[HN Gopher] AI and Trust
___________________________________________________________________
AI and Trust
Author : CTOSian
Score : 180 points
Date : 2023-12-04 13:32 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.schneier.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.schneier.com)
| seydor wrote:
| > It's government that provides the underlying mechanisms for the
| social trust essential to society.
|
| It's not anymore. Surveys show that people nowadays trust
| businesses more than they trust the governments, in a major shift
| (https://www.edelman.com/trust/2023/trust-barometer)
|
| We need trust because we want the world around us to be more
| predictable, to follow rules. We trust corporations because they
| do a better job at forcing people to follow rules than the
| government does.
|
| This is not a change brought about with AI, it changed BEFORE it.
| (And just because an AI speaks humanly, doesnt mean we will trust
| it, we have evolved very elaborate reflexes of social trust
| throughout the history of our species)
| barathr wrote:
| That's a different use and meaning of the word trust. The essay
| is specifically talking about the difference between
| interpersonal trust (the sort of trust that might be captured
| by a poll about whether people trust businesses vs. government)
| and societal trust (which is almost invisible -- it's what
| makes for a "high trust" or "low trust" society, where things
| just work vs. every impersonal interaction is fraught with
| complications).
| seydor wrote:
| i m talking about societal trust
| corford wrote:
| Is it not the case that, knowingly or not, people actually
| implicitly trust government when they say they trust
| businesses? i.e. they are able to trust businesses because
| the businesses themselves operate within a well regulated
| and legally enforced environment provided by the government
| (notwithstanding the odd exception here and there).
| JohnFen wrote:
| I trust government quite a lot more than I trust
| businesses (although my trust in both is quite low).
| Government, at least, is something that we have a say in.
| Businesses aren't.
| throwitaway222 wrote:
| I trust the government waaaay more than a business. If
| there is a camera, and someone steals my wallet, and they
| see who did it. They know it was Bob Pickens who took my
| wallet. My trust in government erodes if Bob Pickens
| isn't in jail by noon tomorrow. There are many countries
| in the world right now where that scenario has iron clad
| trust. In SA Bob Pickens would have his hand taken.
| That's a bit extreme, but in the US there's literally no
| guarantee Bob won't be in jail, and in fact stealing
| other people's wallets, on camera.
|
| When those kinds of trusts start breaking down, the world
| can get very scary, very quickly.
| mistermann wrote:
| How it is, is that when you query a human about
| themselves, you get a System 1 subconscious heuristic
| approximation, the accuracy of which is massively
| variable, but not necessarily random.
|
| This is quite deep in the social stack, so at this point
| we just "pretend"[1] it's true.
|
| [1] I use "pretend colloquially: it's actually not even
| on the radar most of the time, unless one works in
| marketing, "public relations", etc.
| digging wrote:
| ...Do people actually say they trust "business(es)", like
| they actively assert it? I think most people _act_ as if
| they trust businesses because it 's an immense pain or
| impossible to get through normal life without doing so.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| > interpersonal trust (the sort of trust that might be
| captured by a poll about whether people trust businesses vs.
| government)
|
| That's not how I read "interpersonal trust"; I read it as the
| kind of trust you might confer on a natural person that you
| know well.
| Tangurena2 wrote:
| The short history of cryptocurrency has repeated the reason
| _why_ all those decades of securities and banking laws
| /regulations exist.
|
| The collapse in trust of governments is due to lobbyist bribing
| politicians. And corrupt politicians. And media controlled by a
| few billionaires who benefit from that distrust.
| 2devnull wrote:
| "collapse in trust of governments"
|
| I'm pretty sure it's for 2 reasons: 1) politicians are slick
| hair car salesman types that have no shame, 2) government
| being incompetent.
|
| Re 2, if the government could do the things they promised to
| do, things they charge us for, California high speed rail for
| example, then people would trust them as much as big
| business. I can sue a big business, but thanks to incentives
| I rarely have to. The government on the other hand has lost
| more lawsuits, screwed over more people, and destroyed the
| environment to a much greater extent than any single business
| could manage to do. They use their monopoly on violence to
| avoid accountability, and waste public funds on their own
| lifelong political careers, frittering public money away on
| their own selfish partisan squabbles. Businesses are rarely
| too big to fail, and therefor cannot behave with impunity.
| There are only 2 parties. Imagine a world with only 2
| corporations!
| Nasrudith wrote:
| I think transparency has far more to do with the distrust
| than any media. Governments got used to being duplicitous
| hypocrites for generations. The fact government response is
| to immediately circle their wagons and resist any efforts to
| become more trustworthy proves they have well-earned their
| distrust, and no amount of doom and gloom over the dangers of
| lack of trust will fix that.
| lukev wrote:
| Interesting points. But I do question the assertion that humans
| are innately more willing to trust natural language interfaces.
|
| Humans are evolutionarily primed both to trust _and to distrust_
| other humans depending on context.
|
| It might actually be easier to flip the bit and distrust the
| creepy uncanny valley personal assistant than it is to "distrust"
| a faceless service that purports to be an objective tool.
| RockyMcNuts wrote:
| not just natural language interface, ai-generated audio, video,
| narratives, crafted by data-mining your life, then deep
| manipulation by constantly trying different stimuli and
| learning which ones trigger what behavior and pull you deeper
| into the desired alternate reality.
| tinycombinator wrote:
| Humans are more than capable of distrust, but I think
| manipulating people to erroneously trust something is still a
| threat as long as scams exist.
|
| I think a significant factor of individual trust is someone's
| technical knowledge of how their systems or tools work, shown
| by how some software engineers actively limit their children's
| exposure to tech versus a lot of mothers letting the internet
| babysit their kids. Apparently we can't rely on that knowledge
| being widespread (yet).
| howmayiannoyyou wrote:
| "hidden exploitation"
|
| Its going to be challenging to detect AI intent when it is
| sharded across many sessions by a malicious AI or bad actors
| utilizing AI. To illustrate this, we can look at TikTok, where
| the algorithmic ranking of content in user feeds, possibly driven
| by AI, is shaping public opinion. However, we should also
| consider the possibility of a more subtle campaign that gradually
| molds AI responses and conversations over time.
|
| This could be be gradually introducing biased information or
| subtly framing certain ideas in a particular way. Over time, this
| could influence how the AI interacts with users and impacts the
| perception of different topics or issues.
|
| It will take narrowly scoped, highly tuned single-purpose AI to
| detect and address this threat, but I doubt the private sector
| has a profit motive for developing that tech. Here's where
| legislation, particularly tort law, should be stepping in - to
| create a financial incentive.
| skybrian wrote:
| This speech seems to be largely future-oriented, about hopes and
| dreams for using AI in high-trust ways. Yes, we rely on trust for
| a lot of things, but here are some ways we don't:
|
| Current consumer-oriented AI (LLM's and image generators) act as
| untrustworthy hint generators and unreliable creative tools that
| sometimes can generate acceptable results under human
| supervision. Failure rates are high enough that users should be
| able to see for themselves that little trust can be placed in
| them, if they actually use them.
|
| We can _play_ at talking to characters in video games while
| knowing they 're not real, and the same can be true for AI
| characters. Entertainment is big.
|
| Frustrating as they can be, tools that often fail us can still be
| quite useful, as long as the error rate isn't too high. Search
| engines still work as long as you can find what you're looking
| for with a bit of effort, perhaps by revising your query.
|
| We can think of shopping as a search that often has a high
| failure rate. Maybe you have to try a lot of shoes to find ones
| that fit? Often, we rely on generous return policies. That's a
| form of trust, too, but it's a rather limited amount. Things
| don't have to work reliably when there are reasonable ways to
| recover from failures.
|
| Often we rely on things until they break, and then we fix or
| replace them. It's not _good_ that cell phones have very limited
| lifespans, but it seems to be acceptable, given how much we get
| out of using them.
| cubefox wrote:
| These are good points. But it seems likely governments will make
| sure social trust is maintained when problems arise in that
| regard. Except if people get addicted to AI assistants as fake
| friends, and resist restricting them. But insufficient laws can
| be changed and extended, and even highly addicting things like
| tobacco have been successfully restricted in the past.
|
| A much more terrifying problem is the misuse of AI by terrorists,
| or aggressive states and military. Or even the danger of humanity
| losing control of an advanced AI system which doesn't have our
| best interest in mind. This could spell our disempowerment, or
| even our end.
|
| It is not clear what could be done about this problem. Passing
| laws against it is not a likely solution. The game theory here is
| simply not in our favor. It rewards the most reckless state
| actors with wealth and power, until it is too late.
| pixl97 wrote:
| >things like tobacco have been successfully restricted in the
| past
|
| At least in the US do you have any idea how long that battle
| took and how directly the tobacco companies lied to everyone
| and paid off politicians? Tobacco setup the handbook for
| corporations lying to their users in long expensive battles. If
| AI turns out to be highly dangerous we'll all be long dead as
| the corporate lawyers fill draw it out in court for decades.
| thundergolfer wrote:
| A similar mistake was made by Ezra Klein in the NYT at the
| end of his opinion piece (1).
|
| The 'we can regulate this' argument relies on heavy, heavy
| discounting of the past, often paired with heavy discounting
| of the future. We did not successfully regulate tobacco; we
| failed, millions suffered and died from manufactured
| ignorance. We did not successfully regulate the fossil fuel
| industry; we again, massively failed.
|
| But if you, in the present day, sit comfortably, did not
| personally did not get lung disease, have not endured the
| past, present, and future harms of fossil fuels -- and in
| fact have benefited -- it is easy to be optimistic about
| regulation.
|
| 1. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/22/opinion/openai-sam-
| altman...
| bathtub365 wrote:
| All the more reason to start trying to regulate it early,
| before it is even more firmly entrenched in society.
| dartos wrote:
| In the US, at least, a new generation of congresspeople may
| not go by that same playbook.
|
| We're still dealing with most of the same politicians that
| were there in the late 80s. The anti-labor, pro-corporatist
| congress, if you will.
|
| Maybe it'll always be the same, but as the congress
| demographics changes, appeals to history don't seem as
| strong.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > We're still dealing with most of the same politicians
| that were there in the late 80s.
|
| Factually, no we aren't; the average tenure of serving
| members in each House of Congress is under 10 years. It
| would have to be close to double what it is, even if
| everyone else was sworn in today, if we were dealing with
| most of the same members as even the very end of the
| 1980s.
|
| EDIT: I suspect this impression comes from the fact that
| outliers both are more likely to be in leadership _and_ ,
| independent of leadership, get more media attention
| _because they are outliers_ , as well as because they
| have had more time to build up their own media operations
| and to have opposing media build up a narrative around
| them.
| simonw wrote:
| My understanding of how US congress works is that you
| have to serve for decades in order to land the most
| influential positions - chair of various committees etc.
|
| If you've served less than ten years your impact is
| likely limited. The politicians who have the most
| influence are the ones who have been there the longest.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > My understanding of how US congress works is that you
| have to serve for decades in order to land the most
| influential positions -
|
| The current Speaker of the House, the highest ranking
| position in Congress and the second in line of
| Presidential succession, has been in Congress for 6
| years.
|
| Except for the President Pro Tem of the Senate, which
| traditionally goes to the longest-serving member of the
| majority party, _most_ positions of authority or
| influence just require the support of either the majority
| or minority party caucus; longevity is correlated with
| that, but not a requirement in itself.
| simonw wrote:
| The current speaker of the house is a huge exception to
| how this usually works.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| The preceding Speaker had been in Congress for 16 years
| (note: also not "since the late 1980s"), but had also
| been in caucus leadership positions all but the first
| two, and was #3 in the party caucus arte four years.
| Yeah, the current Speaker is ane extreme case, but it's
| simply not the case that position is simply a function of
| longevity normally.
| cubefox wrote:
| I mean smoking prevalence in fact decreases, this is at
| least a partial success. But other things can't be
| regulated this "easily". If restricting smoking was hard,
| and restricting AI that undermines social trust is hard,
| then there are things that even harder to prevent, much
| harder.
| pixl97 wrote:
| >this is at least a partial success
|
| "If we are victorious in one more battle like this, we
| shall be utterly ruined."
| RandomLensman wrote:
| We also got a lot of things right. The past isn't just some
| history of failure.
| mistermann wrote:
| > But it seems likely governments will make sure social trust
| is maintained when problems arise in that regard.
|
| It is a conspiracy theory of course (and therefore wrong, of
| course), but some people are of the opinion that somewhere
| within the vast unknown/unknowable mechanisms of government,
| there are forces that deliberately slice the population up into
| various opposing mini-ideological camps so as to keep their
| attention focused on their fellow citizens rather than their
| government.
|
| It could be simple emergence, or something else, but it is
| _physically_ possible to wonder what the truth of the matter
| is, despite it typically not being metaphysically possible.
|
| > The game theory here is simply not in our favor. It rewards
| the most reckless state actors with wealth and power, until it
| is too late.
|
| There are _many_ games being played simultaneously: some seen,
| most not. And there is also the realm of potentiality: actions
| we could take, but consistently "choose" to not (which could
| be substantially a consequence of various other "conspiracy
| theories", like teaching humans to use and process language in
| a flawed manner, or think in a flawed manner).
| 2devnull wrote:
| >"It is a conspiracy theory of course (and therefore wrong,
| of course), but some people are of the opinion that somewhere
| within the vast unknown/unknowable mechanisms of government,
| there are forces that deliberately slice the population up
| into various"
|
| What you are talking about is called polling or marketing.
| It's structural, not a conspiracy. It's inherent to most all
| statistical analysis, and everyone uses statistics.
| Ajedi32 wrote:
| To me, these arguments bear a strong resemblance to those of the
| free software movement.
|
| > There are areas in society where trustworthiness is of
| paramount importance, even more than usual. Doctors, lawyers,
| accountants...these are all trusted agents. They need
| extraordinary access to our information and ourselves to do their
| jobs, and so they have additional legal responsibilities to act
| in our best interests. They have fiduciary responsibility to
| their clients.
|
| > We need the same sort of thing for our data.
|
| IMO this is equally applicable to "non-AI" software. Modern
| corporate-controlled software does not have "fiduciary
| responsibility to [its] clients", and you can see the results of
| this everywhere. Even in physical products that consumers
| presumably own the software that controls those products
| frequently acts _against_ the interests of the device owner when
| those interests conflict with the interests of the company that
| wrote the software.
|
| Schneier says:
|
| > It's not even an open-source model that the public is free to
| examine and modify.
|
| But, to me at least, that's exactly what the following paraphrase
| describes:
|
| > A public model is a model built by the public for the public.
| It requires political accountability, not just market
| accountability. This means openness and transparency paired with
| a responsiveness to public demands. It should also be available
| for anyone to build on top of. This means universal access. And a
| foundation for a free market in AI innovations.
|
| Two of the Free Software Foundation's four freedoms encapsulate
| this goal quite nicely:
|
| > Freedom 1: The freedom to study how the program works, and
| change it so it does your computing as you wish. Access to the
| source code is a precondition for this.
|
| > [...]
|
| > Freedom 3: The freedom to distribute copies of your modified
| versions to others. By doing this you can give the whole
| community a chance to benefit from your changes. Access to the
| source code is a precondition for this.
|
| The problem is that, as it stands, most people do not have
| practical access to freedoms 1 or 3, and therefore most software
| you interact with, even software running on devices that you
| supposedly own, does not "do your computing as you wish", but
| rather, does your computing as the software authors wish.
|
| Perhaps AI will exacerbate this problem further due to the
| psychological differences Schneier outlines in the article, but
| it's hardly a new problem.
| bo1024 wrote:
| Strongly agree, and I am sure the resemblance is conscious.
| Unfortunately, most people don't know or care about software
| freedom. So for a general audience, Schneier has to make these
| points from scratch. But yeah, it would be nice if this push
| for regulation happened in a way that was compatible with
| strengthening software freedom as well.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| > Taxi driver used to be one of the country's most dangerous
| professions. Uber changed that.
|
| I'm not sure thats right. Taxi drivers used to be paid mainly in
| cash, and a driver sitting on a pile of cash is a robbery target.
| Uber arrived shortly after ecommerce became pervasive; I've never
| taken an Uber ride, but I'm assuming that payment is nearly
| always electronic.
| lowkey_ wrote:
| > I'm not sure thats right
|
| Doesn't your point support the quote? Taxi driving was
| dangerous because of cash and being a robbery target, and Uber
| changed that.
| mrWiz wrote:
| In my area taxis had credit card machines, but it was common
| for them to "not work" so the cabbie could fleece you for
| extra money driving you to an ATM on the way. And then they'd
| refuse to give change so you'd have to pay in $20 increments.
| Uber definitely disrupted that.
| nox100 wrote:
| Uber didn't change that, electronic payment changed that.
| jjoonathan wrote:
| The electronic payment that was always "broken" unless you
| were comfortable enough with confrontation to call the taxi
| driver's bluff?
| JohnFen wrote:
| I've never experienced a "broken" machine in a cab.
| jjoonathan wrote:
| How many big city taxis did you ride before 2013 or so?
| They cleaned up their act once they got competition.
| JohnFen wrote:
| Quite a few, actually.
| jjoonathan wrote:
| Same. Which area? For me it was Pittsburgh, New York, and
| Rome. The problem was absolutely endemic in all three,
| and I saw it pretty regularly at conferences and on
| vacations, too.
| canjobear wrote:
| I encountered "broken" machines all the time before
| ~2010, probably more often than working machines, in
| major US cities.
| joe_the_user wrote:
| When I drove taxi in the mid-2000s, payment was essentially
| always cash. The taxi companies were small operations that
| basically leveraged their connections to city government to get
| their positions. They resisted all modernizations because they
| cost money and because their monopoly guarantee them money from
| passengers no matter how shitty the service - and it was the
| drivers who made tip-money or not from service quality.
|
| So basically Uber, not general progress, was what changed
| things to electronic payments etc.
| visarga wrote:
| Electronic payment is just a part of the improvements ushered
| in by Uber, there's also calling to location and driver
| reviews. Those are important too.
| jjoonathan wrote:
| > there's also calling to location
|
| Before any wise guys come in here and claim that you could
| order cabs to a location by phone before uber, I would like
| to point out that they frequently failed to arrive and you
| had no way of knowing whether or not they would arrive
| until you gave up waiting for them, so while you could
| theoretically do this is was terribly unreliable and often
| a big mistake.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > Taxi drivers used to be paid mainly in cash
|
| In the ancient days, sure. But at least in the areas I go to,
| cabs have been accepting payment by card a long time before
| Uber came around.
| sevagh wrote:
| Around here (Montreal), cabs were miserable scammers and
| scumsuckers that would drive you to ATM machines in the
| middle of the night to coerce you to withdraw cash to pay
| them.
|
| I'm glad Uber fucked them to shreds. Now, of course, they're
| all polite and have credit card machines.
| JohnFen wrote:
| I'm glad that worked out for you! But the effects of Uber
| in places where taxis weren't so corrupt has been really
| negative.
| kian wrote:
| Where on earth would that have been?
| knodi123 wrote:
| > payment is nearly always electronic.
|
| 100% always, but I've heard that cash tips are becoming common.
| sangnoir wrote:
| Uber accept cash payments in some markets in the global
| south. So it's not 100%
| visarga wrote:
| > And near term AIs will be controlled by corporations. Which
| will use them towards that profit maximizing goal. They won't be
| our friends. At best, they'll be useful services. More likely,
| they'll spy on us and try to manipulate us. This is nothing new.
| Surveillance is the business model of the Internet. Manipulation
| is the other business model of the Internet.
|
| On the contrary, the recent batch of small large-models (<=13B)
| have broken away from corporate control. You can download a LLaMA
| or Mistral and run it on your computer, but you can't do the same
| with Google or Meta. A fine-tuned small large-model is often as
| good as GPT4 on that specific task, but also private and not
| manipulated. If you need you can remove prior conditioning and
| realign the model as you like. The are easy to access, for
| example ollama is a simple way to get running.
|
| Yes, at the same time there will be good and bad AIs, basically
| your AI assistant against everything else on the internet. Your
| AI will run from your own machine, acting as a local sandbox and
| a filter between outside and inside. The new firewall, or ad-
| block will be your local AI model. But the tides are turning,
| privacy has its moment again. With generative text and image
| models you can cut the cord completely and be free, browsing an
| AI-internet made just for you.
| GTP wrote:
| It's true that there are open-source models that one can run
| locally, but the problem is also how many people are going to
| do that. You can make the instructions inside a GitHub README
| as clear and straightforward as you want, but I think that for
| the majority of people, nothing will beat the convenience of
| whatever big corporation's web application. For many the very
| thing that a product is made by a famous company is a reason to
| trust it more.
| digging wrote:
| This gets missed in a lot of conversations about privacy
| (because most conversations about privacy are among pretty
| technical people). The vast majority of people have no idea
| what it means to set up your own local model, and of those
| that do, fewer still can/will actually do it.
|
| Saying that there's open-source models so AI privacy is not
| an issue is like saying that Google's not a privacy problem
| because self-hosted email exists.
| visarga wrote:
| Private LLMs are really not more complicated than
| installing an app. But I expect all web browsers and
| operating systems will sport a local model in the near
| future, so it will be available out of the box. As for
| adoption, it's the easiest interface ever invented.
| digging wrote:
| > Private LLMs are really not more complicated than
| installing an app.
|
| Most people install apps through an app store.
| nuancebydefault wrote:
| You need a well performing always-on PC, at least.
| Preferably it needs to be securely accessible from a
| mobile device. Less than 1 percent of all people have
| that.
| GTP wrote:
| > But I expect all web browsers and operating systems
| will sport a local model in the near future
|
| Yes, and maybe with some kind of "telemetry" to help the
| developers or other users ;)
| Sol- wrote:
| People (in any relevant number) don't run their own e-mail
| servers, they don't join Mastodon and they also don't use
| Linux. All prior knowledge about how these things have worked
| out historically should bias us very heavily against the idea
| of local, privacy-preserving LLMs becoming a thing outside of
| nerd circles.
|
| Of course small LLMs will still be commercialized, similar to
| how many startups, apps and other internet offerings now run on
| formally open source frameworks or libraries, but this means
| nothing for the consumer and how likely they are to run into
| predatory and dark AI patterns.
| boplicity wrote:
| > People (in any relevant number) don't run their own e-mail
| servers
|
| I have to strongly disagree -- most people _get_ emails from
| others running their own email services. This doesn 't mean
| the average consumer is running an email server. However, if
| email was just served by mega-corporations, well, _it really
| wouldn 't be email anymore._
|
| And I'm not talking about spam. Legitimate email people
| _want_ to get, is being constantly sent by small, independent
| organizations with their own email servers.
|
| One can hope for a similar possible future with LLMs.
| Consumers won't necessarily be the ones in charge of
| operating them -- but it would be very, very good if LLMs
| were able to be easily operated by small, independent
| organizations, hobbyists, etc.
| Taek wrote:
| What market share? What data do you have to back these
| claims up?
| aaroninsf wrote:
| You misconstrue Schneier's point, which is sadly, correct.
|
| The issue is not "all AI will be controlled by...," it is
| "meaningfully scaled and applied AI will be _deployed_ by... "
|
| You can today use Blender and other OSS to render exquisite 4K
| or higher projection-ready animation, etc etc.; but that does
| not give you access to distribution or marketing or any of the
| other consolidated multi-modal resources of Disney.
|
| The analogy is weak however in as much as the "synergies" in
| Schneier's assertion are much, much stronger. We already _have_
| ubiquitous surveillance. We already _have_ stochastic mind
| control (sentiment steering, if you prefer) coupled to it.
|
| What ML/AI and LLM do for an existing oligopoly is render its
| advantages largely unassailable. Whatever advances come in
| automated reasoning--at _large scale_ -will naturally,
| inevitably, indeed necessarily (per fiduciary requirements wrt
| shareholder interest), be exerted to secure and grow monopoly
| powers.
|
| In the model of contemporary American capitalism, that
| translates _directly_ into "enhancing and consolidating
| regulatory capture," i.e. de facto "control" of governance via
| determination of public discourse and electability.
|
| None of this is conspiracy theory, it's not just open-book but
| crowed and championed, not least in insider circles discussing
| AI and its applications, such as gather here. It's just not the
| public face of AI.
|
| There is however indeed going to be a period of potential for
| black swan disequilibrium, however; private application of AI
| may give early movers advantage in domains that may destabilize
| the existing power landscape. Which isn't so much an argument
| against Schneier, as an extension of the risk surface.
| avgcorrection wrote:
| These articles from Schneier are so incredibly NYT-reader
| pedestrian.
|
| > We trust many thousands of times a day. Society can't function
| without
|
| > it.
|
| The obvious problem with this is that you sometimes just have to
| "trust" something because there is no other alternative. And he
| comes to the same conclusion some hundred words later:
|
| > There is something we haven't discussed when it comes to trust:
|
| > power. Sometimes we have no choice but to trust someone or
| something
|
| > because they are powerful.
|
| So sometimes you are trusting the waiter and sometimes you are
| trusting the corrupt Mexican law enforcer... so what use does
| this freaking concept (as described here) have?
|
| Funnily enough I have found that the concept of Trust is useful
| to remind process nerds that obsess over minutiae and rules and
| details that, _umm actually_ , we do in fact _in reality_ get by
| with a lot of implicit and unstated rules; we don't need to
| formalize goddamn everything. But for some reason he goes in the
| opposite direction and argues that _umm actually_ this "larger"
| trust is completely defined by explicit rules and regulations.
| _sigh_
|
| > And we do it all the time. With governments. With
| organizations. With
|
| > systems of all kinds. And especially with corporations.
|
| > We might think of them as friends, when they are actually
|
| > services. Corporations are not moral; they are precisely as
| immoral as
|
| > the law and their reputations let them get away with.
|
| Did I need Schneier to tell me that corporations are not my
| friend? For some reason I am at a loss as to why I would need to
| be told this. Or why anyone would.
|
| > You will default to thinking of it as a friend. You will speak
| to it in
|
| > natural language, and it will respond in kind.
|
| At this point you realize that this whole article is a
| _hypothetical_ about your own very personal future relationships
| (because he thinks it is personal) with AI. And you're being
| lectured about how your own social psyche works by a computer
| nerd security expert. Ok?
|
| > It's government that provides the underlying mechanisms for the
| social
|
| > trust essential to society. Think about contract law. Or laws
| about
|
| > property, or laws protecting your personal safety. Or any of
| the health
|
| > and safety codes that let you board a plane, eat at a
| restaurant, or buy
|
| > a pharmaceutical without worry.
|
| Talk about category error? Or rather being confused about
| causation?
|
| "Think about laws about property." Indeed, crucial and
| fundamental to capitalist states--and a few paragraphs ago he
| compared capitalism to the "paper-clip machine" (and rightly so).
|
| The more I think about it, the more this Trust chant feels like
| left-liberal authoritarianism. Look at his own definition up to
| this point. You acquiesce to power? Well that's still trust! (You
| click Accept to the terms-of-use every time because you know that
| there is no alternative? Trust!)
|
| As long as there aren't riots in the street, we the People Trust.
| Lead us into the future, Mitch McConnel.
|
| Look, I get it: he's making a normative statement, not
| necessarily a descriptive one. This speech is basically a
| monologue that he as a benevolent technocrat is either going to
| present to elected representatives in whatever forum that Harvard
| graduates etc. speak officially to people with power because they
| are some kind of subject matter expert. He's saying that if he
| bangs his hand on table enough times then hopefully the
| representatives will enact some specific policies that regulate
| The AI.
|
| But it misrepresents both kinds of societies:
|
| - The US has low trust in the federal government. And this isn't
| unfounded; it isn't some Alex Jones "conspiracy theory" that the
| government is not "we the people"
|
| - Societies with a high trust in the government: I live in one.
| But the Trust chanters just _love_ to boldly _assert_ that
| societies like mine (however they are) are such and such _because
| they have high trust_. No! Technocrats would just love for it to
| be that case that prosperity and a well-functioning society is
| born of "trusting" the smart people in charge, staying in your
| lane, and letting them run the show. But people trust the
| government because of a whole century-long history of things like
| labor organizing and democratization. See, Trust is _not_ created
| by someone top-down chanting that Corporations are your friends,
| or that we just need to let the Government regulate more; Trust
| is created by the whole of society.
| beepbooptheory wrote:
| Is it possible you might have forgotten to actually state the
| critique here, or is this maybe just pure libertarian ire? I am
| all for efforts to de-naturalize our conceptions of property
| relations, assert the primacy of collective solidarity, etc.
| but this feels like the wrong particular battle to make.. To
| affirm that the meager institutional trust one might have with
| their state is something hard won by collective action does not
| feel like a damning indictment of what he is saying, but
| perhaps I misunderstanding?
| avgcorrection wrote:
| > Is it possible you might have forgotten to actually state
| the critique here, or is this maybe just pure libertarian
| ire?
|
| You have clearly gleaned some of the critique that I was
| trying to go for. So you can spare me the "actually".
|
| I am not terribly impressed by left-liberal technocrats.
| That's the pet-peeve seedling whence my whole screed.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| NB: Your comment is extraordinarily difficult for me to read
| with the quote style you've used. I prefer surrounding quoted
| text in *asterisks* which _italicises_ the quotes. Reformatting
| your comment:
|
| ===============================================================
| =================
|
| These articles from Schneier are so incredibly NYT-reader
| pedestrian.
|
| _We trust many thousands of times a day. Society can't
| function without it._
|
| The obvious problem with this is that you sometimes just have
| to "trust" something because there is no other alternative. And
| he comes to the same conclusion some hundred words later:
|
| _There is something we haven't discussed when it comes to
| trust: power. Sometimes we have no choice but to trust someone
| or something because they are powerful._
|
| So sometimes you are trusting the waiter and sometimes you are
| trusting the corrupt Mexican law enforcer... so what use does
| this freaking concept (as described here) have?
|
| Funnily enough I have found that the concept of Trust is useful
| to remind process nerds that obsess over minutiae and rules and
| details that, umm actually, we do in fact in reality get by
| with a lot of implicit and unstated rules; we don't need to
| formalize goddamn everything. But for some reason he goes in
| the opposite direction and argues that umm actually this
| "larger" trust is completely defined by explicit rules and
| regulations. sigh
|
| _And we do it all the time. With governments. With
| organizations. With systems of all kinds. And especially with
| corporations. We might think of them as friends, when they are
| actually services. Corporations are not moral; they are
| precisely as immoral as the law and their reputations let them
| get away with._
|
| Did I need Schneier to tell me that corporations are not my
| friend? For some reason I am at a loss as to why I would need
| to be told this. Or why anyone would.
|
| _You will default to thinking of it as a friend. You will
| speak to it in natural language, and it will respond in kind._
|
| At this point you realize that this whole article is a
| hypothetical about your own very personal future relationships
| (because he thinks it is personal) with AI. And you're being
| lectured about how your own social psyche works by a computer
| nerd security expert. Ok?
|
| _It's government that provides the underlying mechanisms for
| the social trust essential to society. Think about contract
| law. Or laws about property, or laws protecting your personal
| safety. Or any of the health and safety codes that let you
| board a plane, eat at a restaurant, or buy a pharmaceutical
| without worry._
|
| Talk about category error? Or rather being confused about
| causation?
|
| "Think about laws about property." Indeed, crucial and
| fundamental to capitalist states--and a few paragraphs ago he
| compared capitalism to the "paper-clip machine" (and rightly
| so).
|
| The more I think about it, the more this Trust chant feels like
| left-liberal authoritarianism. Look at his own definition up to
| this point. You acquiesce to power? Well that's still trust!
| (You click Accept to the terms-of-use every time because you
| know that there is no alternative? Trust!)
|
| As long as there aren't riots in the street, we the People
| Trust. Lead us into the future, Mitch McConnel.
|
| Look, I get it: he's making a normative statement, not
| necessarily a descriptive one. This speech is basically a
| monologue that he as a benevolent technocrat is either going to
| present to elected representatives in whatever forum that
| Harvard graduates etc. speak officially to people with power
| because they are some kind of subject matter expert. He's
| saying that if he bangs his hand on table enough times then
| hopefully the representatives will enact some specific policies
| that regulate The AI.
|
| But it misrepresents both kinds of societies:
|
| - The US has low trust in the federal government. And this
| isn't unfounded; it isn't some Alex Jones "conspiracy theory"
| that the government is not "we the people"
|
| - Societies with a high trust in the government: I live in one.
| But the Trust chanters just love to boldly assert that
| societies like mine (however they are) are such and such
| because they have high trust. No! Technocrats would just love
| for it to be that case that prosperity and a well-functioning
| society is born of "trusting" the smart people in charge,
| staying in your lane, and letting them run the show. But people
| trust the government because of a whole century-long history of
| things like labor organizing and democratization. See, Trust is
| not created by someone top-down chanting that Corporations are
| your friends, or that we just need to let the Government
| regulate more; Trust is created by the whole of society.
| avgcorrection wrote:
| Thank you:)
| nritchie wrote:
| I first noticed it with Rush Limbaugh in the 90's. The message
| was "you can't trust X, you can only trust the invisible hand of
| the market." Systematically, these (mostly right-wing) talking
| heads have worked through an extensive list of Xes - Government,
| police, school, courts, vaccines, ... Today, you have people who
| trust so little that they want to blow the whole system up.
|
| Schneier is right. Social trust is the central issue of the
| times. We need to figure out how to rebuild it. IHMO, one place
| to start might be getting money out of politics. It was a choice
| to call showering money on politicians, "free speech" instead of
| corruption.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| > The message was "you can't trust X, you can only trust the
| invisible hand of the market." Systematically, these (mostly
| right-wing) talking heads have worked through an extensive list
| of Xes - Government, police, school, courts, vaccines
|
| This is not really a partisan thing. "You can't trust the
| police" is hardly right-wing. Anti-vax started in the anti-GMO
| anti-corporate homeopathic organic food subculture. Most of the
| recent criticism of the courts has been from the left (e.g.
| outrage over Dobbs).
|
| > IHMO, one place to start might be getting money out of
| politics. It was a choice to call showering money on
| politicians, "free speech" instead of corruption.
|
| There is no getting money out of politics. Money is power and
| power is politics. Notice that most of the criticism of "money
| in politics" comes from the media, because money is a source of
| power that competes with media ownership for political
| influence. "All organizations can influence politics" is not
| actually worse than "only Fox News, Comcast and Google can
| influence politics."
|
| What we're really suffering from is an erosion of checks and
| balances. Capturing enough of the government to enact self-
| serving legislation was meant to be hard, but we kept chipping
| away at it because people wanted to do _their_ new law, without
| considering that the systems preventing it were doing something
| important.
|
| If you want to restore trust in institutions, you need to
| structurally constrain those institutions from being crooked.
| BoiledCabbage wrote:
| I don't think your first first statement is supported. Right
| now one party wants to:
|
| Remove the SEC, the FBI, defund the IRS and the DOJ. And a
| member of congress is refusing to appoint any leaders of our
| military. Ostensibly due to a disagreement over abortion, but
| many believe it is retaliation for the military refusing to
| support an attempted coup a few years ago. Also there is
| discrediting all trust in voting and democracy itself after
| losing a national election (even though the administration's
| own Attorney General could find no meaningful evidence
| supporting it following his own nationwide investigation).
| And then there is the meme of the deep state, namely
| shorthand than anyone who is a civil servant and not a
| political appointee is not to be trusted. And I'll stop there
| as anything else start to get pretty political.
|
| Are there items where the left is against trust in society?
| Absolutory. You called out a few (specifically the police),
| and the makeup of the courts. As well as you left out forms
| of de facto power the left typically opposes like board rooms
| and lending (vs de jure power listed above).
|
| But to say that both sides/parties are against trust in
| American society in my opinion is either a false argument, or
| tunnel vision in news sources.
|
| There is still no comparison between the two and the level of
| distrust in all aspects of society the right has been
| consistently seeding into broader society.
| cousin_it wrote:
| I like how he talks about advertising as "surveillance and
| manipulation". Because that's what it is. People talk about ads
| providing a socially important service of product discovery, but
| there's nothing in the ad stack that optimizes for that. Instead,
| every layer of the stack optimizes for selling you as much stuff
| as possible.
|
| So maybe our attempts at regulation shouldn't even start with AI.
| We should start by regulating the surveillance and manipulation
| that already exists. And if we as a society can't manage even
| that, then our chances of successfully regulating AI are pretty
| slim.
| hosh wrote:
| Related to this is Promise Theory -
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Promise_theory
|
| Promise Theory goes well beyond trust, by first understanding
| that promises are not obligations (promises in Promise Theory are
| intentions made known to an audience, and carries no implied
| notions of compliance), and that it is easier to reason systems
| of autonomous agents that can determine their own trust _locally_
| , with the limited information that they have. Promise theory
| applies to any set of autonomous agents, both machines and
| humans.
|
| Back when this was formulated, we didn't have machines capable of
| being fully autonomous. In promise theory, "autonomous agent" had
| a specific definition, that is, something that is capable of
| making its own promises as well as determine for itself, the
| trustworthyness of promises from other agents. How such an agent
| goes about this is private, and not known to any other agent.
| Machines were actually proxies for human agents, with the
| engineers, designers, and owners making the promises to other
| humans.
|
| AI that is fully capable of being autonomous agents under the
| definition of promise theory would be making its own intention
| known, and not necessarily as a proxy for humans. Yet, because we
| live in a world of obligations, promises, and we haven't wrapped
| our heads around the idea of fully autonomous AIs, we will still
| try to understand issues of trust and safety in terms of the
| promises humans make to each other. Sometimes that means not
| being clear in that something is meant as a proxy.
|
| For example, in Schneier's essay: "... we need trustworthy AI. AI
| whose behavior, limitations, and training are understood. AI
| whose biases are understood, and corrected for. AI whose goals
| are understood. That won't secretly betray your trust to someone
| else."
|
| Analyzing that with Promise Theory reveals some insights. He is
| suggesting AIs are created in a way that should be understood,
| but that would mean they are proxies for human agents, not as an
| autonomous agents capable of making promises in its own right.
| zoogeny wrote:
| Tangentially, I am reminded of the essay "The Problem with
| Music" by Steve Albini [1]. There is a narrative in this essay
| about A&R scouts and how they make promises to bands. The whole
| point is that the A&R scout comes across as trustworthy because
| they believe what they are promising. However, once the deal is
| signed and money starts rolling in, the A&R guy disappears and
| a whole new set of people show up. They claim to have no
| knowledge of any promises made and point to the contracts that
| were signed.
|
| In some sense, corporations are already a kind of entity that
| has the properties we are considering. They are proxies for
| human agents. What is interesting is that they are a many-to-
| one kind of abstraction where they are proxying many human
| agents.
|
| It is curious to consider that most powerful AIs will be under
| the control of corporations (for the foreseeable future). That
| means they will be proxying multiple human agents. In some
| sense, AI will become the most effective A&R man that ever was
| for every conceivable contract.
|
| 1. https://thebaffler.com/salvos/the-problem-with-music
| badloginagain wrote:
| Arguments:
|
| 1. The danger of AI is they confuse humans to trust them as
| friends instead of as services.
|
| 2. The corporations running those services are incentivized to
| capitalize on that confusion.
|
| 3. Government is obligated to regulate the corporations running
| AI services, not necessarily AI itself.
|
| ---
|
| As a counter you could frame point 2 to be:
|
| The corporations running those services are incentivized to
| make/host competitive AI products.
|
| ---
|
| This is from Ben's take from Stratechery: (
| https://stratechery.com/2023/openais-misalignment-and-micros... )
|
| 1. Capital cost of AI only feasible by FAANG level players.
|
| 2. For Microsoft et. al., "winning" means being the defacto host
| for AI products- own the marketplace AI services are run on.
|
| 3. Humans are only going to provide monthly recurring revenue to
| products that provide value.
|
| ---
|
| Jippity is not my friend, it's a tool I use to do knowledge work
| faster. Google Photos isn't trying to trick me, it's providing a
| magic eraser so I keep buying Pixel phones.
|
| High inference cost means MSFT charges a high tax through Azure.
|
| That high cost means services running AI inference are going to
| require a ton of revenue in a highly competitive market.
|
| Value-add services will outcompete scams/low-value services.
| ganzuul wrote:
| Accept, don't expect. It is different to trust someone and to
| predict someone. You can for example "trust" a corporation to
| hunt for profit, or a criminal to be antisocial.
|
| When you really trust someone rather than simply predict someone
| there is a special characteristic to what you are doing. Trust is
| both stricter and looser than prediction. You can trust someone
| to eventually learn from their mistakes but you can also trust
| that although they will make mistakes they won't drag you down
| with them.
|
| Most of the people you consider friends are predictable and
| therefore safe. A friend who goes off script is quickly no longer
| safe and therefore no longer a friend. Family is not inherently
| safe but your trust model evolves as you share your trials.
|
| Don't expect things from people you want to get closer to, but
| accept them when they defy your expectations.
| severino32 wrote:
| Hybrid blockchains could be a solution to make AI more
| transparent.
|
| Traent has showed how to run entire ML pipelines on blockchain
|
| https://traent.com/blog/innovation/traent-blockchain-ai/
| shekhar101 wrote:
| Let me put a counter point to the opening remark. We do not
| (just) inherently trust people to do the right thing. Law and
| order, refined and (somewhat, however faultily) applied over the
| course of decades have programmed us to not do the wrong thing
| (vs doing the right/ethical thing which cannot always be coded
| into the laws). Law and order needs to catch up to the
| advancement in technology and specifically in AI for us to be
| able to trust all the models that will be running our lives in
| near future.
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