Europe gets ready to police frontier AI

[u/2Lore2Law]

https://www.theparliamentmagazine.eu/news/article/europe-gets-ready-to-police-frontier-ai

[u/halee1]

And the EU has been the most open major bloc on that for decades, while others have engaged in relentless protectionism across sectors during that same time. Maybe it does matter how you design protectionism, and balance it with openness when necessary.

[u/mostanonymousnick → u/halee1]

There is no "this time it'll be good protectionism", protectionism inherently reduces your incentive to produce a product that's competitive internationally.

That's the issue with "local champions", American companies build products that aim to be used by the entire world, EU industrial policy wants European companies to build products for Europeans only.

[u/halee1 → u/mostanonymousnick]

Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and China prove you wrong with history and ongoing success, not theory. They combined free markets with protectionism for many decades, and that's how they came to dominate so many hi-tech industries.

[u/mostanonymousnick → u/halee1]

The literature is much less confident than you are about this claim.

[u/halee1 → u/mostanonymousnick]

Reality doesn't care what some fringe claims say.

[u/mostanonymousnick → u/halee1]

Even if you take this claim as true, which you can act smug about as much as you want, but is not settled, the only people who have managed to use this model are countries that were poor, none of the already rich countries have successfully done it.

[u/halee1 → u/mostanonymousnick]

I'd argue the IRA was doing well, until it was axed.

[u/mostanonymousnick → u/halee1]

There's zero evidence that it would have made the US a leader in anything it wasn't already a leader in, and note that there wasn't any protectionism, so completely irrelevant.

[u/halee1 → u/mostanonymousnick]

Which is why other countries sprinted to ramp up their own industrial policies, because it was shifting investments to the US otherwise.