Big Tobacco
People say the US is litigious, but I prefer that to a bunch of centrally-directed regulations.
Tort Law Is the Best Way to Regulate AI
In a well-written defense from a Yale Professor who advised the author of California’s AI law, he argues that a) AI companies are already subject to tort law, b) SB1047 clarifies the reasonableness standard, and c) SB1047 forces transparency before anything seriously bad can happen.
The tech companies, in their move-fast-and-break-things sensibility, seem to think that they are immune by virtue of their awesomeness. Or perhaps, they have been lulled into false complacency by Section 230’s protection of social media companies.
I do like the idea of removing bureaucracy from the equation and giving people the right to fight it out in court. It does have the potential, though, for stifling tobacco-like litigation.
Is AI too important for the kind of transparency that SB1047 demands? Is this forced openness unusual to mandate?
‘Tort law is animated by a simple and powerful idea: If you harm other people by failing to take reasonable care, then fairness requires you to compensate them. By creating an incentive for reasonable precaution rather than imposing detailed bureaucratic restrictions, tort law provides the most basic form of risk governance in a decentralized economy. But what does “reasonable care” require when developing extremely powerful AI?
‘California’s Senate Bill 1047, first-of-its-kind legislation that the Legislature passed this month, builds on industry safety practices to help answer this question. Before the end of the month, Gov. Gavin Newsom will decide whether to veto SB 1047 or sign it into law. The bill has prompted a heated debate between ideologically diverse coalitions: Elon Musk, leading AI developer Anthropic and two Turing Award-winning “godfathers” of AI (Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio) support it, while venture capital firm a16z, Nancy Pelosi and a “godmother” of AI (Fei-Fei Li) are opposed.’
Electric Vehicles: Eurotrashed
The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
The evolution to electric vehicle mass adoption is not linear. Pity the central planner.
‘Buyers have proved to be interested in EVs, just not in the numbers that the planners had assumed, partly because of cost, partly because of their intrinsic flaws, and partly because the infrastructure was not in place to support EVs at the pace they were supposed to be rolled out. With bottom-up EV growth, the supporting infrastructure (notably charging) would have (as with gas stations in the 1920s) developed organically. In this case, EV sales were driven by top-down pressure, meaning that, even at lower-than-expected sales, the infrastructure was not ready. Talk of charging problems then hit sales…
‘The central planners had not planned for that.
‘And then in the EU and UK, something else happened. Sales of Chinese EVs have been taking market share. This will make it more difficult for European manufacturers to fill their EV sales quotas.’
Congressman Blasts SEC Chair Over Crypto Regulation Failures
Accusing a bureaucrat of having loyalty to their boss over the law?
Those are fighting words.
‘The lawmaker accused Gensler of fostering political loyalty among SEC staff and prioritizing allegiance over the agency’s mission. He referenced emails showing that a senior SEC official aligned with Gensler’s political views, suggesting this behavior creates a culture of loyalty to Gensler over the law. Emmer brought up a court case in Utah involving the Debt Box, where SEC attorneys allegedly misled the court to target cryptocurrency companies, which led to $2 million in legal fees. The congressman asserted:
‘The SEC broke the law, your attorneys lied to the court, and no one in your leadership here in D.C. has been held accountable.’
How Democrats Are Helping The Woke Bureaucracy Sabotage The Next Republican President
They’re “Trump proofing” the civil service. The story below is just one of several in this Federalist piece.
‘Agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency or the National Institutes of Health are heavily influenced by scientific study. For example, significant regulations like the Biden-Harris electric vehicle (EV) mandate impose dramatic costs on the U.S. economy based on assumptions that are both speculative and highly controversial. Prohibiting a new administration from revisiting the Biden-Harris administration’s questionable assumptions and economic analysis would hinder a reversal of the EV mandate. According to Politico, this is the whole point.
‘Thus, if agency leadership directives aimed at shaping research are deemed “political” or “improper,” then the proposed rules would take away the very essence of being a constitutional officer. Indeed, by making ambiguous terms like “political” or “improper” the standard for misconduct by political appointees, political appointees will have to constantly wonder if their directives will violate the agency policy.’
We need to have a talk about making the federal bureaucracy work better
Mick Mulvaney on how difficult it is for the President to do things when the civil service is politically opposed. This is the case for Schedule F, by the way.
‘I have run a federal agency. In fact, I have run three: the Office of Management and Budget, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and the Executive Office of the President. I shared with my tablemates my view that running one isn’t anything like what most people probably think. One of the biggest challenges that I suppose few people acknowledge — and indeed, it was news to my tablemates — was actually getting the agency to do what you want, or more accurately what the president wants. The analogy of turning around an aircraft carrier came up more than once.’
OPINION: In defense of the federal bureaucracy
As a Hoosier father, I was happy to see the school paper take on Loper. I don’t agree with the opinion, but there it is.
The one thing that Mulvaney said in the article cited above is that populism is a function of the perception that the civil service is disconnected from the people, their views, and their needs.
Schedule F and Loper may be just the things to re-invigorate our Republic.
‘American bureaucracy was designed to leverage the skills of hardworking, educated Americans in a meritocratic system — giving subject matter experts the ability to help interpret and roll out legislation meant to benefit the public. Now the judicial system has the jurisdiction to handle all questions of legislative wording.
‘Beyond simply not having the necessary knowledge to make informed rulings on niche policy topics, these judges may hold certain political ideologies that influence their decisions and open the door to actors without the public’s interest at heart.’