New tech industries are historically bad at self-regulation, only government intervention solves
Gans 2023. Gans, Joshua S., Professor of Strategic Management and holder of the Jeffrey S. Skoll Chair of Technical Innovation and Entrepreneurship at the Rotman School of Management, the University of Toronto. “Can Socially-Minded Governance Control the AGI Beast?” December 10, 2023. <https://ssrn.com/abstract=4646953> Accessed June 29, 2024 ARJSH
This paper has examined whether a socially-minded entity might be able to control AGI if the technology underlying it is non-excludable. It is shown that either entity will be preempted by a for-profit firm, limiting both its ability and incentive to mitigate unrestricted AGI products that emerge in equilibrium. In other words, it demonstrates that a form of ‘self-regulation’ is unlikely to be effective. This leads to a natural conclusion that regulating the harmful effects of AGI, or any other technology for that matter, is likely to be conducted by government policy. Indeed, if such policies can create conditions by which externalities are internalised by for-profit firms (for instance, through product liability laws), it will likely bolster conditions by which socially-minded activities could prove more effective. That, however, is a subject left to future research. Also left for future research is whether the government intervention required in this case could remain under the control of national governments or whether it requires a global effort. The results in this paper point, for the same reasons as given in this paper, to the latter.14