Tag Archives: regulation

Yet Another Reason

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The European Union is moving toward passing legislation that would allow it to curb imports of heavily subsidized foreign products. The legislation doesn’t single out any particular nation; although, the Peoples’s Republic of China is infamous for such subsidies.

Those subsidies allow PRC businesses to sell their products at less than their cost of production in order to sell at lower prices than European businesses can due to their own, unsubsidized, costs of production. That allows the PRC to put those businesses out of business and to seize nearly all of the market share. In the aggregate, this cascades into steadily increasing PRC influence over European economies.

Naturally, the PRC wants to continue this domination, so it’s threatening countermeasures if Europe continues with the impudence of defending itself.

Chinese authorities could initiate anti-discrimination and supply-chain security investigations into the EU’s “overcapacity instrument,” a social media account run by China’s state broadcaster said Friday, citing unnamed sources.
If the EU advances the tool, China will take immediate action and deploy comprehensive countermeasures, it added.

Of course, that retaliation wouldn’t matter if Europe’s nations were doing no business with the PRC or with businesses domiciled there.

The PRC keeps providing reasons for discontinuing business with or within it. It’s time for the EU and for Europe’s nations individually to act on at least some of those reasons, for their own economic survival.

The Pope’s Encyclical

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The Wall Street Journal‘s editors are amused by the press’ response to Pope Leo XIV’s writ that warns of the dangers that Artificial Intelligence presents to the humanity of us all.

I’m amused by the Pope’s naïveté. He wrote this (as cited by the editors), for instance:

Some of what he writes is hard to dispute, such as that AI has “harmful uses, such as the manipulation of information or violations of privacy.”

So do the printing press and reporters since that machine’s invention engage in the harm of manipulating information—what they choose to write, what they choose to not write, how they choose to present either. So do the reporters, specifically, with the means they use to snoop out what they choose then to write about.

And

“There is also a subtler danger,” he writes, of AI “reflecting and reinforcing the stereotypes or ideological bias of their designers and developers.”

“Subtler dangers?” That’s the press and reporters here, too. Reporters today only write consistently with their preconceived notions and/or those of their employers, the press’ collection of editors and publishers. Particular stereotypes are blithely peddled where they support those preconceived notions or contradict the obviously wrong notions of those whom they oppose.

The Pope is on firm ground when he advises the flock—and the rest of us—on morality and the role of God in our lives. However, if he’s going to move from the general of morals and God’s Word to specifics like the tools we use, he would do well to at least be consistent. AI is in many respects, if not most, simply an extension of the printing press, the press industry, and reporters in the arena of information generation and dissemination.

Throw Money at it

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The letter-writer seems to be writing from the Left. Opening with Praise for Ohio’s Republican candidate for Governor Vivek Ramaswamy’s proposal for attacking Medicaid fraud, he quickly pivoted.

States need more funds to address fraud….

How typical.

No, States do not need more funds to combat and drastically reduce, much less “address,” fraud. Were States actually to get serious about combatting and reducing Medicaid, they’d uncover 10s of millions, if not billions, of dollars of fraud, and they’d recover significant percentages of those dollars. Those dollars then could feed back into the program to help keep Medicaid fraud down to an absolute minimum.

To address the problem for long-term of vastly reduced fraud and commensurate reduced fraud recovery funds, States need only to reallocate existing spending. They most assuredly do not need more money blindly and blithely tossed over the transom at the problem.

The Nub of the Matter

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An article concerning the nature of “sex work” and the debate over whether it ought be decriminalized and destigmatized, there was this characterization:

On [one] side are those arguing for total decriminalization, which lifts all laws regulating the buying and selling of sex acts.

And this, from a woman who ultimately escaped from the environment:

Prostitution is someone using their money and power to get someone else to provide a service for them. You’re literally paid to be a product that is used and discarded.

There it is, in all its glory, from the life of an individual once in the environment and from the broad movement looking to decriminalize “sex” work. It isn’t about sex; it’s about faceless male gratification, for whom the woman isn’t even a human being; she’s just a body temperature, organic inflatable sex doll. It’s not even a matter of buying a selling sex; it’s only renting a warm doll for a hour or a night, otherwise akin to renting a power tool.

Say, though, that in an amoral yet otherwise ideal world, this work is entirely legalized. On what basis would we believe the women involved really are engaging in it on their own initiative and entirely free of coercion? Pimps will still be there, now legalized as agents or brokers for the firms renting these commodities. And they’ll still control the women, who they engage with, what they’ll do—be required to do under the terms of their employment—during those engagements.

Would a woman be free to leave one…employer…for another whenever she chose to do so? Would she be free to leave the…industry…altogether and seek employment doing other things wholly apart from being a rented sex doll? Those answers seem obvious.

Tellingly, too, the movement wholly ignores the men who are trafficked or pimped out as male prostitutes, and worse, the movement wholly ignores the children, of both sexes, who are trafficked for sex.

The answer to “sex work” isn’t to legalize it. It’s a multipart question: help the women (and the men and children) recover from the damage done by their present strait and then learn other means of earning a living—a legitimate living and one in which they keep all of their wages. In parallel, hammer severely the traffickers and pimps making these victims—and that’s what the women (and men and children) are to five nines significance—”available.” Hold criminally liable the customers of these pimps and traffickers for receiving illegal goods. They’re certainly not customers of the women; they’re receivers of the pimps’ and traffickers’ product. And publicly shame those customers for their abuse of the women whose bodies are the product they rented.

Experts Everywhere

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A couple of professors at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School Department of Legal Studies and Business Ethics want a body of Experts to supervise risks from emergent AI, saying that such a body would be better than an FDA-like regulatory body, or Congress through statutorily enabled product-safety laws.

They’re right that having a government body of experts like the FDA do this sort of thing is determinedly suboptimal. They’re right, also, regarding Congress, although Congress is considerably more malleable than a department or agency of bureaucrats.

But another body of Experts?

Bank supervision, which emerged in the Civil War and took its current form out of the Great Depression, offers the best framework for overseeing the most advanced AI labs.

After all,

Frontier AI labs such as OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google DeepMind are different.

And there’s always an excuse for standing up yet another bureaucratic regulatory body. In the case of their bank supervision model, about which they’re so enthusiastic, they give their game away [emphasis added].

Banks are too complex to govern through legislated rules alone, too important to leave to market discipline, and too dynamic for one-time approval.
Bank examiners often sit inside the institutions they oversee.

That’s the problem with our economic system government overlords. With the Panic of 2008, the Federal government created out of whole cloth the myth of some (ultimately government favored) businesses are too big to fail and so must always be guaranteed a government bailout. That confidence in the Federal apparatchiks sitting inside the banks also is misplaced. It’s only necessary to see the failures of the Silvergate, Signature, and First Republic banks to see the intrinsic failure of this. Those banks didn’t only fail through their own mismanagement; they also failed because their regulators were incompetent enough or lazy enough or complacent enough to miss those bank managers’ basic economics error of borrowing short-term while lending long-term and letting those two get ‘way out of balance. That allowed their short-term debts to come due before they had the long-term debt income to cover.

But the good professors want a board of Expert Apparatchiks inside the OpenAIs, Anthropics, and DeepMinds to oversee how these handle risks of emergent AI.

And this:

Banks share information with supervisors that they could never safely disclose publicly.

AI software is too important, too critical to national security, to share with apparatchiks of government. Our Federal government is infamous for its inability to defend against PRC cyber espionage. It’s infamous, also, for its bureaucrat employees leaking confidential financial data about businesses and persons of which those bureaucrats personally disapprove.

And this:

An AI risk supervisor could be funded by industry fees. Its leaders should be Senate-confirmed and removable by the president, but its expert staff should be insulated from day-to-day political pressure.

No.

Experts have their uses, often very important uses. On the witness stand to explain this or that aspect of a crime, balanced by another expert on the witness stand with a differing explanation. In police department forensics sections. As teachers in environments where their expertise is more important to the teaching than their teaching style. In medical and mental health doctor offices.

But in government? Not so much. Experts are useful when they’re part of a range of experts advising, as employees, the government’s decision makers. But as government decision makers? Definitely not so much. For the lack of utility of that last role, it’s only necessary to look at the Fauci-Collins-led experts as bureaucrats, or at the experts of the John Brennan and James Clapper CIA and ODNI, respectively.

The Supreme Court was right when it greatly reduced Chevon Deference in its Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo ruling, making clear that “experts” in government aren’t owed any particular deference on matters of government behaviors and decision-making.

So it is with emergent AI.