example. By slowing innovation, we are told, we are keeping people from being safer. Except that no one told anyone that innovation meant cars that could be defeated by potholes, were too stupid to not drag people under them for twenty feet or more, and couldn’t recognize children well enough to take necessary precautions around them. That is a whole lot of innovation, as long as by innovation you mean careless disregard for the lives others.

Democratic control over the economy is a basic building block of civilized life. We cannot have a functioning society if we allow people’s whose primary incentives are to make as much money as fast as possible to decide what is and is not an acceptable cost for their “innovations” to be the ultimate arbiters. Regulations are one means of democratic control. And every time someone complains about regulations, your first thought should be what risk do they want someone else to take on behalf of them making money? Because as we see with stories like Cruise, the answer is very often they are willing to risk someone else’s life, even someone else’s child’s life, in the pursuit of their profit.

And no decent society should ever allow that.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/11/8/2204443/-Regulations-Keep-AI-Companies-From-Killing-Your-Children?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=more_community&pm_medium=web

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