John_Maxwell_IV comments on The Robots, AI, and Unemployment Anti-FAQ - Less Wrong

47 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 25 July 2013 06:46PM

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Comment author: complexmeme 24 July 2013 05:48:15PM 28 points [-]

If cars were invented nowadays, the horse-and-saddle industry would surely try to arrange for them to be regulated out of existence, or sued out of existence, or limited to the same speed as horses to ensure existing buggies remained safe.

That's not a new thing, that sort of regulation actually happened!

Comment author: John_Maxwell_IV 29 July 2013 05:01:35AM 1 point [-]

Do you have a source for the claim that this act was due to industry lobbying as opposed to risk aversion?

Comment author: complexmeme 17 August 2013 03:00:58AM 1 point [-]

I can see why you think I was making that implicit claim, though that wasn't quite the point I was trying to make.

I don't know to what extent the regulation mentioned in the Wikipedia article I linked to was influenced by industry lobbying versus concern about other sorts of risks to infrastructure or public safety. I'm not sure whether the precise cause of the passage of such regulation is that relevant to the regulation's durability in the face of potential benefits from adoption of new technology. Maybe it is, but the precise example of "limit[ing cars] to the same speed as horses" in the original post seems to imply that was something that didn't happen, not just something that did happen for different reasons.