It has disappeared down the rabbit hole

[tahasozgen]

Hi There;

There is a phrase that I cannot understand in the Economist, June 17th 2023.

There is a paragraph about Rishi Sunak's vision of Artificial Intelligence and its legal regulations. Title of the paragraph is "Rishi Sunak's AI dreams".

"I do buy the Sunak picture”, says the tech boss. "In keeping with common law. You have these context-specific regulators. You don't have broad cross-sectoral statutory regulations. The EU is not going to do it; it has disappeared down the rabbit hole and is going to be down there for a couple of years. The US is going to be the wild west. Britain is the one place that's going to combine that concern around ethics of models and their application with a deep pragmatism and openness to innovation."

What does the author mean by "it has disappeared down the rabbit hole"? Thanks in advance.

 

[BobK]

'Down the rabbit-hole' is a reference to the book 'Alice's Adventures in Wonderland' by 'Lewis Carol' (actually Charles Lutwidge Dodgson) - a mathematician/philosopher/logician... (I'm not precisely sure about this - Wikipedia will correct me if I'm wrong) who wrote the book for his niece Alice. At the beginning of the book, Alice follows a rabbit down a rabbit hole and falls into a magical world.

Recently the phrase has come to be used with particular reference to crackpot arguments and conspiracy theories on the Internet, often amplified by social media. In this case it refers to the EU officials getting obsessed about procedural minutiae

 

[Skrej]

Every since the book came out, the phrase has been used to refer to a confusing or unusual situation or state one finds themself in, which is exactly what happens to Alice. Starting with the rabbit hole being large enough for her to fall into (or perhaps her becoming small enough to fall into such a hole - either way magic is involved), she encounters a series of odd and sometimes surreal situations with talking animals, crazy rulers and inanimate objects come to life.

Somewhere along the line it also picked up a second meaning where when searching for answers or information, you're lead to a steady stream of tangential new questions or information. It doesn't have to have the confusing/magical/fantastical sense, just a stream of never-ending new questions. Although everything in the book is fantastical or allegorical,, that's actually what happens to Alice. Trying to find one answer (how to get home), she keeps getting lead ever astray on additional adventures and side quests.

Wikipedia is a real-life example of our modern day rabbit hole. If you've ever read a Wikipedia article, only to click on something linked in the article that leads you to another Wikipedia page, only to then subsequently keep reading and clicking, you've fallen down the Wikipedia rabbit hole. It's easy to do.

I simply wanted to clarify the difference between a crocodile and an alligator, then suddenly three hours later I've learned about all the world-wide variations of dairy-based fruit desserts, stitching patterns on Victorian undergarments, Rasputin's sexual proclivities, Mennonite migration to Nebraska, and phoneme maps of endangered Sub-Saharan Berber dialects. Yet I'm still unclear on the difference between a caiman and a crocodile, although surprisingly the American alligator ranges as far north as southern Oklahoma and nest temperature determines the gender of the hatching egg, specific to within three degrees.

 

[jutfrank]

Please no one ask me about my rabbit holes.