AI Regulation
August 17, 2025
This is going to be an ongoing series on AI, the first of many, hopefully.
Let’s start with Bastiat’s famous Candlestick Makers’ Petition. You can read it here in English or if you want, the original.
Candlemakers were upset that the Sun was eating into their
business and asked the King for a law making everyone shut their
windows during the day.
And just to make things fun I’ve asked Copilot to make a summary of the English translation
The webpage you referenced—http://bastiat.org/en/petition.html—is a satirical essay written in 1845 that critiques protectionist economic policies.
📜 Summary of the Petition In the essay, Bastiat imagines a group of candlemakers and other lighting industry professionals petitioning the French government to block out sunlight. Their argument? The sun is an unfair competitor because it provides free light, undermining their businesses. They propose a law to shutter all windows, skylights, and other openings that let sunlight into homes, thereby forcing people to buy more candles and lighting products.
🧠 Key Insights Satirical Tone: Bastiat uses irony to highlight the absurdity of protectionism. By treating the sun as a foreign competitor, he mocks the logic behind tariffs and trade barriers.
Economic Argument: The essay illustrates how protectionist policies can lead to inefficiency and waste. Forcing consumers to pay for something they could get for free (like sunlight) diverts resources from more productive uses.
Broader Message: Bastiat champions free markets and criticizes government interference that favors certain industries at the expense of consumers and overall economic welfare.
Regulation of algorithms is impossible, at least due to technical constraints. It is not feasible and just like the Candlestick makers’ Petition it is just a deception, a useless initiative at best.
Algorithms, source code, mathematical formulas cannot be constrained by any written law. You will need to:
* Access to source code. Some models are black boxes.
* Audit code constantly
* Promises that only the source code that was audited will be used. How do you enforce that?
* Apps can be deployed anywhere in the world, beyond the reach of any jurisdictions.
Any attempt at regulation will also come disguised as a protection measure, but ultimately it just leads to weakening privacy for everyone, like ProtectEU
Regulation, and its cousin Protection (from any malicious actor) has only led to a competitive disadvantage for the former and a collapse of privacy and security for the latter. Let’s not forget previous attempts like Dual_EC_DRBG, which even made it into a standard!
Banning the Sun is impossible, so is forcing people to close all their windows.