Tech firms say laws to protect us from bad AI will limit ‘innovation’. Well, good

theguardian.com:

Way back in May 2014, the European court of justice issued a landmark ruling that European citizens had the right to petition search engines to remove search results that linked to material that had been posted lawfully on third-party websites. This was popularly but misleadingly described as the “right to be forgotten”; it was really a right to have certain published material about the complainant delisted by search engines, of which Google was by far the most dominant. Or, to put it crudely, a right not to be found by Google.

On the morning the ruling was released, I had a phone call from a relatively senior Google employee whom I happened to know. It was clear from his call that the company had been ambushed by the ruling – its expensive legal team had plainly not expected it. But it was also clear that his US bosses were incensed by the effrontery of a mere European institution in issuing such a verdict. And when I mildly indicated that I regarded it as a reasonable judgment, I was treated to an energetic tirade, the gist of which was that the trouble with Europeans is that they’re “hostile to innovation”. At which point the conversation ended and I never heard from him again.

What brings this to mind is the tech companies’ reaction to a draft EU bill published last month that, when it becomes law in about two years’ time, will make it possible for people who have been harmed by software to sue the companies that produce and deploy it. The new bill, called the AI Liability Directive, will complement the EU’s AI Act, which is set to become EU law around the same time. The aim of these laws is to prevent tech companies from releasing dangerous systems, for example: algorithms that boost misinformation and target children