Why overregulation is a real risk to AI development

Hey everyone, I thought this was a super interesting & insightful comment about the current debate happening in the EU and the US about regulating the AI space. What are your thoughts on how to best approach this?

"The UAE Minister of AI, Omar Al Aloma, points to a historical precedent of premature technology regulation motivated by fear: the ban of the printing press in 1515 by Sultan Selim I led to the decline of the Ottoman Empire.“We overregulated a technology, which was the printing press. It was adopted everywhere on Earth. The Middle East banned it for 200 years. The calligraphers came to the sultan and said: ‘We’re going to lose our jobs, do something to protect us’—so, job loss protection, very similar to AI. The religious scholars said people are going to print fake versions of the Quran and corrupt society—misinformation, second reason. It was fear of the unknown that led to this fateful decision."

Source: comment by Yann LeCun, VP and Chief AI Scientist at Meta, inspired by https://fortune.com/2023/11/28/artificial-intelligence-ai-technology-regulation-policy-guardrails-uae-fortune-global-forum/

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