AI-regulation and the notion of new technology

 An old tale is that when locomotion was invented during the 19th century it came with a medical discourse, we’re people were afraid of their inner organs becoming unarranged or that the human mind could not phantom incredible speeds of 40 km/h. Similar aspects can be high lighted with the case of computer games containing graphic violence, leading to outburst of violence all over society. As astonishing that it might seem for people living and partaking in these debates, some decades later society is still here. 

And what’s more interesting is all of this fear of AI. For the last months I’ve spent allot of time reading on it from both a technical, social, judicial and ethical dimension. Some authors, such as Sheikh et al argues that this is a system technology which similar to the early cars will transform society. And what has struck me is that  when the car was invented in the 20th century it was both viewers as a threat to people’s health from the danger of travelling at a high speed, but also as a mean to solve the dirtiness of the city, with streets covered in horse manoeuvres. No one would today claim that the car is dangerous with regard to speed, but they would neither claim that they are a clean mode of transportation. Instead new issues have arisen, we might have solved the issue of horse-shit on our streets, but are also facing an existential threat from the global climate crises.

I would argue that we can not yet understand whatever or not AI is a system changing technology. This is simple because I believe that it is hard to identitify such shifts in your own life-time. Instead I would argue that it is of importance to let AI develop and then see what it brings, wherever or not it is a system technology (unlikely) or just a fad (also unlikely). And here is were the legislation comes in. Drawing inspiration from a contribution by Staffan Larson to the anthology “AI & makten över besluten” it is clear that it exists a gap between technology development and the judicial sector. According to Larsson this can also lead to a judification of a technology. 

It is from this perspective I am quite sceptical about if we need more legislation beyond the EU’s AI act. This is due to that we simply does not fully know where the new technology might lead us. A to intense legislation could therefore block research into AI that is perfectly safe, but necessary for Europe to not lag behind North America and Asia. Especially given the huge amount of techno-negativists who believe in terminator like scenarios, without actually knowing the technology. Today we are deeply grateful that no one tried to legislate against the development of trains, and in the future we might be just as grateful that no one tried to legislate away AI.

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