The counterargument — and one several people in the audience brought up — was that the world didn’t really see the types of harms that the internet or social media could do before those harms were upon us. When Google and Facebook were launched, no one knew they would dominate online advertising or collect so much data on individuals. No one understood things like cyberbullying or echo chambers when social media was young.

Advocates of AI regulation now often point to these past circumstances and say those technologies should have been regulated early on.