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Unpopular opinion on HN. But governments who have draconian laws against AI acceleration will put their country behind.

When I grew up in India in the 80s and early 90s, the government banned, imposed heavy-tarrifs on computers. The country was a shithole till we were forced to open up the economy.

These kind of policies sets countries decades behind and happens silently.

I'm glad for an AI to record everything of me and help me get better / substitute me.




> governments who have draconian laws against AI acceleration will put their country behind

Is this a law against acceleration or a privacy law?

I agree that there is a competition for the crown of the world’s AI capital. (Presently between Washington and Beijing.) But Brazil is too small to demand a seat at the table, like the EU can. That means it shouldn’t give its leverage away for free.


> I'm glad for an AI to record everything of me and help me get better / substitute me.

Then you are free to consent to that. You are not permitted, on the other hand, to presume that consent from every other person on the planet which is what these companies have done and continue doing.

That's it. Just ask. Just asking the damn question solves 99% of the ethical issues people raise about this tech, ask, and it's done. But they won't, because they know damn well a whole lot of people are going to say no. Far too many for it to be viable tech.

This is so simple and the pro-AI people just willfully prevent their understanding of it. You do not get to trample the rights of everyone on the planet just to make a thing. You just don't. We won't even take perfectly good organs from dead people who didn't volunteer them before they died to help people. If it was impossible to fully sequence the human genome without a DNA sample from every living person, and one person in the south of England is too afraid of needles to give it up, then you don't get to do that fella, irrespective of how good it might be to do. No matter how useful it might be.

This is like, the base ethics involved in any and all science, apart from AI apparently.


> I'm glad for an AI to record everything of me and help me get better / substitute me.

Yes, and you can give affirmative consent to that. In some countries, however, companies cannot force it upon you.


India is still a very poor country, despite the huge amount of IT workers.


It would have been even worse off (with African level of poverty) if there weren't an IT revolution.


The law used to support this decision was the LGPD. LGPD is not against AI, it's pro-privacy and pro-explicit user consent. It was approved back in 2018, mirroring the GDPR.

Meta was training Generative AI on Instagram photos as an opt-out feature and even after opting out, photos you uploaded before that date could still be used to train generative models. I don't think stopping it is by any means "draconian".




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