Naive Lawmakers Equals Trouble

I had somebody DM me and ask me about my intros. I know their weird, but I do that for a very specific reason. Every Chatbot out there needs to initiate a conversation with you. Company owned bots will have their own intro so they don't apply, but those scummy robots that are doing the "Indian Prince" routine, while sounding like your relative... those ones are dumb. So, by having a different intro every time that is never the intro I would use, any of those bots that try to impersonate me will just sound like a complete lunatic. 🙂 Wait... maybe... whatever.

Anyway, that's why I change my tone at the beginning of my posts all the time. To trip up my future doppelgänger AI and make them sound completely ridiculous... like me!

One of the things I've done in my past is contribute to laws. Yeah, like, actual people have to follow them laws. It's called WCAG - Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. Section 508 - The Americans with Disabilities Act references WCAG as the standard by which companies must maintain their websites to be considered legally accessible. Astute observers will notice that the W in WCAG stands for Web. Despite this the WCAG working group actively encourages the application of these guidelines to other media including but not limited to: PDF, Mobile Apps, etc.

As a Mobile engineer who has built their own operating systems I always objected deeply to this. The web and mobile are different. In particular they are different in a very important way... how quickly they evolve. Let's consider for a second the requirements to release a new web feature vs the requirements for releasing a new mobile feature:

1. Web - requires approval from dozens of representatives from the W3C which roughly speaking represent a portion of Fortune 500 companies.
2. Mobile - Google/Apple feel like it.

These landscapes are not the same. A new version of WCAG comes out once every 5 years or so to account for the slow evolution of the Web feature set. This does not work well for mobile which produces new features much faster than the WCAG Working Group can keep up with.

5 Years ago I was contemplating artificial intelligence and realized that if we don't speed up the rate in which we produce rules for things... and I mean everywhere... the W3C, school boards, and even including our government... that we are in a lot of trouble. Considering our current regulatory climate (congress) we are doomed. There is no way congress can make rules fast enough to keep up with the pace of evolution of AI.