Category: Law
Does an AI Pause make sense?
Should we lobby governments to impose a moratorium on AI research? Since we don’t enforce pauses on most new technologies, I hope the reader will grant that the burden of proof is on those who advocate for such a moratorium. We should only advocate for such heavy-handed government action if it’s clear that the benefits of doing so would significantly outweigh the costs.[1] In this essay, I’ll argue an AI pause would increase the risk of catastrophically bad outcomes, in at least three different ways:
- Reducing the quality of AI alignment research by forcing researchers to exclusively test ideas on models like GPT-4 or weaker.
- Increasing the chance of a “fast takeoff” in which one or a handful of AIs rapidly and discontinuously become more capable, concentrating immense power in their hands.
- Pushing capabilities research underground, and to countries with looser regulations and safety requirements.
That is from Nora Belrose, here is much more. Via N.
Regulation is the Friend of the Incumbent!
A fantastic talk from VC Bill Gurley. A great primer on public choice and regulation.
IFOs
While strolling in the garden one day…a priest said to him, ‘Father Joseph, oh, how beautiful God has made heaven!’ Then Joseph, as if he had been called to heaven, gave a loud shriek, leapt off the ground, flew through the air, and knelt down atop an olive tree, and—as witnesses declared in his beatification inquest—that branch on which he rested waved as if a bird were perched upon it, and he remained up there about half an hour” (Paolo Agelli, Vita del Beato Giuseppe di Copertino, 1753).
What kind of nonsense is this? Who is this liar quoted above? Human beings can’t fly or kneel on slender tree limbs like little birds. So, how is it that in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries—the very era that gave birth to aggressive skepticism and empirical science—countless people swore that they had witnessed such events? And how is it that some of these sworn testimonies are legal records, archived alongside lawsuits and murder trials, from all sorts of people, not just illiterate peasants but also elites at the apex of the social, intellectual, and political hierarchy?
…Levitation is one of the best of all entry points into the history of the impossible, principally because it is an event for which we have an overabundance of testimonies, not just in Western Christianity but throughout all of world history.
Carlos Eire argues in CommonWeal that these events should be taken seriously. Eire is cagey about what he means by take seriously but I agree that we can say something about the form such visions take and when and why they rise and fall in frequency. Eire notes, for example, that reporting of such events changed significantly with the Protestant Reformation.
…Protestants of all stripes also rejected the proposition that God had continued to perform miracles beyond the first century, a doctrine that came to be known as “the cessation of miracles” or “the cessation of the charismata.” The miracles mentioned in the Bible had really occurred, they argued, but such marvels became unnecessary after the birth of the early Church and would never happen again. Consequently, all of those miraculous supernatural phenomena associated with holiness throughout the Middle Ages, including levitation, could not be the work of God. But by designating these phenomena “false”—that is, not attributable to God—Protestants did not declare them impossible. As most Protestant Reformers and their later disciples saw it, ecstatic seizures, levitations, luminous irradiance, and all such phenomena did in fact occur, but they were all diabolical in origin.
…Given the religious, social, political, and intellectual turmoil caused by the advent of Protestantism and its great paradigm shift, it is not at all surprising that miracles became a marker of difference between Catholics and Protestants, as well as a flash point of discord and a polemical weapon.
That’s right but the author would have done better to refer to the work of my GMU colleagues. GMU (oddly?) is a leading center of experts on witch trials. See most notably Leeson and Russ and Johnson and Koyama.
People don’t report seeing flying people the way they used to. Is that because people have become more rational or because the socially acceptable form of vision has changed?
Should child influencers have stronger rights to the income they generate?
That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column. You can think of this as a government regulation issue, but alternatively you could frame it as the government enforcing individual property rights that currently are absent. Here is one excerpt:
More and more children, by which I mean minors below legal working age, are producing content as online influencers. A lot of Instagram or YouTube or TikTok accounts feature such children, and they can be cute, endearing or (depending on your mood) annoying — as well as profitable. By one estimate, the most successful children working in this area — called “kidfluencers” — can generate more than $20 million a year in revenue…
Legally, these children have no claim to the income their sites generate. Thankfully, many parents are loving and generous. But not all. There is no data on how social media earnings are distributed within the family, but the long history of child movie and TV stars indicates that many receive little or nothing.
But change is afoot, and this is mostly a good thing:
Enter the state of Illinois, where a recently passed law gives successful child social media stars a right to some percentage of the earnings they generate, to be held in a trust in their name until they turn 18. Such legislation has precedent. In the early days of Hollywood, California passed the Coogan Law, which gives child actors a right to a certain percentage of earnings, which employers have to place in trust accounts. New York has passed similar legislation.
The social media case is tougher to enforce, because often the parents themselves are the de facto employer and there is no contract specifying terms. And how is the relative contribution of the child to the family income to be assessed? (Time spent onscreen? Cuteness? What if the social media presence leads to a book contract or podcast?) Nonetheless, the law sends a clear signal that the children do have some rights to the generated income, and grown children can sue their parents if the money is not passed along.
Note however that: “It is neither practical nor desirable for the state to insert itself into family decision-making on a regular basis.” So we should expect only limited gains from such legislation. Furthermore, unlike with child stars in the movies and on TV, there is no real paper trail of contracts and transactions. On the upside, those superior property rights for “kidfluencer” income might get some kids to want to work more, rather than less.
Not everyone will like that outcome of course.
I thank Anecdotal, and also A., for pointers on this issue.
U.S.A. fact of the day
After the Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade last year, it looked like the number of abortions would soon plummet across the country. But new estimates suggest that has not happened. The number of legal abortions has held steady, if not increased, nationwide since 2020, our colleagues Amy Schoenfeld Walker and Allison McCann reported today.
How is that possible? New data from the Guttmacher Institute, a nonprofit specializing in reproductive health, implies that more people are traveling across state lines or using telemedicine to get abortions, including through the use of abortion pills. The increase in use of those options has offset the decrease in abortions resulting from new state bans, Amy and Allison found.
Here is more from The New York Times.
Law-Abiding Immigrants
The subtitle is The Incarceration Gap Between Immigrants and the U.S.-Born, 1850–2020, and the authors are Ran Abramitzky, Leah Boustan, Elisa Jácome, Santiago Pérez, and Juan David Torres. Here is the to-the-point abstract:
Combining full-count Census data with Census/ACS samples, the researchers provide the first nationally representative long-run series (1870–2020) of incarceration rates for immigrants and the U.S.-born. As a group, immigrants had lower incarceration rates than the US-born for the last 150 years. Moreover, relative to the U.S.-born, immigrants’ incarceration rates have declined since 1960: Immigrants today are 60% less likely to be incarcerated (30% relative to U.S.-born whites). This relative decline occurred among immigrants from all regions and cannot be explained by changes in immigrants’ observable characteristics or immigration policy. Instead, the decline likely reflects immigrants’ resilience to economic shocks.
Here is the full paper, via Anecdotal.
Why do immigrants oppose immigration?
This question does not receive enough discussion, but there is a new paper of note, by Aflatun Kaeser and Massimiliano Tani:
…successful immigrants in the United States (i.e., those who are in the top quintile of the socioeconomic classification), who may benefit the most from being perceived as unrelated to unskilled undocumented immigrants, have negative views about immigration, especially with respect to its contribution to unemployment, crime, and the risk of a terrorist attack. This effect does not arise in the case of countries that apply stricter controls than the United States on immigration, like Australia, Canada, and New Zealand, or do not attract as large a number of undocumented immigrants. We interpret these results as evidence that immigrants’ attitudes toward other immigrants respond to the lack of a selective immigration policy: namely, if successful immigrants run the risk of being perceived as related to undocumented or uncontrolled immigration, they respond by embracing an immigrants’ anti-immigration view.
Via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
Proudhon: To be Governed
To be GOVERNED is to be watched, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, regulated, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, checked, estimated, valued, censured, commanded, by creatures who have neither the right nor the wisdom nor the virtue to do so. To be GOVERNED is to be at every operation, at every transaction noted, registered, counted, taxed, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed, authorized, admonished, prevented, forbidden, reformed, corrected, punished. It is, under pretext of public utility, and in the name of the general interest, to be place under contribution, drilled, fleeced, exploited, monopolized, extorted from, squeezed, hoaxed, robbed; then, at the slightest resistance, the first word of complaint, to be repressed, fined, vilified, harassed, hunted down, abused, clubbed, disarmed, bound, choked, imprisoned, judged, condemned, shot, deported, sacrificed, sold, betrayed; and to crown all, mocked, ridiculed, derided, outraged, dishonored. That is government; that is its justice; that is its morality.
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, “General Idea of the Revolution in the Nineteenth Century,” first published in French 1851; translated by John Beverly Robinson (1923), pp. 293-294.
Hat tip: Robert Higgs.
Italy fact of the day
Before becoming Italian prime minister, Giorgia Meloni was one of the most strident voices on migration in the European Union. As an opposition politician, she warned darkly of efforts to substitute native Italians with ethnic minorities and promised to put in place a naval blockade to stop migrants crossing the Mediterranean.
During her time in office, she has taken a markedly different tack — presiding over a sharp spike in irregular arrivals and introducing legislation that could see as many as 1.5 million new migrants arrive through legal channels.
Do note this:
Meloni is presiding over a country that is economically stagnant and in demographic decline. Over the last decade, Italy has shrunk by some 1.5 million people (more than the population of Milan). In 39 of its 107 provinces, there are more retirees than workers. ..
Meloni’s legal migration decree estimates Italy needs 833,000 new migrants over the next three years to fill in the gap in its labor force. It opens the door to 452,000 workers over the same period to fill seasonal jobs in sectors like agriculture and tourism as well as long-term positions like plumbers, electricians, care workers and mechanics…
Given Italy’s rules on family reunification, which allow residents to bring in relatives, “it’s easy to predict that over something like 10 years, these figures will triple,” bringing in about 1.5 million migrants, said Maurizio Ambrosini, a professor of sociology and an expert on migration at Milan’s university.
The median voter surfaces yet again? Here is the full account, via Andrew McLoughlin.
Market Response to Racial Uprisings
Defund the police was never really in the cards:
Do investors anticipate that demands for racial equity will impact companies? We explore this question in the context of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement—the largest racially motivated protest movement in U.S. history—and its effect on the U.S. policing industry using a novel dataset on publicly traded firms contracting with the police. It is unclear whether the BLM uprisings were likely to increase or decrease market valuations of firms contracting heavily with police because of the increased interest in reforming the police, fears over rising crime, and pushes to “defund the police”. We find, in contrast to the predictions of economics experts we surveyed, that in the three weeks following incidents triggering BLM uprisings, policing firms experienced a stock price increase of seven percentage points relative to the stock prices of nonpolicing firms in similar industries. In particular, firms producing surveillance technology and police accountability tools experienced higher returns following BLM activism–related events. Furthermore, policing firms’ fundamentals, such as sales, improved after the murder of George Floyd, suggesting that policing firms’ future performances bore out investors’ positive expectations following incidents triggering BLM uprisings. Our research shows how—despite BLM’s calls to reduce investment in policing and explore alternative public safety approaches—the financial market has translated high-profile violence against Black civilians and calls for systemic change into shareholder gains and additional revenues for police suppliers.
That is from a new NBER working paper by Bocar A. Ba, Roman Rivera, and Alexander Whitefield.
El Salvador and the elasticity of supply
Many of you have written in and asked what I think of president Bukele throwing all those gang members (and possibly others) in jail without much due process. I do hope to learn more about this, including possibly with a trip to El Salvador later this year. In the meantime, I say let’s put aside the moralizing — in either direction — and try to think of this in terms of what is the appropriate economic model.
In one view, supply is highly elastic, so if government tries to restrict the supply of a good or service, production responds accordingly. For instance, many gun buyback programs fail for this reason. Guns come out of the woodwork, but they are not really the guns you want to be bought up. In the longer run, perhaps more guns are imported into the country, whether to be sold to the government or the replace the sold guns.
So if the government of El Salvador throws 60,000 gang members into jail, is this supply elastic? Do replacements step forward, like villains in a Batman movie and its sequels? Or is the distribution bimodal, I for instance would not become an El Salvadoran gang member for any amount of money. I genuinely do not know the answer to this question.
Furthermore, what would the new supply look like? Presumably the new gang members would have to be “more invisible,” otherwise they would get tossed in jail too. So the new gang members could not sport tattoos and the like, and they would find it harder to coordinate with each other.
If you think this year is definitely the year to visit El Salvador, perhaps you fear some medium-term elasticity of supply. After all, we do know that El Salvador is currently one of the safest countries in Latin America, for how long I cannot say.
What variable might we try to measure or estimate to address this question?
On Twitter, Chris Blattman suggested that the imprisonments will not work, as organized crime will reemerge in El Salvador. He mentioned further that organized crime would reemerge in a more centralized and politicized fashion. I do not disagree (am genuinely agnostic), but what exactly is the underlying model? That the government can crack down on little guys but not big players? And also that a new big player can emerge with so many of the little guys in jail?
Is the best case scenario for the Bukele policy one of “El Salvador as transmission belt to the U.S.”? And so if the critical mass of Salvadoran intermediaries disappears, the bad guy drug lords find other routes and carriers in other countries, and El Salvador sets off along its new, merrier, path-dependent way?
How might we test prospectively whether that is likely to be true?
SpaceX Versus the Department of Justice
The DOJ is suing SpaceX for focusing its hiring on US citizens and permanent residents. Yes, you read that right.
Semafor: The DOJ alleges that SpaceX discouraged refugees and asylum seekers from applying to open positions and refused to hire those that did, according to the complaint.
According to the complaint, SpaceX job postings wrongly stated that only U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents could apply for openings, and that “SpaceX’s hiring practices were routine, widespread, and longstanding, and harmed asylees and refugees.”
Under U.S. law, both asylum seekers and refugees are protected from hiring discrimination regardless of citizen status.
The lawsuit is bizarre. I am sure Elon would be happy to hire some refugees from the Russian space program. So why does SpaceX advertise that only US citizens and lawful permanent residents can apply for some jobs? Because that’s what they understand the law requires:
People “don’t understand the chilling effect of the federal export control laws” that SpaceX allegedly cited in its job listings as a reason for excluding refugees and asylees as candidates, writes Abhi Tripathi, the director of mission operations at UC Berkeley’s Space Sciences Laboratory. The International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) only allows U.S. citizens and green card holders to access information in companies that make spacecraft and rockets for national security reasons. “Employees are PERSONALLY liable with huge fines and imprisonment if the wrong info gets out,” Tripathi says. It’s unclear which positions SpaceX allegedly refused refugee and asylum applicants for.
Now SpaceX may be wrong about the technicalities of the law, the distinction, as I understand it, rests on the difference between US Persons and US Citizens, but they are 100% correct that the DoD frowns on non-citizens working for military related ventures. As a result, jobs restricted to US citizens are common in industries that interact with the military or that involve technologies which are potentially dual-use, such as jobs at SpaceX. Jobs that require security clearances are, of course, typically restricted to US citizens but so are many jobs not requiring clearances. Here, for example, is an ad for an engineer at Northrup Grumman in aerospace structures that does not require security clearance but advertises US Citizen only. The U.S. military, of course, mandates citizenship or a green card for enlistment, a policy that is shared by another federal employer—can you guess? Surprise. The Department of Justice.
Below, for example, is an ad for a recreational specialist to work for the DOJ’s Bureau of Prisons–this is not a job involving national security!–but the ad states clearly that U.S. Citizenship is Required. Most federal government jobs, in fact, are restricted to US citizens. The Federal Reserve even requires US citizenship to get an internship.
In short, it seems that SpaceX is being singled out for punishment for a practice that is widespread in the industry and often encouraged by, sometimes required by, and usually practiced by the Federal government.
The Mother Church of the Common Law
The Temple Church is a small church in London built in 1185 by the Knights Templar. It’s now hidden behind Fleet Street amid the Middle and Inner Temple, two of the four “Inns of Court”, the educational institutions and professional associations for common law barristers and judges. The Temple Church is known as the Mother Church of the Common Law both for its role in the creation of the Magna Carta and because of its location amid the Temple area.
King John used the Temple Church as his headquarters in 1214-1215 and it’s from here that he was forced to issue the first of the Magna Cartas. The real hero of the Magna Carta, however, was the knight William Marshal who negotiated the original agreement, reissued it again under his authority as regent to the boy King, Henry III, and then reissued it again–after, at the age of 70 personally leading troops into battle and defeating a French invasion–thereby cementing the Magna Carta and the rights it guarantees into British life.
William Marshall’s tomb can be found in the Temple Church.
Middle and Inner Temple were the heart of the common law for hundreds of years and the presence of the Temple Church meant that the idea of a bill of rights was always nearby. So much so that the Temple played a role in the American Revolution and not just as inspiration. Six members of the Inner or Middle Temple were signatories to the Declaration of Independence and seven were signatories to the US Constitution.
The Mother Church of the Common Law is well worth a visit if you are in London.
The Jones Act Enforcer
The Offshore Marine Service Association has a ship, the Jones Act Enforcer, whose only job is to spy on and harass European vessels that are installing wind farms off the coast of New England.
BostonGlobe: To get Vineyard Wind done, developers are turning to vehicles such as the Sea Installer, which arrived in Salem in early August. Owned by the Danish firm DEME Group, the vessel is one of the few on the planet capable of installing GE Haliade-X wind turbines that are the size of a skyscraper into the ocean floor.
Measuring more than 430 feet in length and 150 feet wide, Sea Installer is a “jack up” vessel that lifts itself out of the water on legs more than 300 feet long. Once elevated, the vessel becomes a platform where an immense crane, capable of lifting more than 1,600 tons, can install the tower sections, nacelle, and blades for each turbine.
The Jones Act Enforcer does not board the suspected ships. Instead, as it did this day with the Sea Installer, the crew photographs the vessels from about half a nautical mile away and, if they suspect violations, files complaints with US Customs and Border Protection and the Coast Guard. The outcomes of the complaints are confidential, Smith said.
…The law prohibits foreign ships from transporting goods between two points within the US. But the actions that ships can and can’t take on American waters gets very technical.
For example, the Jones Act Enforcer observed Go Liberty, an American ship, perched beneath the Sea Installer. Smith said the American vessel was most likely transporting materials to the site so the Sea Installer could place a monopile — the bright yellow steel piles that support the turbines — into the ocean.
However, if the Sea Installer received material from the Go Liberty and then physically moved to another monopile in a different location, that act could violate the Jones Act.
The Jones Act Enforcer also observed the Italian ship Giulio Verne, which was working to connect underseas cables to an electric substation that would power the wind turbines. In this case, Smith claimed the Italian ship was violating the law because it was moving the cables from one point (the sea bed) to another point (the substation).
The stupidity, it burns. But Biden supports the Jones Act.
Compensating Kidney Donors
LA Times: Never in the field of public legislation has so much been lost by so many to one law, as Churchill might’ve put it. The National Organ Transplant Act of 1984 created the framework for the organ transplant system in the United States, and nearly 40 years later, the law is responsible for millions of needless deaths and trillions of wasted dollars. The Transplant Act requires modification, immediately.
We’ve got skin in this game. We both donated our kidneys to strangers. Ned donated to someone who turned out to be a young mother of two children in 2015, which started a chain that helped an additional two recipients. And Matt donated at Walter Reed in 2021, after which his kidney went to a Seattleite, kicking off a chain that helped seven more recipients, the last of whom was back at Walter Reed.
…The National Organ Transplant Act prohibits compensating kidney donors, which is strange in that in American society, it’s common to pay for plasma, bone marrow, hair, sperm, eggs and even surrogate pregnancies. We already pay to create and sustain life.
…Compensation models have been proposed in the past. A National Institutes of Health study listed some of the possibilities, including direct payment, indirect payment, “in kind” payment (free health insurance, for example) or expanded reimbursements. After much review, we come down strongly in support of indirect payment, specifically, a $100,000 refundable federal tax credit. The tax credit would be uniformly applied over a period of 10 years, in the amount of $10,000 a year for those who qualify and then become donors.
This kind of compensation is certainly not a quick-cash scheme that would incentivize an act of desperation. Nor does it commoditize human body parts. Going forward, kidney donation might become partly opportunistic rather than mostly altruistic, as it is now. But would it be exploitative? Not at all.
Long-time readers will know that I have argued for the greater use of incentives in organ donation both for live donors and cadaveric donors. Pecuniary compensation is one possibility but so are no-give, no-take laws that give those who previously signed their organ donor cards priority should they one day need an organ.