You Can’t Regulate What You Don’t Understand

Yeah, it's best when companies self-regulate, because they're the ones who understand it best.

Government steps in when companies don't self-regulate. There's a saying that regulations are written in blood. Every regulation that exists can be tied back to some incident of somebody getting killed or injured.

Despite anti-government claims, regulators don't write the rules for fun. And they often do understand the domain, sometimes better because they are surveying a whole industry rather than a single perspective.

If AI companies want to avoid being regulated by government, they'll come up with their own regulations before somebody gets hurt. When it comes to AI, there's a possibility of a whole lot of people getting hurt all at once, which leads to governments having to regulate in haste. Haste is bad and leads to bad regulation. But it's better than allowing harm to go on while industries clutch their pearls about how bad government is.