Why didn’t industry succeed in killing SB1047 [so far]?
If someone had told me in 2022 that there would be a bill in CA that the major labs opposed and that the tech industry spent a fair amount of effort lobbying against (to the point of getting Congresspeople and Nancy Pelosi to chime in), I would’ve been like “that bill seems like it should get killed pretty early on in the process.”
Like, if the bill has to go through 5+ committees, I would’ve predicted that it would die within the first 3 committees.So what’s going on? Some plausible explanations:
Industry has less power over AI legislation than I (and maybe some others) thought
Industry has more influence on the federal government than on the CA legislatures
Industry underestimated SB1047 early on//didn’t pay much attention to it and the opposition came relatively late in the game
Scott Weiner is really good at building coalitions and forming alliances
SB1047 is relatively light-touch and the burden is very high when industry tries to fight light-touch things
What do you think are the most noteworthy explanations for why industry has failed to kill SB1047 so far?
One question I have is whether Nancy Pelosi was asked and agreed to do this, or whether Nancy Pelosi identified this proactively as an opportunity to try to win back some tech folks to the Dem side. Substantially changes our estimate of how much influence the labs have in this conversation.
One plausible explanation is that industry still thinks it’s likely to kill the bill, and they just didn’t feel like they needed to play their cards sooner.
But this still leaves me surprised– I would’ve expected that it’s in industry’s interest to kill the bill earlier in the process because:
It might be easier to kill earlier on because it hasn’t gained much traction/support
If you want to appear like you’re open to regulation (which seems to be the policy of major AI companies), you probably want to kill it in a relatively silent/invisible way. If you have to be very loud and public and you get to the point where there are a bunch of media articles about it, you lose some credibility/reputation/alliances (and indeed I do think industry has lost some of this “plausibility of good will” as a result of the SB1047 saga)
Why didn’t industry succeed in killing SB1047 [so far]?
If someone had told me in 2022 that there would be a bill in CA that the major labs opposed and that the tech industry spent a fair amount of effort lobbying against (to the point of getting Congresspeople and Nancy Pelosi to chime in), I would’ve been like “that bill seems like it should get killed pretty early on in the process.”
Like, if the bill has to go through 5+ committees, I would’ve predicted that it would die within the first 3 committees.So what’s going on? Some plausible explanations:
Industry has less power over AI legislation than I (and maybe some others) thought
Industry has more influence on the federal government than on the CA legislatures
Industry underestimated SB1047 early on//didn’t pay much attention to it and the opposition came relatively late in the game
Scott Weiner is really good at building coalitions and forming alliances
SB1047 is relatively light-touch and the burden is very high when industry tries to fight light-touch things
What do you think are the most noteworthy explanations for why industry has failed to kill SB1047 so far?
One question I have is whether Nancy Pelosi was asked and agreed to do this, or whether Nancy Pelosi identified this proactively as an opportunity to try to win back some tech folks to the Dem side. Substantially changes our estimate of how much influence the labs have in this conversation.
One plausible explanation is that industry still thinks it’s likely to kill the bill, and they just didn’t feel like they needed to play their cards sooner.
But this still leaves me surprised– I would’ve expected that it’s in industry’s interest to kill the bill earlier in the process because:
It might be easier to kill earlier on because it hasn’t gained much traction/support
If you want to appear like you’re open to regulation (which seems to be the policy of major AI companies), you probably want to kill it in a relatively silent/invisible way. If you have to be very loud and public and you get to the point where there are a bunch of media articles about it, you lose some credibility/reputation/alliances (and indeed I do think industry has lost some of this “plausibility of good will” as a result of the SB1047 saga)