I think we’re probably in agreement. What I was trying to say was that for all the (many) issues in the medical system, we have places in society where risk is studied and managed. We can do the same with AI, there just doesn’t seem to be any will on the part of the political class to actually tackle complex problems right now, and we really need that will to regulate because the free market sure as fuck isn’t going to regulate itself.

If this were a physical object that, ha ha, occasionally convinced people to commit suicide or murder, or spiral off into other delusions, it’d be off the shelves in a heartbeat

I want to gently push back on this. There are medications that can cause psychological symptoms and suicidal ideation as side effects and they’re still prescribed. They are, however, controlled, people who take them have to be informed of the side effects, and they’re managed by a trained physician. I absolutely think LLMs need to be more tightly regulated, and we need to have a much better idea of how they work and how to deploy them safely and in contexts where they are actually useful and won’t cause harm. But we do manage known risks with other products.

North America has a bunch of different types of receptacles as well, but they’re a little better regulated and configured so there’s not much chance of mixing them up. Lots of houses here have both 120V and 250V circuits, but the receptacles are normally completely different so there’s no risk of mixing them up, I think. Amperage, however, is a little more wild west from what I can tell - you have have anywhere from 15 to 60 amp circuits and, as far as I can tell, there’s no way to tell from the receptacle what you’re plugging into or the load it can take unless you check the breaker box (and have a house where the circuits make sense - older houses often have things like lights or receptacles wired into circuits that don’t really make sense for them). This is all in my very limited, very lay understanding so somebody who knows better will probably come along with better info.

ETA: The situation in Brazil sounds rough - generally from my experience in the us, if your plug fits in the receptacle, it’s probably fine. Worst case scenario (most of the time) is the overload a circuit and flip a breaker/blow a fuse, but there are lots of older houses that are definitely not up to current code.