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MS Exec Ignores AI Harm to Avoid Regulation, Or Why the Cassandras Are Right [1]

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Date: 2023-05-12

A Microsoft exec thinks that AI should not be regulated until it actually harms people:

"There has to be at least a little bit of harm, so that we see what is the real problem," Schwarz explained. "Is there a real problem? Did anybody suffer at least a thousand dollars' worth of damage because of that? Should we jump in to regulate something on a planet of 8 billion people when there is not even a thousand dollars of damage? Of course not." ... Schwarz seemed to discount the urgency of lawmakers' rush to prevent harms to civil rights, though, suggesting instead that preventing monetary harms should be the goal of regulations and that there is seemingly no need for that yet. "You don't put regulation in place to prevent a thousand dollars' worth of harm, where the same regulation prevents a million dollars' worth of benefit to people around the world," Schwarz said. “Meaningful harm” from AI necessary before regulation, says Microsoft exec | Ars Technica

This position is, of course, bullshit. Harm from AI has been documented for years:

If you want to limit this to harm caused by what the press is calling AI today, LLM systems and their visual art equivalents:

And the lsit above doesn't even include lawsuits over stealing intellectual property to feed the training data, since those are still being litigated.

It beggars belief to think that Schwartz is not aware of these harms, and others like them. He would have to be oblivious to the point of being incapable of crossing the street because he wouldn't notice delivery trucks bearing down on him. He most likely knows, and thus is most likely lying about the situation so as to fend off regulation that might cost his company a handful of dollars.

And that is why strong regulation is so important. The people running the large AI companies, the people like Schwartz, have given us precious little reason to think that they give a tinker's damn about any of us. Google and Microsoft have both gutted their AI ethics organizations, weakening internal checks on the product teams. OpenAI, a Microsoft partner, has said that open sourcing their code is "dangerous" -- meaning that outsiders will have precious little opportunity to track how their systems really work and really affect people. We are grist for their mills. AI may bankrupt you, it may discriminate against you, it may weaken your democracy, it may even kill you. Those are sacrifices that Schwartz, and others in powerful AI companies, appear to be willing to make.

I have been accused of over-hyping the dangers from AI. Considering that I don't believe in the fantasies of extra-human level artificial intelligence, I find that a bit amusing. And I understand the potential benefits AI can bring. Hell, I am a programmer. A largely self-taught programmer -- neither of my degrees is directly related to computer science. I have made my living in IT for my entire professional life, including as a programmer. I program on the side for fun. I am no anti-technology Cassandra.

But the tragedy of Cassandra is that she was right. Almost every new technology has externalities, costs that are easy to pass off to someone other than the person responsible for producing them. We live in a world made worse by allowing social media companies to do whatever they wanted with our data. The AI leadership is telling us loud and clear how little they care about the externalities. They mouth platitudes about protecting us from imaginary super intelligences, but when it comes to preventing real harms in the here and now? Well, in the words of Schwartz, "There has to be at least a little bit of harm, so that we see what is the real problem."

Harm for you, of course. Not for him. Not for the companies he works for. You can only get widespread benefits from new technologies if the externalities are contained and the vulnerable are protected and assisted. In other words, you can only get widespread benefits from new technologies with strong regulations. If you really want to benefit from AI, you should be working hard to ensure that proper regulation is established as soon as possible. Anyone arguing otherwise is simply trying to line their pockets at your expense.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/5/12/2168847/-MS-Exec-Ignores-AI-Harm-to-Avoid-Regulation-Or-Why-the-Cassandras-Are-Right

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