"Welcome to the brave new world of AI and cozy crony capitalism"

Will the big guys shut everyone else out with government regs?

Surprise surprise the biggest players in Artificial Intelligence want to pull up the drawbridge behind them.

“Please, regulate us!” cry Nvidia, Microsoft, and Google. “For the sake of humanity, please help us create a government sponsored cartel that will shut out innovators and foreign competition! It’s the right thing to do. You know, for humanity!”

One of the things many people do not understand is that many if not most of the regulations that come out of Washington are written to a significant degree by industry lobbyists and the like. Once in place these regs are often guided by industry as the regulatory agencies take hold of a law. This goes for Pharma, food, tech, whatever. Big business LIKES government. The last thing a giant, established, currently profitable firm wants is new competition in a free market. Better to appeal to the government for protection and then to help feather the nests of people in government (in legal ways only of course) than have some wiz-kid come into the market and upend all of what the the older firms have.

This was a concept that I first came to really understand over a decade ago when I heard a lecture by the economist Murray Rothbard who explained that the “progressive era” was in fact not a time of enlightened government working on behalf of the people to tame the “robber barons", but in fact a time when industry was able to consolidate and protect itself with government force. This is what the Interstate Commerce Commission (for instance) was all about. It wasn’t about protecting consumers, as to this day it is sold as having done. It protected the railroads from getting their rates undermined in a competitive environment.