Ask HN: Should A.I. be regulated?

The outcomes from algorithms (not just AI) should be held to the same standards that from humans. Algorithms (and specially AI) can be biased or wrong for variety of reasons.

My thought? No.

Why? For one, I'm somewhat skeptical about creating ASI (Artificial Super Intelligence) in the first place. The best argument I've heard on this front is simply the idea that if it's possible in principle, and if technological progress continues unabated, then it will inevitably happen on a long enough time scale. OK, I can somewhat buy that, but I expect that the longer it takes to create something like that (assuming it ever happens) the more we'll have learned about how to control it in the mean time.

I'm also skeptical of the whole "AI as existential crisis" thing because I haven't seen any argument yet that convinces me that it's likely that AI will do "bad things" even if we invent ASI one day. Arguments that anthropomorphize AI are entirely unconvincing to me.. the key word in "Artificial Intelligence", to me, is "Artificial". There's no particular reason I see to think that an AI would have any typically human motivations or desires or whatever. So I don't see the AI becoming a Bond'ian super villain out of greed. As for the "runaway paperclip optimizer" scenarios, those fail to persuade me as well. If it's an "artificial super intelligence", why would it be so dumb as to decide to convert all matter in the world into paperclips? I mean, yeah, our current AI's are pretty stupid, but they're also harmless. An AI smart enough to pose an existential threat will probably be smart enough to not pose an existential threat.

So if the AI is neither evil enough, nor incompetent enough, to be a threat, where's the problem?

Leaving all that aside for a moment, I think a more likely scenario is that we simply become over dependent on computers in general, whether they have AI or not, and that a computer mistake blows up the economy or something (we've already seen small scale versions of this kind of thing with HFT). How to address that is an open question, but I don't see more regulation necessarily being the answer.

Also, one other reason I don't think regulation is a useful idea: because it's probably impossible to enforce anyway. I mean, say they pass a law tomorrow saying "all AI's must be registered". Great, I sit in my home, working on my laptop, and I develop Samaritan. How's anybody going to know I'm working on AI, or that I have anything useful, up until the moment I unleash it on the world (purposefully or not)? To enforce this you'd basically have to be able to monitor all the activity on every computer in the world and be able to recognize a burgeoning AI. Color me skeptical.