alt Hacker News> Namely, restricting the use of AI in corporate environments so that it does not destroy the economy as it advances.
Regulate what, exactly?
Limit what AI corporations can use? Other countries would love that more than anything. Basically a free gift to any competitors or any startup that quietly avoids the rules.
There’s a theoretical version where all the countries in the world join hands and agree not to compete with each other, but that’s so impractical that I don’t find it interesting to discuss.
> Place legal restrictions on (at least) large companies such that they may not use AI to replace human labor in this way.
So small companies get the advantage, but large companies don’t? And large companies in other countries also get the advantage?
This is a highly precise way for a country to take out all of their large companies. What would actually happen is that every large company would start the process of relocating to another country right away, accelerating job losses rather than slowing them.
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On competition between countries: you’re imagining the world economy as working in the same way pre and post AGI, I doubt it will work the same way at all.
There is not a single country nor trading block on Earth who is going to allow some AI dominant superpower to ravage them. The idea that America or China wins an economic game here is absurd, what happens instead is that trade barriers go up hard and the world fragments into blocks that tolerate AI to differing levels. Unevenly distributed AGI kills globalism the next day.
For the rest of your reply you ignore the “at least” part in that sentence, and also seem to expect a detailed policy proposal. The details can be worked out; there is some reasonable compromise between what activities AI can and cannot be used for, and what level of capability can be deployed where.
More broadly, you seem to believe in a just world fallacy of unregulated capitalism being an inherent good. It isn’t, and regulations exist even in the United States, so this unregulated state doesn’t exist now.
Moreover, regulations and redistribution are stronger elsewhere in the developed world, and there is a strong argument to be made that the lack of these in the US, and the gap between rich and poor that it causes, is responsible for more suffering than having more of these things outside of it.
> world join hands and agree not to compete with each other
We kinda do for other areas.
Largely the world agrees not to pirate software, tv, other IP.
THe issue of joblessness is well understood in china, they know that jobless people means a drop in living standards, a drop in living standards means the "contract" has failed.
So it makes sense that countries like america and the constituents of the EU understand that loosing 10% of all jobs in a few years is going to be a massive dick punch.
I also I think that finally the historians and economic types havae got through to the dipshit billionaire that they only have money because the plebs are spending money. If the plebs are unemployed and unemployable, they (the billionaires) are going to be lynched.
> Limit what AI corporations can use? Other countries would love that more than anything. Basically a free gift to any competitors or any startup that quietly avoids the rules.
Sure - look at what is being done today with H1B visas and tariffs.
What is more important to you - having a job and a functioning economy/society, or upholding some "free market" doctrine you've bought into?
Just as with H1B visas, you restrict usage. For example, don't allow AI to replace any job that pays under $250K.
If foreign countries make things cheaper, just as China is making EVs that cost a fraction of a Tesla, then slap tariffs on them.
A government should be primarily concerned about the people it represents, not about the profitability of the companies who are lobbying/bribing it.
You start from incorrect premises by presupposing agreed-upon rules would never work anyway.
"Competition" only makes sense within a pre-mediated set of constrains. Rules all competitors agree to.
Workable rules are a difficult problem, that doesn't mean it wasn't worthwhile to come up with them.