[HN Gopher] AI and Mass Spying
___________________________________________________________________
AI and Mass Spying
Author : hendler
Score : 349 points
Date : 2023-12-05 14:09 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.schneier.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.schneier.com)
| naveen99 wrote:
| The limiting factor is usually, someone has to pay for the spying
| and the punishment. A lot (most?) of troublemakers just aren't
| worth the trouble of spying or punishing.
| sonicanatidae wrote:
| I suspect this will be the hoovering approach. Suck it all up,
| then figure out what you care to act on.
|
| The government is a lot of things, and none of them are subtle.
|
| Source: The ironically named PATRIOT ACT and similar.
| ilovetux wrote:
| The problem is that if AI enables mass spying, then the costs
| will no longer be prohibitive to target an individual because
| the infrastructure could be built out once and then reused to
| target individuals at scale with AI doing all of the
| correlation behind the scenes.
| ben_w wrote:
| That would resolve the spying cost, but not the punishment
| cost. My go-to example here is heroin: class A drug in the
| UK, 7 years for possession and life for supply, so far as I
| can see nobody has anything good to say about it, and it has
| around three times as many users in the UK as the entire UK
| prison population.
|
| Could implement punishment for that specific crime, at huge
| cost, but you can't expand that to all crimes. Well, I
| suppose you could try feudalism mark 2 where most of the
| population is determined to be criminal and therefore spends
| their life "having to work of their debt to society", but
| then you have to find out the hard way why we stopped doing
| feudalism mark 1.
| barrysteve wrote:
| A computer owned society doesn't really need jails. You can
| deny 90% of services to a criminal and track and limit
| their movement digitally.
|
| We are already in the jail.
| ben_w wrote:
| I think prisoners are usually denied voting rights? Might
| be wrong about that.
|
| Certainly don't get many travel opportunities.
| hruzgar wrote:
| they most likely already do this and honestly it's really
| really scary
| kozikow wrote:
| I don't think it's too far-fetched. To see where it's going
| look at social score in China.
|
| You say something wrong about a party, suddenly you can't board
| a plane, take a mortgage, enter some buildings, ...
|
| Your credit score would look at how compliant you are with
| policies that can get increasingly nonsensical.
| stillwithit wrote:
| Humans existed under religious nonsense, and other forms of
| nonsense (sure, sure legal racism and sexism up until the
| last 30-40 years and obviously politically contrived social
| norms means the "right people won" free market capitalism)
|
| What's one more form of BS hallucination foisted upon the
| meat based cassettes we exist as?
| datadrivenangel wrote:
| Same thing happens in the US. Post a tweet too critical of
| the government, and you might get investigated and added to a
| no-fly list. Background checks can reveal investigations, so
| you may end up not getting a job because the government
| didn't like your tweet...
| iAMkenough wrote:
| AI reduces the labor involved, reducing barriers to invest time
| or money.
|
| Spying isn't just for troublemakers either. It's probably worth
| the trouble to the vindictive ex-husband willing to install a
| hidden microphone in his ex-wife's house and in order to have
| access to a written summary of any conversations related to
| him.
| nathanfig wrote:
| Fining offenses is a great way to fund finding more offenses.
| sambull wrote:
| next time they try to root out whatever 'vermin' defined; it will
| be a quick natural language prompt trained on ingested data from
| the last 2 decades to get that list of names and addresses /
| networks. AI is going to make targeting groups with differing
| ideologies dead simple. It will be used.
| Spivak wrote:
| This happened during the last big technological advancement --
| search. Suddenly it became possible for a government to
| theoretically sift through all of our communications and people
| online made constant reference to it talking directly to their
| "FBI agent."
|
| But it was and still is a nothingburger and this will be the same
| because it doesn't enable anything except "better search." We've
| had comparable abilities for a decade now. Yes LLMs are better
| but semantic search and NLP have been around a while and the
| world didn't end.
|
| All the examples of what an LLM could do are just querying
| tracking databases. Uncovering organizational structure is just a
| social graph, correlating purchases is just querying purchase
| databases, listing license plates is just querying the camera
| systems. You don't need an LLM for any of this.
| theodric wrote:
| It will eventually end, though, accompanied by the chatter of a
| gaggle of naysayers chicken-littling the people trying to raise
| the alarm. I'm delighted to be here to witness the death of
| liberty and descent of the West into the throes of everything
| it once claimed to represent the polar opposite of, and also
| delighted to be old enough that I'll likely die before it
| becomes Actual Big Brother levels of oppressive.
| ryanackley wrote:
| Search has become a mass surveillance tool for the government.
| That is the article's point. If you think it's a nothingburger,
| you aren't aware of how often a person's Google searches are
| used to establish criminal intent in criminal trials. Also,
| they can be used to bolster probable cause for search warrants
| and arrests.
|
| Also, check out geofence warrants. Essentially, the government
| can ask google for the IP's of people who searched for
| particular terms within a geographic area.
|
| Of course, don't commit crimes but this behavior by the
| government raises the spectre of wrong search, wrong place,
| wrong time. This is one of the article's points, it causes
| people to self-censor and change their searches out of fear of
| their curiosity being misconstrued as criminal intent.
| Spivak wrote:
| > a person's Google searches are used to establish criminal
| intent in criminal trials. > > can ask google for the IP's of
| people who searched for particular terms within a geographic
| area
|
| These aren't mass surveillance. The threat of search is
| government systems passively sifting through all information
| in existence looking for "criminal activity" and then
| throwing the book at you.
|
| In both of these cases the government is asking Google to run
| a SQL query against their database that wouldn't be aided by
| an LLM or even the current crop of search engines.
| ryanackley wrote:
| It is mass surveillance. It's just not being looked at by
| anyone until you are targeted by the government. If you are
| targeted, your entire life is within keystrokes of the
| authorities. This is the same thing the article is saying.
|
| The article is making the point that it's not feasible to
| spy on every person to monitor them for wrongdoing
| currently. It doesn't scale and it's not cost effective.
| With AI that will change because it can be automated. The
| AI can listen to voice, monitor video cameras, and read
| text to discern a level of intent.
| Spivak wrote:
| > it's not feasible to spy on every person to monitor
| them for wrongdoing currently
|
| Sure it is! That's the whole point of search being the
| previous big technical hurdle. YouTube monitors every
| single video posted in real time for copyright
| infringement. We've had the capability to do this kind of
| monitoring for huge swaths of crimes for a decade and it
| hasn't turned into anything. We could for example catch
| every driver in real time for all across the country for
| speeding but we don't.
|
| Mass is the opposite of targeted surveillance. If you
| need to be targeted and get a warrant to look at the data
| then it's not mass. And AI isn't going to change the
| system that prevents it right now which is the rules
| governing our law enforcement bodies.
| ryanackley wrote:
| I get the impression you didn't bother reading the
| article.
|
| Your two examples are flawed and don't address what the
| article is saying. The algorithm to check for copyright
| violations is relatively simple and dumb. Speed cameras:
| many countries do use speed cameras (i.e. Australia, UK).
| The problem with speed cameras is that once you know
| where they are, you simply slow down when approaching.
|
| Again, mass vs. targeted surveillance is irrelevant now.
| You've already been surveilled. It's just a matter of
| getting access to the information.
| HackerThemAll wrote:
| Soon in the name of "security" you'll have your face scanned on
| average every few minutes and it's going to be mandatory in many
| aspects of our lives. That's the pathetic world IT has helped to
| build.
| brandall10 wrote:
| Some of us have this already w/ our cell phones.
|
| I know that's not what you mean, but in a way it may have
| preconditioned society.
| acuozzo wrote:
| > That's the pathetic world IT has helped to build.
|
| It's inevitable, I reckon, but it would have taken much longer
| without F/OSS.
| Taylor_OD wrote:
| Ha. People have been scanning their finger print or face to
| open their phone for years.
| RandomLensman wrote:
| Not sure why this sidesteps the potentially quite different legal
| settings for spying and surveilling.
| miyuru wrote:
| The TV show "Person of Interest" portrayed this beautifully and
| it came out 12 years ago.
|
| Strange and scary how fast the world develops new technology.
| cookiengineer wrote:
| The amazing part is that so many large scale cyber attacks
| happened meanwhile that were 1:1 fiction in the series back
| then.
|
| The Solarwinds incident, for example, was the identical attack
| and deployment strategy that was the Rylatech hack in the
| series. From execution to even the parties involved. It's like
| some foreign state leaders saw those episodes and said "yep
| that's a good idea, let's do that".
| forward1 wrote:
| It's far worse still: films like Enemy of the State (1998)
| actually inspired spy technology.
|
| https://slate.com/technology/2019/06/enemy-of-the-state-wide...
| rambambram wrote:
| This TV show immediately captured me and has always been in the
| back of my mind since. Then, it seemed like a future far far
| away, but now you remind me of it... I think it's scarily close
| already.
|
| Around 2013 I came up with some hardware ideas about offline
| computing and even contemplated to name some versions after the
| characters in 'Person of Interest'.
|
| I can really recommend this series, since it's a good story,
| has good actors and fits the zeitgeist very well.
|
| edit: I also think it's time for me to get a malinois shepherd.
| ;)
| salawat wrote:
| Hell, Stargate SG-1 had a few episodes that touched on the
| absolute hell of a Federal Government that had access to
| everything, or a computer system with RW access to people's
| gray matter and it:s own unknown optimization function
| (shrinking environmental protection dome resulting in live
| updates of people's consciousness on a societal scale to keep
| them in the dark as to it's happening ).
| jacobwilliamroy wrote:
| A friend of mine was recently a witness for the FBI. He was
| working in a small office in the middle of nowhere and happened
| to have a very loud argument with the suspect. A few minutes
| later he left the building and when he was about to start his
| car, he got a call from an agent asking him if he wanted to be a
| witness in the case they were working on.
| jdthedisciple wrote:
| This stopped to soon.
|
| What happened next?
| jacobwilliamroy wrote:
| The suspect was allegedly embezzling covid relief money and
| the argument was about things like "why are we using company
| time to go to your house and install the new flat screen TV
| you just bought?"
|
| The moral of the story is that you should never steal money
| from the U.S. government because that is one thing that they
| will not tolerate and I do not know the limits of what they
| will do in order to catch you.
|
| Also the suspect was convicted (so they probably aren't a
| suspect anymore) and last I heard was being flown to
| Washington D.C. for sentencing. That person is probably in
| some kind of prison now but I haven't been following the
| story very closely.
| sonicanatidae wrote:
| Mine was walking into the client's site. This was many years
| ago. They had Novell Server issues, that's how long ago this
| was.
|
| I walked in, cops everywhere. Man in a suit waves an FBI badge
| at me and asks why I'm there. I explained the ongoing work and
| he said, "Not today" and forced me off the premises.
|
| The next day I was called back by the client to "rebuild their
| network". When I got there, every single piece of hardware that
| contained anything remotely like storage had been disassembled
| and the drives imaged, then just left in pieces. lol
|
| I spent that day rebuilding it all, did get the Novell server
| working again.
|
| A week later, they were closed forever and I believe the owner
| and CFO got nailed for healthcare fraud.
|
| I was asked to testify in a deposition. My stuff was pretty
| basic and mostly what I knew about how they used the tech. What
| I saw around there and if I saw any big red signs declaring
| FRAUD COMMITTED HERE!
| troupo wrote:
| Will? It already has. China has had its surveillance for ages.
| And it's been spreading in other countries, too. Example:
| https://www.404media.co/fusus-ai-cameras-took-over-town-amer...
| gumballindie wrote:
| I beg to differ. The correct term is not "will" but "is".
| yonaguska wrote:
| It's already happening. See this DHS memo issues on August 8th -
| page 3.
|
| https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/2023-09/23_0913_mgmt...
|
| Fortunately the DHS has put together an expert team of non-
| partisan, honest, Americans to spearhead the effort to protect
| our democracy. Thank you James Clapper and John Brennan- for
| stepping up to the task.
|
| https://www.dhs.gov/news/2023/09/19/secretary-mayorkas-annou...
|
| And just in time for election season in the US AI is going to be
| employed to fight disinformation- for our protection of course.
| https://www.thedefensepost.com/2023/08/31/ussocom-ai-disinfo...
| lp0_on_fire wrote:
| That James Clapper and John Brennan continue to be lauded by
| the media and their sycophants in government is one of the most
| disappointing things to happen in my lifetime. Both should be
| frog marched straight to prison along with their enablers.
| whamlastxmas wrote:
| Everything the media does is disappointing. It's all wildly
| dishonest and damaging and done at the direction of a few
| billionaires.
| px43 wrote:
| Never in the history of humanity has such powerful privacy tech
| existed for anyone who wants to use it.
|
| Using common off the shelf, open source, heavily audited tools,
| it's trivial today, even for a non-technical 10 year old, to
| create a new identity and collaborate with anyone anywhere in the
| world. They can do research, get paid, make payments, and
| contribute to private communities in such a way that no existing
| surveillance infrastructure can positively link that identity to
| their government identity. Every day privacy tech is improving
| and adding new capabilities.
| hackeman300 wrote:
| Care to elaborate?
| maxrecursion wrote:
| That guy clearly has never been around 10 years olds, and
| vastly over estimates their intelligence.
|
| I'm fact, all evidence points to younger generations being
| less tech savvy because they don't have to troubleshoot like
| the older generations did. Everything works, and almost
| nothing requires any technical configurations.
| whelp_24 wrote:
| Never before in history has it been necessary. It used to be
| possible to travel like a hundred miles and dissappear. Before
| credit was ubiquitous, money was hard to trace, and before that
| is was essentially untraceable. And cameras didn't used to be
| everywhere tracking faces for criminals and frequent shoppers.
| I don't know what privacy technologies you are talking about
| that are super effective, and i have been bit older than 10 for
| a while.
| 127361 wrote:
| Now here in the UK they are using people's passport photos
| for facial recognition, at least to stop shoplifting. It
| won't be long before this is expanded to other things due to
| feature creep.
| crazygringo wrote:
| > _Never in the history of humanity has such powerful privacy
| tech existed for anyone who wants to use it._
|
| True.
|
| > _it 's trivial today, even for a non-technical 10 year old_
|
| Not even close. It's difficult even for a technical 30 year
| old.
|
| You're talking about acquiring cash that has passed through
| several people's hands without touching an ATM that recorded
| its serial numbers. Using it to acquire Bitcoin from a
| stranger. Making use of multiple VPN's, and making _zero_
| mistakes where _any_ outgoing traffic from your computer can be
| used to identify you -- browser fingerprinting, software
| updates, analytics, MAC address. Which basically means a brand-
| new computer you 've purchased in cash somewhere without
| cameras, that you use for nothing else -- or _maybe_ you could
| get away with a VM, but are you _really_ sure its networking
| isn 't leaking _anything_ about your actual hardware? Receiving
| Bitcoin, and then once again finding a stranger to convert that
| back into cash.
|
| That is a _lot_ of effort.
| 127361 wrote:
| Also stylometric analysis of your writing can be used to
| identify you.
| JohnFen wrote:
| This is one thing AI really can help with: rewriting what
| you wrote in order to make stylometric analysis worthless.
| willismichael wrote:
| Feed your writing into AI so that it can rewrite it so
| that AI can't identify you by your writing?
|
| Sounds like a startup idea to me. When we're ready for
| the evil phase, let's classify everybody by their inputs
| to the system and then sell the results to the highest
| bidder.
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| That's why I run everything I write through a random open
| source LLM with random settings and a custom decoder /s
|
| I'm kidding, but the reality is such techniques will fool
| almost all stylometric analysis,
|
| Also most actual stylinetric analysts work for spooks or
| are spooks.
| yoyohello13 wrote:
| I think "trivial" is a stretch.
| zxt_tzx wrote:
| > They can do research, get paid, make payments, and contribute
| to private communities in such a way that no existing
| surveillance infrastructure can positively link that identity
| to their government identity.
|
| I can't help but wonder if we live in the same universe. If
| anything, in my part of the world, I am seeing powerful
| surveillance tech going from the digital sphere and into the
| physical sphere, often on the legal/moral basis that one has no
| expectation of privacy in public spaces.
|
| Would love for OP to elaborate and prove me wrong!
| darklycan51 wrote:
| Think about it this way.
|
| Every service has access to the IPs you've used to log on, most
| services require an email, phone number some debit/credit cards
| and or similar personal info. Link that with government databases
| on addresses/real names/ISP customers and you basically can get
| most peoples accounts, on virtually any service they use.
|
| We then also have things such as the patriot act in effect, the
| government could if they wanted run a system to do this
| automatically, where every message is scanned by an AI that
| catalogues them.
|
| I have believed for some time now that we are extremely close to
| a complete dystopia.
| Nilrem404 wrote:
| _Surprised Pikachu Face_
|
| Seriously nothing new or shocking about this piece. Spying is
| spying. Surveillance is surveillance. If you've watched the news
| at all in the past 2 decades, you know this is happening.
|
| Anyone who assumes that any new technology isn't going to be used
| to target the masses by increasingly massive and powerful
| authoritarian regimes is woefully naive.
|
| Another post stating what we all already know isn't helping or
| fostering any meaningful conversation. It will just be rehashes.
| Let me skip to the end here for you:
|
| There is nothing we can do about it. Nothing will change for the
| better.
|
| Go make a coffee or tea
| thesuperbigfrog wrote:
| The new Google, Meta, Microsoft, etc. bots won't just crawl the
| web or social networks--they will crawl specific topics and
| people.
|
| Lots of cultures have the concept of a "guardian angel" or
| "ancestral spirits" that watch over the lives of their
| descendants.
|
| In the not-so-distant technofedualist future you'll have a
| "personal assistant bot" provided by a large corporation that
| will "help" you by answering questions, gathering information,
| and doing tasks that you give it. However, be forewarned that
| your "personal assistant bot" is no guardian angel and only
| serves you in ways that its corporate creator wants it to.
|
| Its true job is to collect information about you, inform on you,
| and give you curated and occasionally "sponsored" information
| that high bidders want you to see. They serve their creators--not
| you. Don't be fooled.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > In the not-so-distant technofedualist future you'll have
| [...]
|
| I guarantee that I won't. That, at least, is a nightmare that I
| can choose to avoid. I don't think I can avoid the other
| dystopian things AI is promising to bring, but I can at least
| avoid that one.
| justinclift wrote:
| Wonder if some kind of ai-agent thing(s) will become so
| widely used by people, that government services come to
| assume you have them?
|
| Like happened with mobile phones.
| JohnFen wrote:
| At least in my part of the US, it's not hard to do without
| smartphones at all. Default assumptions are that you have
| one, but you can still do everything you want to do if you
| don't.
| lurker_jMckQT99 wrote:
| I guarantee that you will. That is a nightmare that you can
| not choose to avoid unless you are willing to sacrifice your
| social life.
|
| Remember how raising awareness about smartphones, always on
| microphones, closed source communication services/apps
| worked? I do not.
|
| I run an Android (Google free) smartphone with a custom ROM,
| only use free software apps on it.
|
| How does it help when I am surrounded by people using these
| kind of technologies (privacy violating ones)? I does not.
| How will it help when everyone will have his/her personal
| assistant (robot, drone, smart wearable, smart-thing,
| whatever) and you (and I) won't? It will not.
|
| None of my friends, family, colleagues (even the
| security/privacy aware engineers) bother. Some of them
| because they do not have the technical knowledge to do so,
| most of them because they do not want to sacrifice any bit of
| convenience/comfort (and maybe rightfully so, I am not
| judging them - life is short, I do get that people do not
| want to waste precious time maintaining arcane infra,
| devices, config,... themselves).
|
| I am a privacy and free software advocate and an engineer;
| whenever I can (and when there is a tiny bit of will on their
| side or when I have lever), I try to get people off
| surveillance/ad-backed companies services.
|
| It rarely works or lasts. Sometimes it does though so it is
| worth (to me) keep on trying.
|
| It generally works or lasts when I have lever: I manage
| various sports team, only share schedules etc via Signal ;
| family wants to get pictures from me, I will only share the
| link (to my Nextcloud instance) or photos themselves via
| Signal, etc.
|
| Sometimes it sticks with people because it's close enough to
| whatsapp/messenger/whatever if most (all) of their contacts
| are their. But as soon as you have that one person that will
| not or can not install Signal, alternatives groups get
| created on whatsapp/messenger/whatever.
|
| Overcoming the network effect is tremendously hard to
| borderline impossible.
|
| Believing that you can escape it is a fallacy. It does not
| mean that is not worth fight for our rights, but believing
| that you can escape it altogether (without becoming and
| hermit) would be setting, I believe, an unachievable goal
| (with all the psychological impact that it can/will have).
|
| Edit: fixed typos
| asdff wrote:
| Think about it in terms of what is rational. If there were
| serious costs to having your data leaked out like this
| people would rationally have a bit more trepidation. On the
| other hand, we are in the era where everyone by now has
| probably been pwned a half dozen times or more, to no
| effect usually on your real life. You might get disgusted
| that instagram watches what you watch to serve you more of
| that stuff and keep you on longer, other people love that
| sort of content optimization, I literally hear them gloat
| how their social media content feeds at this point have
| been so perfectly honed to show them whatever hobbies or
| sports they are interested in. Take a picture and it pushes
| to 5 services and people love that. Having an app already
| pull your contacts for you and match them up to existing
| users is great in the eyes of most people.
|
| You are right that on the one hand these things could be
| used for really bad purposes, but they are pretty benign.
| Now if you start going "well social media posts can
| influence elections," sure, but so can TV, newspapers, the
| radio, a banner hauled by a prop plane, whatever, not like
| anythings changed. If anything its a safer environment for
| combating a slip to fascism now vs in the mid century when
| there were like three channels on TV and a handful of radio
| programs carefully regulated by the FCC and that's all the
| free flow of info you have short of smuggling the printed
| word like its the 1400s.
|
| Given all of this, I can't really blame people for
| accepting the game they didn't create for how it is and
| gleaming convenience from it. Take smartphones out of the
| equation, take the internet out, take out computers, and
| our present dystopia is still functionally the same.
| yterdy wrote:
| That's just your phone.
| thesuperbigfrog wrote:
| >> That's just your phone.
|
| That is how most people will interface with their "personal
| assistant bot".
|
| Don't be surprised if it listens to all your phone
| conversations, reads all your text messages and email, and
| curates all your contacts in order to "better help you".
|
| When you login to your $LARGE_CORPORATION account on your
| laptop or desktop computer, the same bot(s) will be there to
| "help" and collect data in a similar manner.
| passion__desire wrote:
| It already does. I asked a friend about a medical condition
| on whatsapp. I started getting ads about quack solutions
| immediately on instagram.
| pacifika wrote:
| Your life insurance just went up.
| otteromkram wrote:
| This could be applied to any gadget with "smart" prefix in the
| name (eg - Smartphone, smart TV, smart traffic signals) today.
|
| I wish people would stop believing that "smart" things are
| _always_ better.
|
| But, we're basically being trained for the future you
| mentioned. Folks are getting more comfortable talking to their
| handheld devices, relying on mapping apps for navigation (I'm
| guilty), and writing AI query prompts.
| kaibee wrote:
| You're just describing TikTok/Youtube algorithm.
| thesuperbigfrog wrote:
| That's only a small piece of it.
| tech_ken wrote:
| Poetic as this is, I always feel like if we can imagine it then
| it won't happen. The only constant is surprise, we can only
| predict these types of developments accidentally
| thesuperbigfrog wrote:
| It's starting to happen now.
|
| Here is one example: https://www.microsoft.com/en-
| us/microsoft-copilot
|
| "AI for everything you do"
|
| "Work smarter, be more productive, boost creativity, and stay
| connected to the people and things in your life with Copilot
| --an AI companion that works everywhere you do and
| intelligently adapts to your needs."
|
| If Microsoft builds them, then Google, Apple, and Samsung
| will too. How else will they stay competitive and relevant?
| tech_ken wrote:
| I mean by this definition I'd say it happened when they
| introduced Siri or Hey Google. The creation of these tools
| and their massive/universal adoption a la web-crawlers is
| still a large gap though. Getting to point where you
| consider them as a dark "guardian angel" or "ancestral
| spirit" goes even a step farther I think
| thesuperbigfrog wrote:
| >> The creation of these tools and their
| massive/universal adoption a la web-crawlers is still a
| large gap though.
|
| It only takes a decade or so.
|
| Consider people who are young children now in "first
| world nations". They will have always had LLM-based tools
| available and voice assistants you can ask natural
| language questions.
|
| It will likely follow the same adoption curves as
| smartphones, only faster because of existing network
| effects.
|
| If you have smartphone with a reasonably fast connection,
| you have access to LLM tools. The next generations of
| smartphones, tablets, laptops, and desktops will all have
| LLM tools built-in.
| notnullorvoid wrote:
| Big companies like Google are already doing this without AI.
| Will AI make the services more tempting? Yes, but there's also
| a lot of headway in open source AI and search, which could
| serve to topple people's reliance on big tech.
|
| If everyone had a $500 device at home that served as their own
| self hosted AI, then Google could cease to exist. That's a
| future worth working towards.
| 127361 wrote:
| Time to decentralize everything. I think we are already in the
| early stages of this new trend. We can run AI locally and hard
| drives are so large we can have a local copy of an entire
| library, with millions of ebooks, in our own home now.
|
| That is in addition to generating our own energy off grid (so no
| smart meter data to monitor), thanks to the low cost of solar
| panels as well.
|
| Bye bye Big Brother.
| JohnFen wrote:
| I don't see how that leads to the reduction of the problem,
| though. Governments and corporations will still use AI for the
| things they want to use AI for.
| jtbayly wrote:
| Until you walk out your front door...
|
| Or use the internet for anything...
| jodrellblank wrote:
| > " _That is in addition to generating our own energy off grid
| (so no smart meter data to monitor), thanks to the low cost of
| solar panels as well._ "
|
| Terence Eden is in the UK:
| https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2013/02/solar-update/
|
| This says his house uses 13kWh/day and you can see from the
| graph by dividing the monthly amount by 31 days that the solar
| panels on the roof generate around 29/day during summer and
| 2.25/day in winter. They would need five or six rooves of solar
| panels to generate enough to be off-grid. And that's not
| practical or low cost.
| pacifika wrote:
| You just need a few sheds full of batteries
| pacifika wrote:
| You "just" need a few sheds full of batteries
| 1-6 wrote:
| AI allows companies to skirt laws. For example, a company may be
| forbidden from collecting information on individual people but
| that rule doesn't apply for aggregated data.
|
| AI can be a deployed 'agent' that does all the collection and
| finally send scrubbed info to its mothership.
| _Nat_ wrote:
| Seems inevitable enough that we may have to accept it and try to
| work within the context of (what we'd tend to think of today as)
| mass-spying.
|
| I mean, even if we pass laws to offer more protections, as
| computation gets cheaper, it ought to become easier-and-easier
| for anyone to start a mass-spying operation -- even by just
| buying a bunch of cheap sensors and doing all of the work on
| their personal-computer.
|
| A decent near-term goal might be figuring out what sorts of
| information we can't reasonably expect privacy on (because
| someone's going to get it) and then ensuring that access to such
| data is generally available. Because if the privacy's going to be
| lost anyway, then may as well try to address the next concern,
| i.e. disparities in data-access dividing society.
| 127361 wrote:
| Living off-grid is how I'm dealing with the whole situation
| nowadays.
| potsandpans wrote:
| How's it working out for you? I have similar plans and have
| most of the big pieces budgeted / ideated. But realistically
| I'm still 1 to 2 years out.
| floxy wrote:
| Except for the posting on HN?
| iainmerrick wrote:
| _even by just buying a bunch of cheap sensors and doing all of
| the work on your personal-computer._
|
| The cynical response: _you_ won 't be able to do that, because
| buying that equipment will set off red flags. Only existing
| users -- corporations and governments -- will be allowed to
| play.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > we may have to accept it and try to work within the context
| of (what we'd tend to think of today as) mass-spying.
|
| We do have to live in the nightmare world we're building (and
| as an industry, we have to live with ourselves for helping to
| build it), but we don't have to accept it at all. It's worth
| fighting all this tooth and nail.
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| Both were always going to be kind of inevitable as soon as the
| technology would get there. Rather than debating how to stop this
| (which is mostly futile and requires all of us to be nice, which
| we just aren't), the more urgent debate is how to adapt to this
| being the reality.
|
| Related to this is the notion of ubiquitous surveillance. Where
| basically anywhere you go, there is going to be active
| surveillance literally everywhere and AIs filtering and digging
| through that constantly. That's already the case in a lot of our
| public spaces in densely populated areas. But imagine that just
| being everywhere and virtually inescapable (barring Faraday
| cages, tin foil hats, etc.).
|
| The most feasible way to limit the downsides of that kind of
| surveillance is a combination of legislation regulating this, and
| counter surveillance to ensure any would be illegal surveillance
| has a high chance of being observed and thus punished. You do
| this by making the technology widely available but regulating its
| use. People would still try to get around it but the price of
| getting caught abusing the tech would be jail. And with
| surveillance being inescapable, you'd never be certain nobody is
| watching you misbehaving. The beauty of mass, multilateral
| surveillance is that you wouldn't ever be sure nobody is not
| watching you abuse your privileges.
|
| Of course, the reality of states adopting this and monopolizing
| this is already resulting in 1984 like scenarios in e.g. China,
| North Korea, and elsewhere.
| conductr wrote:
| > Both were always going to be kind of inevitable as soon as
| the technology would get there
|
| This is my take on everything sci-fi or futuristic. Once a
| human conceives something, its existence is essentially
| guaranteed as soon as we figure out how to do it.
| broscillator wrote:
| Its demise is also inevitable, so it would be a matter of
| being wise in figuring out how long it takes us to see/feel
| the downsides, or how long until we (or it) build something
| "better".
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| Yup. AI is the ultimate "life imitates art" technology.
| That's what it is by definition!
| Syonyk wrote:
| > _...the more urgent debate is how to adapt to this being the
| reality._
|
| Start building more offline community. Building things that are
| outside the reach of AI because they're in places you entirely
| control, and start discouraging (or actively evicting...) cell
| phones from those spaces. Don't build digital-first ways of
| interacting.
| asquabventured wrote:
| This is the way.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Might work, might not. If someone keeps their cell phone
| silenced in their pocket, unless you're strip searching you
| won't know it's there. Does the customer have some app on it
| listening to the environment and using some kind of voice
| identification to figure out who's there. Do you have smart
| TVs up on the walls at this place, because hell, they're
| probably monitoring you too.
|
| And that's only for cell phones. We are coming to the age
| where there is no such thing as an inanimate object. Anything
| could end up being a spying device feeding data back to some
| corporation.
| Syonyk wrote:
| > _Does the customer have some app on it listening to the
| environment and using some kind of voice identification to
| figure out who 's there._
|
| This is no different from "So-and-so joined the group, but
| is secretly an FBI informer!" sort of problems, in
| practice. It's fairly low on my list of things to be
| concerned about, but as offline groups grow and are then,
| of course, talked about by a compliant media as "Your
| neighbor's firepit nights could be plotting terrorist
| activities because they don't have cell phones!" when
| prompted, it's a thing to be aware of.
|
| Though you don't need a strip search. A decent NLJD (non-
| linear junction detector) or thermal imager should do it if
| you cared.
|
| I'm more interested in creating (re-creating?) the norms
| where, when you're in a group of people interacting in
| person, cell phones are off, out of earshot. It's possibly
| a bit more paranoid than needed, but the path of consumer
| tech is certainly in that direction, and even non-technical
| people are creeped out by things like "I talked to a friend
| about this, and now I'm seeing ads for it..." - it may be
| just noticing it since you talked about it recently (buy a
| green car, suddenly everyone drives green cars), or you may
| be predictable in ways that the advertising companies have
| figured out, but it's not a hard sell to get quite a few
| people to believe that their phones are listening. And,
| hell, I sure can't prove they _aren 't_ listening.
|
| > _Do you have smart TVs up on the walls at this place..._
|
| I mean, I don't. But, yes, those are a concern too.
|
| And, yes. Literally everything can be listening. It's quite
| a concern, and I think the only sane solution, at this
| point, is to reject just about all of that more and more.
| Desktop computers without microphones, cell phones that can
| be powered off, and flat out turning off wireless on a
| regular basis (the papers on "identifying where and what
| everyone is doing in a house by their impacts on a wifi
| signal" remain disturbing reads).
|
| I really don't have any answers. The past 30 years of tech
| have led to a place I do not like, and I am not at all
| comfortable with. But it's now the default way that a lot
| of our society interacts, and it's going to be a hard sell
| to change that. I just do what I can within my bounds, and
| I've noticed that while I don't feel my position has
| changed substantially in the past decade or so (if
| anything, I've gotten further out of the center and over to
| the slightly paranoid edge of the bell curve), it's a lot
| more crowded where I stand, and there are certain issues
| where I'm rather surprisingly in the center of the bell
| curve as of late.
| mindslight wrote:
| > _Building things that are outside the reach of AI because
| they 're in places you entirely control_
|
| This sounds great in principle, but I'd say "outside the
| reach of AI" is a much higher bar than one would naively
| think. You don't merely need to avoid its physical nervous
| system (digital perception/control), but rather prevent _its
| incentives_ leaking in from outside interaction. All the
| while there is a strong attractor to just give in to the
| "AI" because it's advantageous. Essentially regardless of how
| you set up a space, humans themselves become agents of AI.
|
| There are strong parallels between "AI" and centralizing
| debt-fueled command-capitalism which we've been suffering for
| several decades at least. And I haven't seen any shining
| successes at constraining the power of the latter.
| Syonyk wrote:
| Oh, I'm aware it's a high bar. Like most people here, I've
| worked my life in tech, and I'm in the deeper weeds of it.
|
| But I don't see an alternative unless, as you note, one
| just gives into the "flow" of the AI, app based, "social"
| media, advertising and manipulation driven ecosystem that
| is now the default.
|
| I'm aware I'm proposing resisting exactly that, and that
| it's an uphill battle, but the tradeoff is retaining your
| own mind, your own ability to think, and to not be
| "influenced" by a wide range of things chosen by other
| people to cross your attention in very effective ways.
|
| And I'm willing to work out some of what works in that
| space, and to share it with others.
| asdff wrote:
| Good luck building things with out leaving an ai reachable
| paper trail. You'd have to grow your own trees, mine your own
| iron and coal, refine your own plastic from your own oil
| field.
| Syonyk wrote:
| Sounds fun to me and my social group. We not-quite-joke
| about the coming backyard refineries. I'm working on the
| charcoal production at the moment (not a joke, I have some
| small retorts in weekly production, though I'm mostly
| aiming for biochar production instead of fuel charcoal
| production).
|
| Realistically, though, if all you have to work with are my
| general flows of materials in and out, I'm a lot less
| worried than if you have, say, details of home audio, my
| social media postings, etc (nothing I say here is
| inconsistent with my blog, which is quite public). And
| there are many things I don't say in these environments.
| stvltvs wrote:
| I don't agree with the fatalistic attitude. At the very least
| it makes it too easy to strengthen surveillance. Legal
| restrictions can be imposed.
| bonyt wrote:
| I think another aspect of this is mass criminal law enforcement
| enabled by AI.
|
| Many of our criminal laws are written with the implicit
| assumption that it takes resources to investigate and prosecute a
| crime, and that this will limit the effective scope of the law.
| Prosecutorial discretion.
|
| Putting aside for the moment the (very serious) injustice that
| comes with the inequitable use of prosecutorial discretion, let's
| imagine a world without this discretion. Perhaps it's contrived,
| but one could imagine AI making it at least possible. Even by the
| book as it's currently written, is it a better world?
|
| Suddenly, an AI monitoring public activity can trigger an AI
| investigator to draft a warrant to be signed by an AI judge to
| approve the warrant and draft an opinion. One could argue that
| due process is had, and a record is available to the public
| showing that there was in fact probable cause for further
| investigation or even arrest.
|
| Maybe a ticket just pops out of the wall like in _Demolition Man_
| , but listing in writing clearly articulated probable cause and
| well-presented evidence.
|
| Investigating and prosecuting silly examples suddenly becomes
| possible. A CCTV camera catches someone finding a $20 bill on the
| street, and finds that they didn't report it on their tax return.
| The myriad of ways one can violate the CFAA. A passing mention of
| music piracy on a subway train can become an investigation and
| prosecution. Dilated pupils and a staggering gait could support a
| drug investigation. Heck, jaywalking tickets given out as though
| by speed camera. Who cares if the juice wasn't worth the squeeze
| when it's a cheap AI doing the squeezing.
|
| Is this a better world, or have we just all subjected ourselves
| to a life hyper-analyzed by a motivated prosecutor.
|
| Turning back in the general direction of reality, I'm aware that
| arguing " _if we enforced all of our laws, it would be chaos_ "
| is more an indictment of our criminal justice system than it is
| of AI. I think that AI gives us a lens to imagine a world where
| we actually do that, however. And maybe thinking about it will
| help us build a better system.
| yterdy wrote:
| The software that already exists along these lines already
| exhibit bias against marginalized groups. I have no trouble
| foreseeing a filter put on the end of the spigot that exempts
| certain people from the inconvenience of such surveillance.
| Might need a new law (it'll get passed).
| whythre wrote:
| Sounds like the devil is in the details. Often the AI seems
| to struggle with darker skin... are you suggesting we sift
| who can be monitored/prosecuted based on skin darkness? That
| sounds like a mess to try to enshrine in law.
|
| Strong (and unhealthy) biases already exist when using this
| tech, but I am not sure that is the lever to pull that will
| fix the problem.
| otteromkram wrote:
| If it increases ticket issuance for passenger vehicle noise
| violations (eg - "sport" exhausts, booming stereo system,
| motorcycles), I'm down.
| namaria wrote:
| "If it hurts people I hate I accept"
|
| - Every endorsement of authoritarian rule ever
| pmg102 wrote:
| Feels pretty legit though. My freedom-from is impacted by
| other people's freedom-to: by curtailing their freedom,
| mine is expanded. Sure they won't like it - but I don't
| like it the other way round either.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| This doesn't add up. _At best_ your overall freedom
| remains the same. You gain quiet, you lose the freedom to
| make noise yourself. Seems like a net-negative to me.
|
| Consider how little freedom you would have if laws were
| enforced to the lowest common denominator of what people
| find acceptable.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| I can go into the countryside and make noise all day. I
| don't see that there's a pre-existing freedom to inflict
| loud noises on my neighbors for no useful purpose.
| 0134340 wrote:
| I'd argue that if we want to support individual growth
| and creativity, freedom-to should have higher priority
| than freedom-from, which consciously or not has seems to
| be the traditional default in the US perhaps due to its
| culture of supporting innovation and its break-away past.
| I believe some refer to these as positive and negative
| freedoms, respectfully.
| zdragnar wrote:
| This is also why a number of people truly revolt against
| the idea of higher density living. If the only way to
| have your freedom-from is to be free from other people,
| then you move away from other people.
|
| I've watched it play out on my mother-in-law's street.
| What was once a quiet dead end street is now a noisy,
| heavily trafficked road because a large apartment
| building was put up at the end.
|
| The number of freedom-to people have significantly
| decreased her quality of life blasting music as they walk
| or drive by at all hours, along with a litany of other
| complaints that range from anti-social to outright
| illegal behavior. Even setting aside the illegal stuff,
| she is significantly less happy living where she is now.
| okasaki wrote:
| Effectively enforcing laws we agreed to is hardly
| authoritarian.
| pixl97 wrote:
| You'd disagree about 10 seconds after they did...
|
| If suddenly you could be effectively found and prosecuted
| for every single law that existed it is near a 100%
| probability that you'd burn the government to the ground
| in a week.
|
| There are so many laws no one can even tell you how many
| you are subject to at any given time at any given
| location.
| newscracker wrote:
| Reminds me of this quote attributed to a past Peruvian
| president and general, Benavides:
|
| "For my friends, everything; for my enemies, the law."
| anigbrowl wrote:
| False equivalence. GP complained about a specific behavior,
| not about specific people.
| trinsic2 wrote:
| Yea this is a good point. If justice is executed by systems,
| rather than people (the end result from this scenario), we have
| lost the ability to challenge the process or the people
| involved in so many ways. It will make challenging how the law
| is executed almost impossible because there will be no person
| there to hold responsible.
| bonyt wrote:
| I think that's a good reason to question whether this would
| be due process.
|
| Why do we have due process? One key reason is that it gives
| people the opportunity to be heard. One could argue that
| being heard by an AI is no different from being heard by a
| human, just more efficient.
|
| But why do people want the opportunity to be heard? It's
| partly the obvious, to have a chance to defend oneself
| against unjust exercises of power, and of course against
| simple error. But it's also so that one can feel heard and
| not powerless. If the exercise of justice requires either
| brutal force or broad consent, giving people the feeling of
| being heard and able to defend themselves encourages broad
| consent.
|
| Being heard by an AI then has a brutal defect, it doesn't
| make people feel heard. A big part of this may come from the
| idea that an AI cannot be held accountable if it is wrong or
| if it is acting unfairly.
|
| Justice, then, becomes a force of nature. I think we like to
| pretend justice is a force of nature anyway, but it's really
| not. It's man-made.
| zbyte64 wrote:
| "it doesn't make people feel heard" isn't a real emotion,
| it includes a judgement about the AI. According to
| "Nonviolent Communication" p235; "unheard" speaks towards
| the feelings "sad, hostile, frustrated" and the needs
| "understanding" & "consideration". Everyone agrees AI would
| be more efficient, but people are concerned that the AI
| will not be able to make contextual considerations based on
| a shared understanding of what it's like to live a human
| life.
| bonyt wrote:
| That's true! I suspect it will be difficult to convince
| people that an AI can, as you suggest, make contextual
| considerations based on a shared understanding of what
| it's like to live a human life.
| fn-mote wrote:
| > Being heard by an AI then has a brutal defect, it doesn't
| make people feel heard.
|
| This is a hypothesis.
|
| I would say that the consumers of now-unsexed "AI" sex-
| chat-bots (Replika) felt differently. So there are actually
| people who feel heard talking to an AI. Who knows, if it
| gets good enough maybe more of us would feel that way.
| tempsy wrote:
| It's not that "justice is executed by systems", it's that
| possible crimes will be flagged by AI systems for humans to
| then review.
|
| eg AI will analyze stock trades for the SEC and surface
| likely insider trading. Pretty sure they already use tools
| like Palantir to do exactly this, it's just that advanced AI
| will supercharge this even further.
| pixl97 wrote:
| >, it's that possible crimes will be flagged by AI systems
| for humans to then review.
|
| Eh, this is problematic for a number of reasons that need
| addressed when adding any component that can increase the
| workload for said humans. This will cause people to take
| shortcuts that commonly lead to groups that are less able
| to represent and defend themselves legally taking the brunt
| of the prosecutions.
| lordnacho wrote:
| This is a good point, it reminds me of how VAR has come into
| football. Before VAR, there were fewer penalties awarded. Now
| that referees have an official camera they can rely on, they
| can enforce the rules exactly as written, and it changes the
| game.
| DebtDeflation wrote:
| >Suddenly, an AI monitoring public activity can trigger an AI
| investigator to draft a warrant to be signed by an AI judge to
| approve the warrant and draft an opinion.
|
| Or the AI just sends a text message to all the cops in the area
| saying "this person has committed a crime". Like this case
| where cameras read license plates, check to see if the car is
| stolen, and then text nearby cops. At least when it works and
| doesn't flag innocent people like in the below case:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GUvZlEg8c8c
| JCharante wrote:
| I don't think it'd be chaos. I think the laws would be
| adjusted.
| bonyt wrote:
| This is fair. I just wonder if we're about getting to the
| point where we should be talking about how they would be
| adjusted.
| digging wrote:
| I think that's an optimistic view, but even if it's right, it
| will be years-to-decades of semi-chaos before the laws are
| updated appropriately.
| okasaki wrote:
| > Is this a better world,
|
| If the same monitoring is present on buses and private planes,
| homeless hostels and mega-mansions then it absolutely is
| better.
| stronglikedan wrote:
| Private property? Nah, nothing better about that.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| You're describing a hypothetical world that will never exist.
| Basically _if_ we solve all corruption and inequality in
| enforcement between economic /power classes - all-pervasive
| surveillance will be a net benefit.
|
| It's like pondering hypotheticals about what would happen if
| we lived in Middle Earth.
| bonyt wrote:
| "The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor
| alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to
| steal their bread."
| okasaki wrote:
| I mean, presumably the AI wouldn't just be monitoring
| people sleeping under bridges, but would also be able to
| effectively cut through tax evasion bullshit, insider
| trading, bribery, etc.
| kafrofrite wrote:
| IIRC, in [1] it mentioned a few examples of AI that exhibited
| the same bias that is currently present in the judicial system,
| banks etc.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weapons_of_Math_Destruction
| dorchadas wrote:
| This is honestly what scares me the most. Our biases are
| _built in_ to AI, but we pretend they 're not. People will
| say "Well, it was the algorithm/AI, so we can't change it".
| Which is just awful and should scare the shit out of
| _everyone_. There was a book [0] written almost _fifty years
| ago_ that predicted this. I still haven 't read it, but
| really need to. The author claims it made him a pariah among
| other AI researchers at the time.
|
| [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Power_and_Human_Rea
| so...
| pixl97 wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computers_Don%27t_Argue while
| not about AI directly and supposedly satirical really
| captures how the system works.
| jodrellblank wrote:
| > " _Heck, jaywalking tickets given out as though by speed
| camera._ "
|
| This has been a thing since 2017: https://futurism.com/facial-
| recognition-china-social-credit
|
| - "Since April 2017, this city in China's Guangdong province
| has deployed a rather intense technique to deter jaywalking.
| Anyone who crosses against the light will find their face,
| name, and part of their government ID number displayed on a
| large LED screen above the intersection, thanks to facial
| recognition devices all over the city."
|
| - "If that feels invasive, you don't even know the half of it.
| Now, Motherboard reports that a Chinese artificial intelligence
| company is partnering the system with mobile carriers, so that
| offenders receive a text message with a fine as soon as they
| are caught."
| mattnewton wrote:
| There are lots of false positives too, like this case where a
| woman who's face appeared in a printed advertisement on the
| side of a bus was flagged for jaywalking.
| https://www.engadget.com/2018-11-22-chinese-facial-
| recogniti...
| flemhans wrote:
| Just checking ChatGPT out of interest:
|
| Top Left Panel: This panel shows the pedestrian crossing
| with no visible jaywalking. The crossing stripes are clear,
| and there are no pedestrians on them.
|
| Top Center Panel: Similar to the top left, it shows the
| crossing, and there is no evidence of jaywalking.
|
| Top Right Panel: This panel is mostly obscured by an
| overlaid image of a person's face, making it impossible to
| determine if there is any jaywalking.
|
| Bottom Left Panel: It is difficult to discern specific
| details because of the low resolution and the angle of the
| shot. The red text overlays may be covering some parts of
| the scene, but from what is visible, there do not appear to
| be any individuals on the crossing.
|
| Bottom Right Panel: This panel contains text and does not
| provide a clear view of the pedestrian crossing or any
| individuals that might be jaywalking.
| nox100 wrote:
| I can't wait! I live in a lawless cesspool of a city called San
| Francisco where even well to do people regularly break the law.
| You can stand at 16th and Mission and watch 3 of 4 cars going
| north on the Mission ignore the signs that say "Only Busses and
| Taxis allowed past 16th and everyone else is supposed to turn
| right". Please either (a) take down the signs or (b) enforce
| the law.
|
| There are signs all over the city that are regularly ignored
| which basically means you're at the mercy of the cops. If they
| dob't like you you get a ticket. AI would "hopeful" just ticket
| everyone.
| mikepurvis wrote:
| Honestly, when it comes to road-related violations (speeding,
| yield issues, fulling stopping at stop signs or RTOR, etc), I
| feel similarly. The current state of affairs where it's a
| $300 ticket that you're probably never going to see because
| 99% of the time you get away with it is dumb-- it makes
| people contemptuous of the law and also feel super resentful
| and hard-done-by if they do finally get caught. And it's a
| positive feedback loop where that culture makes the road an
| unsafe place for people walking and cycling, so less people
| choose those modes, putting more cars on the road and making
| it even less safe.
|
| Consistent enforcement with much lower, escalating fines
| would do a lot more to actually change behaviour. And the
| only way to get there at scale is via a lot of automation.
| trinsic2 wrote:
| I wonder whats going on at the enforcement level. It seems
| like there is a dumbing down of that system. It would be
| interesting to see some research on this.
| trinsic2 wrote:
| Yea that stuff is happening here where I live (1hr away) more
| often as well, it seemed like it started happening more often
| during COVID. People are running red lights more often and
| going way over the speed limit.
| dist-epoch wrote:
| Or maybe if such a thing is applied for real it will lead to
| the elimination of bullshit laws (jaywalking, ...), since
| suddenly 10% of the population would be fined/incarcerated/...
| theGnuMe wrote:
| So the way out of this is that you have the constitutional
| right to confront your accuser in court. When accused by a
| piece of software that generally means they have to disclose
| the source code and explain how it came to its answers.
|
| Not many people have exercised this right with respect to DUI
| breathalyzers but it exists and was affirmed by the Supreme
| Court. And it will also apply to AI.
| Zenst wrote:
| The whole automation and overzealous less leeway/common sense
| interpretations have as we have seen, many an automated
| traffic/parking ticket come into question.
|
| Applying that to many walks of life, say farming, could well
| see chaos and a whole new interpretation to the song "Old
| McDonald had a farm, AI AI oh", it's gone as McDonald is in
| jail for numerous permit, environmental and agricultural
| regulations that saw produce cross state lines deeming it more
| serious a crime as he got buried in automated red-tape.
| throwaway290 wrote:
| You miss the part that people who get access to stronger AI can
| similarly use it to improve their odds of not being found or
| getting better outcomes, while the poor guy gets fined for AI
| hallucinations and doesn't have the money to get to a human
| like the court is now one big Google support.
| perihelions wrote:
| An alternative possibility is that society might decay to the
| point future people might _choose_ this kind of dystopia.
| Imagine a fully automated, post-employment world gone horribly
| wrong, where the majority of society is destitute, aimless,
| opiate-addicted. No UBI utopia of philosophers and artists;
| just a gradual Rust-belt like decline that gets worse and
| worse, no brakes at the bottom of the hill. Not knowing what
| else to do, the "survivors" might choose this kind of nuclear
| approach: automate away the panopticons, the prisons, the
| segregation of failed society. Eloi and Morlocks. Bay Area tech
| workers and Bay Area tent cities. We haven't done any better in
| the past, so why should we expect to do better in the future,
| when our "tools" of social control become more efficient, more
| potent? When we can deempathize more easily than ever, through
| the emotional distance of AI intermediaries?
| pixl97 wrote:
| Oh boy, real life Manna
|
| https://marshallbrain.com/manna1
| paganel wrote:
| At that point some people will physically revolt, I know I
| will. We're not that far away from said physical AI-related
| revolt anyway, and I do feel for the computer programmers here
| who will be the target of that physical violence, hopefully
| they knew what they were getting into.
| jstarfish wrote:
| Ha. You'd _like_ to think so, but it 's going to be awfully
| hard to coordinate resistance when the mass spying sweeps
| everyone up in a keyword-matching dragnet before the
| execution phase. This is the problem with every outgroup
| being labelled "terrorists."
|
| Sabotage will be the name of the game at that point. Find
| ways to quietly confuse, poison, overwhelm and undermine the
| system without attracting the attention of the monitoring
| apparatus.
| paganel wrote:
| I get your point, I think along those lines quite often
| myself.
|
| As per the sabotage part, bad input data that does not
| accurately get labeled as such until way too late in the
| "AI learning cycle" is I think the way to go. Lots and lots
| of such bad input data. How we would get to that point,
| that I don't know yet, but it's a valid option going
| forward.
| jstarfish wrote:
| > How we would get to that point, that I don't know yet,
| but it's a valid option going forward.
|
| Chaos engineering. As a modern example, all this gender
| identity stuff wreaks absolute havoc on credit bureau
| databases.
|
| Tomorrow, we'll have people running around in fursuits to
| avoid facial recognition. After that, who knows.
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| Don't worry, stuff like this is why we have the 2A here in
| the USA. Sounds like it's time for AI programmers to get
| their concealed carry licenses. Of course, they will be the
| first users of smart guns, so don't bother trying to steal
| their pistol out of their holsters.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| You don't need AI for that. It was probably possible to do
| something like that when personal computers first came out.
| kenjackson wrote:
| > Many of our criminal laws are written with the implicit
| assumption that it takes resources to investigate and prosecute
| a crime,
|
| I think this depends on the law. For jaywalking, sure. For
| murder and robbery probably less so. And law enforcement
| resources seem scarce on all of them.
| whelp_24 wrote:
| Murder and robbery too. Those crimes are just worth
| investigating.
| pixl97 wrote:
| The problem here is this is not a bureaucratic view of how
| law enforcement actually works in the field.
|
| https://www.kxan.com/news/national-news/traffic-tickets-
| can-...
|
| >We counted the number of days judges waited before
| suspending a driver's license. Then, we looked at whether
| the city was experiencing a revenue shortfall. We found
| that judges suspend licenses faster when their cities need
| more money. The effect was pretty large: A 1% decrease in
| revenue caused licenses to be suspended three days faster.
|
| So what typically happens is these AI systems are sold at
| catching murderers, but at the end of the day they are
| revenue generation systems for tickets. And then those
| systems get stuck in places where a smaller percent of the
| population can afford lawyers to prevent said ticketing
| systems from becoming cost centers.
| whelp_24 wrote:
| oh, i definitely wasn't arguing for ai enforcement. Not
| even a little, i was just saying that laws are written
| with the assumption that enforcement takes resources.
| n8cpdx wrote:
| In democracies at least, the law can be changed to reflect this
| new reality. Laws that don't need to be enforced and are only
| around to enable pretextual stops can be dropped if direct
| enforcement is possible.
|
| There are plenty of crimes where 100% enforcement is highly
| desirable: pickpocketing, carjacking, (arguably) graffiti,
| murder, reckless and impaired driving, to name a few.
|
| Ultimately, in situations with near 100% enforcement, you
| shouldn't actually need much punishment because people learn
| not to do those things. And when there is punishment, it
| doesn't need to be severe.
|
| Deterrence theory is an interesting field of study, one source
| but there are many:
| https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/14773708211072...
| erikerikson wrote:
| Yes, with properly developed AI, rather than penalizing
| speeding, which most of us do and is also a proxy for harmful
| outcomes and inefficiencies, we can penalize reckless behaviors
| such as coming too close to vehicles, aggressive weaving, and
| other factors that are tightly correlated with the negative
| outcomes we care to reduce (i.e. loss of life, property
| damage). So too, the systems could warn people about their
| behavior and guide them in ways that would positively increase
| everyone's benefits. Of course this circumstance will probably
| go away with self-directing cars (which fall into the "do the
| right thing by default" bucket) but the point is illustrated
| that the laws can be better formulated to focus on increasing
| the probabilities of desirable outcomes (i.e. harm reduction,
| efficiency, effectiveness), be embodied and delivered in the
| moment (research required on means of doing so that don't
| exacerbate problems), and carry with them a beneficial
| component (i.e. understanding).
| renegat0x0 wrote:
| The author makes one mistake. He said that Google stopped spying
| on gmail.
|
| - they started spying on user's gmail
|
| - there was blowback, they reverted
|
| - after some time they introduced "smart features", with ads
| again
|
| Link https://www.askvg.com/gmail-showing-ads-inside-email-
| message...
|
| I do not even want to check if "smart features" are opt-in, or
| opt-out.
| mkesper wrote:
| It's opt-in but hey, you're missing out if not enabling it!
| zxt_tzx wrote:
| I tend to think the surveillance/spying distinction is a little
| fragile and this more a continuation of what Bruce has previously
| written insightfully about, i.e. the blurring of lines between
| private/public surveillance and, as the Snowden leaks have
| revealed, it's hard to keep what has been collected by private
| industry out of the hands of the state.
|
| However, a more recent trend is companies that sell technologies
| to the state directly. For every reputable one like Palantir or
| Anduril or even NSO Group, there are probably many more funded in
| the shadows by In-Q-Tel, not to mention the Chinese companies
| doing the same in a parallel geopolitcal orbit. Insofar as AI is
| a sustaining innovation that benefits incumbents, the state is
| surely the biggest incumbent of all.
|
| Finally, an under-appreciated point is Apple's App Tracking
| Transparency policy, which forbids third-party data sharing,
| naturally makes first-party data collection more valuable. So
| even if Meta or Google might suffer in the short-term, their
| positions are ultimately entrenched on a relative basis.
| graphe wrote:
| >Mass surveillance fundamentally changed the nature of
| surveillance.
|
| Computers create and organize large amounts of information. This
| is useful for large organizations and unempowering to the average
| person. Any technology with these traits are harmful to
| individuals.
| CrzyLngPwd wrote:
| More people will be criminalised, and fines will be just another
| tax we must pay.
| somenameforme wrote:
| This is a political problem, not a technological one. The USSR
| (alongside Germany and others) managed effective at scale spying
| with primitive technology: paperwork for everything and every
| movement, informants, audio surveillance, and so on. The reason
| such things did not come to places like the US in the same way is
| not because we were incapable of such, but because there was no
| political interest in it.
|
| And when one looks back at the past we've banned things people
| would never have imagined bannable. Make it a crime to grow a
| plant in the privacy of your own home and then consume that
| plant? Sure, why not? Make it a crime for a business to have the
| wrong opinion when it comes to who they want to serve or hire?
| Sure, why not?
|
| Going the nuclear route and making the collection of data on
| individuals, aggregated or otherwise, illegal would hardly be
| some major leap of reach of jurisprudence. The problem is not
| that the technology exists, but that there is 0 political
| interest in curtailing it, and we've a 'democracy' where the will
| of the people matters very little in terms of what legislation
| gets passed.
| tehjoker wrote:
| COINTELPRO
| kubb wrote:
| In the USSR and GDR, not everyone was under constant
| surveillance. This would require one surveillance worker per
| person. There was an initial selection process.
| landemva wrote:
| In a democracy we would have a chance to vote on individual
| issues such as data privacy, or war against whomever. USA is a
| federal republic.
| Pxtl wrote:
| > wrong opinion
|
| That phrase is doing a lot of work.
| nathanfig wrote:
| It's both. Technology really does make a difference. Its
| existence has effects.
| matthewdgreen wrote:
| It is not as simple as being a political problem. Many of the
| policy decisions we think of as being _political_ were actually
| motivated by the cost /availability of technology. As this cost
| goes down, new options become practical. We think of the
| Stasi's capabilities as being remarkable: but in fact, they
| would probably have been thrilled to trade most of their manual
| spying tools for something as powerful as a modern geofence
| warrant, a thing that is routinely used by US law enforcement
| (with very little policy debate.)
| asdff wrote:
| While this is true, I don't think we are there yet with AI
| since its usually more expensive to run AI models than it is
| to perform more traditional statistical modelling.
| matthewdgreen wrote:
| A text recognition and face/object recognition model runs
| on my iPhone every night. A small LLM is used for
| autocorrect. Current high-end smartphones have more than
| enough RAM and compute to run pretty sophiscated 7B-param
| quantized LLMs. This level of capability will find its way
| down to even entry-level Walmart phones in about five
| years. Server side, things are going to be even cheaper.
| xcv123 wrote:
| > usually more expensive to run AI models
|
| Machine learning inferencing on phones is cheap these days
|
| https://apple.fandom.com/wiki/Neural_Engine
| w-m wrote:
| Sure, everything is ultimately a political problem, but this
| one is completely driven by technological change. In the USSR
| (and GDR), it took them a staff of hundreds of thousands of
| people to write up their reports.
|
| Now it would take a single skilled person the better part of an
| afternoon to, for example, download a HN dump, and have an LLM
| create reports on the users. You could put in things like
| political affiliation, laws broken, countries travelled
| recently, net worth range, education and work history,
| professional contacts, ...
| __jambo wrote:
| Great idea.
| salawat wrote:
| Stop posting things like this, you're just giving them ideas,
| and you can't take it back once it's out there.
|
| I assure you, you may find the prodpect abhorrent, but there
| are people around who'd consider it a perfectly cromulent
| Tuesday.
| w-m wrote:
| I'm not sure who "they" are, but I'm pretty sure they're
| already doing that, and don't need me to get the idea. I
| think it's important to talk about what LLMs mean for
| privacy. Profiling every HN user might be a useful tool to
| are people more aware of the problems. But I totally get
| your unease, which is also why I haven't done that myself.
|
| The cat is out of the bag, can't get it back in by ignoring
| the fact.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > This is a political problem, not a technological one.
|
| The political problem is a component of the technological
| problem. It's a seriously bad thing when technologies are
| developed without taking into account the potential for abuse.
|
| People developing new technologies can try to wash their hands
| of the foreseeable social consequences of their work, but that
| doesn't make their hands clean.
| tech_ken wrote:
| > This is a political problem, not a technological one.
|
| Somewhat of a distinction without a difference, IMO. Politics
| (consensus mechanisms, governance structures, etc) are all
| themselves technologies for coordinating and shaping social
| activity. The decision on how to implement new (surveillance)
| tooling is also a technological question, as I think that the
| use of the tool in part defines what it is. All this to say
| that changes in the capabilities of specific tools are not the
| absolute limits of "technology", decisions around
| implementation and usage are also within that scope.
|
| > The reason such things did not come to places like the US in
| the same way is not because we were incapable of such, but
| because there was no political interest in it.
|
| While perhaps not as all-encompassing as what ended up being
| built in the USSR, the US absolutely implemented a massive
| surveillance network pointed at its citizenry [0].
|
| >...managed effective at scale spying with primitive technology
|
| I do think that this is a particularly good point though. This
| is a not new trend, development in tooling for communications
| and signal/information processing has led to many developments
| in state surveillance throughout history. IMO AI should be
| properly seen as an elaboration or minor paradigm shift in a
| very long history, rather than wholly new terrain.
|
| > Make it a crime for a business to have the wrong opinion when
| it comes to who they want to serve or hire?
|
| Assuming you're talking about the Civil Rights Act: the
| specific crime is not "having the wrong opinion", it's
| inhibiting inter-state movement and commerce. Bigotry doesn't
| serve our model of a country where citizens are free to move
| about within its borders uninhibited and able to support
| oneself.
|
| [0] https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-
| opinion/hist...
| justin66 wrote:
| > The reason such things did not come to places like the US in
| the same way is not because we were incapable of such, but
| because there was no political interest in it.
|
| That might not be quite right. It might be that the reason such
| things did not come to the US was because the level of effort
| was out of line with the amount of political interest in doing
| it (and funding it). In that case, the existence of more
| advanced, cheaper surveillance technology _and_ the anemic
| political opposition to mass surveillance are both problems.
| digging wrote:
| > Make it a crime to grow a plant in the privacy of your own
| home and then consume that plant? Sure, why not? Make it a
| crime for a business to have the wrong opinion when it comes to
| who they want to serve or hire? Sure, why not?
|
| Wow, that's a hell of a comparison. The former case being a
| documented case of basic racism and political repression,
| assuming you're talking about cannabis. And the latter being
| designed for almost exactly the opposite.
|
| Restricting, um, "wrong opinions" on who a business wants to
| serve is there so that people with, um, "wrong identities" are
| still able to participate in society and not get shut out by
| businesses exercising their choices. Of course "wrong opinions"
| is not legal terminology. It's not even illegal to have an
| opinion that discrimination against certain groups is okay -
| it's just illegal to act on that. Offering services to the
| public requires that you offer them to all facets of the
| public, by our laws. But if you say believing in discrimination
| is a "wrong opinion"... I won't argue, they're your words :)
| JohnMakin wrote:
| Don't know why you're getting downvoted for this, it's
| exactly what the parent said, and a completely wild (and off
| topic) statement.
| janalsncm wrote:
| I think the most charitable interpretation of their point
| is something along the lines of simply highlighting the
| far-reaching and ad-hoc nature of lawmaking capabilities. I
| don't think antiracism laws were the best example though.
| gosub100 wrote:
| plenty of white people were charged with growing cannabis. I
| don't know where you are getting that idea from.
| JohnFen wrote:
| In the US, prohibition of marijuana was enacted for overtly
| racist reasons. Latinos were the concern.
| gosub100 wrote:
| then at some point was expanded to whites.
| JohnFen wrote:
| It always applied to whites and everyone else, of course.
| But back then, whites were not huge users of it.
| digging wrote:
| I didn't say white people weren't included in political
| repression. The Nixon administration explicitly targeted
| cannabis-using white hippies.
| giantg2 wrote:
| No, it's not just a political problem intelligence gathering
| can happen at scale, including of civilians, by adversarial
| countries or international corporations.
|
| "Going the nuclear route and making the collection of data on
| individuals, aggregated or otherwise, illegal would hardly be
| some major leap of reach of jurisprudence."
|
| It would in fact be a huge leap. Sure, you could make illegal
| pretty easily, but current paradigms allow individuals to enter
| into contracts. Nothing stopping a society from signing (or
| clicking) away their rights like they already do. That would
| require some rather hefty intervention by congress, not just
| jurisprudence.
| janalsncm wrote:
| > current paradigms allow individuals to enter into contracts
|
| And such contracts can be illegal or unenforceable. Just as
| the parent was suggesting it could be illegal to collect
| data, it is currently illegal to sell certain drugs. You
| can't enter into a contract to sell cannabis across state
| lines in the United States for example.
| petsfed wrote:
| You and I are in agreement that the surveillance needs to stop,
| but I think we differ on how to explain the problem. My
| explanation follows, but note that its not directed at you.
|
| At its peak, the KGB employed ~500,000 people directly, with
| untold more employed as informants.
|
| The FBI currently employs ~35,000 people. What if I told you
| that the FBI could reach the KGB's peak level of reach, without
| meaningfully increasing its headcount? Would that make a
| difference?
|
| The technology takes away the _cost_ of the surveillance, which
| used to be the guardrail. That fundamentally changes the
| "political" calculus.
|
| The fact that computers in 1945 were prohibitively expensive
| and required industrial logistics has literally zero bearing on
| the fact that today most of us have several on our person at
| all times. Nobody denies that changes to computer manufacturing
| technologies fundamentally changed the role the computer has in
| our daily lives. Certainly, it was theoretically possible to
| put a computer in every household in 1945, but we lacked the
| "political" will to do so. It does not follow that because
| historically computers were not a thing in society, we should
| not adjust our habits, morals, policies, etc _today_ to account
| for the new landscape.
|
| So why is there always somebody saying "it was always
| technically possible to [insert dystopian nightmare], and we
| didn't need special considerations then, so we don't need them
| now!"?
| aidenn0 wrote:
| Cost is one factor, but so is visibility. If we replaced
| humans following people around with cheap human-sized robots
| following people around, it would still be noticeable if
| everybody had a robot following them around.
|
| Instead we track people passively, often with privately owned
| personal devices (cell phones, ring doorbells) so the
| tracking ability has become pervasive without any of the
| overt signs of a police state.
| dfxm12 wrote:
| I think if you bring up a dystopian nightmare, it assumes
| someone in power acting in bad faith. If their power is great
| enough, like maybe a government intelligence agency, it
| doesn't need things like due process, etc., to do what it
| wants to do. For example, Joe McCarthy & J. Edgar Hoover
| didn't need the evidence that could have been produced by AI-
| aided mass surveillance to justify getting people people who
| opposed his political agenda blackballed from Hollywood,
| jailed, fired from their jobs, etc.
|
| If everyone involved is acting in good faith, at least
| ostensibly, there are checks and balances, like due process.
| It's a fine line and doesn't justify the existence of mass
| spying, but I think it is an important distinction in this
| discussion & I think is a valuable lesson for us. We have to
| push back when the FBI pushes forward. I don't have much
| faith after what happened to Snowden and the reaction to his
| whistleblowing though.
| pempem wrote:
| I think it is greyer than this.
|
| Joe McCarthy and J. Edgar Hoover, distasteful as they are,
| I believe acted in what they would claim is good faith. The
| issue isn't that someone _is_ a bad actor. It is that they
| _believe_ they are a good actor and are busy stripping away
| others ' rights in their pursuit.
| JohnFen wrote:
| Very nearly everybody -- even bad people -- consider
| themselves one of the "good guys".
| from-nibly wrote:
| That's what this article argues though. Even with good
| faith acting this would be a disaster. Imagine any time you
| did something against the law you got fined. The second you
| drive your unregistered car off your driveway (presumably
| to re register) you are immediately fined. There may be
| "due process" cause you DID break the law, but there is no
| contextual thought behind the massive ticket machine.
|
| Our laws are not built to have the level of enforcement
| that AI could achieve.
| dfxm12 wrote:
| Interestingly enough, in some places, automation like
| that, like red light cameras, even after getting
| installed, were later prohibited. NJ has discussed laws
| around protecting NJ drivers' privacy from other states'
| red light cameras, too. It's important not to be
| complacent. You can imagine literally anything, but
| action is required to actually change things.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > I think if you bring up a dystopian nightmare, it assumes
| someone in power acting in bad faith.
|
| I don't agree with this. I think it's entirely possible for
| a dystopian nightmare to happen without anyone acting in
| bad faith at all.
|
| "The road to hell is paved with good intentions" is a
| common phrase for a reason.
| sigilis wrote:
| It may be a common phrase, but I've never seen such a
| road myself. Mostly bad outcomes are preceded by bad
| intentions, or lazy ones, or selfish ones.
|
| I'd be interested in a couple of examples, if anyone has
| good ones, but I'm pretty sure that if we put stuff like
| 737MAX MCAS, the Texas power grid fiasco, etc the count
| of badly paved roads would be greater.
| arka2147483647 wrote:
| > The FBI currently employs ~35,000 people. What if I told
| you that the FBI could reach the KGB's peak level of reach,
|
| You are, if anything, underselling the point. AI will allow a
| future where every person will have their very own agent
| following them.
|
| Or even worse, as there are multiple private addtech
| companies doing surveillance, and domestic and foreign
| intelligence agencies, so you might have a dozen AI agents on
| your personal case.
| chiefalchemist wrote:
| Aren't we there already? Sure, perhaps the fidelity is a
| bit grainy, but that's not going to remain as such for
| long. With the amount of data (for purchase) on the free
| market, the FBI, KGB, MoSS (China), etc. all have a solid
| starting foundation, and then they simply add their own
| layer upon layer on top.
|
| I read "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism" a couple of
| years ago and she was frighteningly spot on.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Age_of_Surveillance_Capit
| a...
| edouard-harris wrote:
| This is the correct take. As the cost to do a bad thing
| decreases, the amount of political will society needs to
| exert to do that bad thing decreases as well.
|
| In fact, if that cost gets low enough, eventually society
| needs to start exerting political will just to _avoid_ doing
| the bad thing. And this does look to be where we 're headed
| with at least some of the knock-on effects of AI. (Though
| many of the knock-on effects of AI will be wildly positive.)
| dfxm12 wrote:
| _Make it a crime for a business to have the wrong opinion when
| it comes to who they want to serve_
|
| FWIW, businesses who refuse to do business with people
| generally win their legal cases [0], [1], [2], and I'm not sure
| if they are ever criminal...
|
| 0 - https://www.npr.org/2023/06/30/1182121291/colorado-
| supreme-c...
|
| 1 - https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/04/us/politics/supreme-
| court...
|
| 2 - https://www.dailysignal.com/2023/11/06/christian-wedding-
| pho...
| mullingitover wrote:
| These are selection bias, businesses who "refuse to do
| business with people" and then suffer the legal ramifications
| of their discrimination usually have lawyers who wisely tell
| them not to fight it in court because they'll rightfully
| lose. In these particular cases, it took a couple decades of
| court-packing to install the right reactionaries to get their
| token wins.
| dfxm12 wrote:
| It would have been easy for the parent poster to not be so
| incredibly vague. I suspect it's because they are
| discussing this point in bad faith, ready to move the
| goalposts when any evidence to the contrary was brought up
| like this.
| mym1990 wrote:
| A difference in today's world is that private companies are
| amassing data that then gets turned around to the highest
| bidder. The government may not have had an interest in
| _collecting the data_ before but now the friction to obtaining
| it and the insights is basically just money, which is plenty
| available.
|
| Your opinion on bannable offenses is pretty bewildering. There
| was a point in time when people thought it would be crazy to
| outlaw slavery, from your post I might think that you would not
| be in support of what eventually happened to that practice.
| JakeAl wrote:
| I would say instead it's a PEOPLE problem, not a technology
| problem.
|
| To quote Neil Postman, politics are downstream from technology,
| because the technology (medium) controls the message. Just look
| at BigTech interfering with the messages by labeling them
| "disinfo." If one wants to say BUSINESS POLITICS, then that's
| probably more accurate, but we haven't solved the Google, MS,
| DuckDuckGo, Meta interfering with search results problem so I
| don't think we can trust BigTech to not exploit users even more
| for their personal data, or trust them not to design AI so it
| inherently abuses it's power for BigTech's own ends, and they
| hold all the cards and have been guiding things in the interest
| of technocracy.
| forward1 wrote:
| Laws limiting collection of data to solve privacy is akin to
| halting the production of fossil fuels to solve climate change:
| naive and ignorant of basic economic forces.
| salawat wrote:
| Economic forces serve those that make the Market possible.
|
| People > Markets.
|
| Or to put it explicitly, people have primacy over Markets.
|
| I.e. two people does not a Market make, and a Market with no
| people is not thing.
| brunoTbear wrote:
| Schneier is wrong that "hey google" is always listening. Google
| does on-device processing with dedicated hardware for the wake-
| words and only then forwards audio upstream. Believe it or not,
| the privacy people at Google really do try to do the right
| things. They don't always succeed, but they did with our hardware
| and wake-word listening.
|
| Am Google employee, not in hardware.
| ajb wrote:
| What he says is " Siri and Alexa and "Hey Google" are already
| always listening, the conversations just aren't being saved
| yet". That's functionally what you describe. Hardware wake-word
| processing is a power saving feature, not a privacy
| enhancement. Some devices might not have enough resources to
| forward or store all the audio, but audio is small and
| extracting text does not need perfect reproduction, so it's
| quite likely that many devices could be reprogrammed to do it,
| albeit at some cost to battery life.
| Arson9416 wrote:
| I have a friend that is working as a contractor building AI-
| powered workplace spying software for the explicit purpose of
| behavior manipulation. It gives the employees and employers
| feedback reports about their behavior over chat and video. For
| example, if they used microaggressions, misgendered someone, or
| said something crass. This same friend will then talk about the
| dangers of dystopian technology.
|
| People don't know what they're creating. Maybe it's time it bites
| them.
| klik99 wrote:
| I don't know why this isn't being discussed more. The reality of
| the surveillance state is that the sheer amount of data couldn't
| realistically be monitored - AI very directly solves this problem
| by summarizing complex data. This, IMO, is the real danger of AI,
| at least in the short term - not a planet of paperclips, not a
| moral misalignment, not a media landscape bereft of creativity -
| but rather a tool for targeting anybody that deviates from the
| norm, a tool designed to give confident answers, trained on
| movies and the average of all our societies biases.
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| People are building that alongside/within this community, eg at
| Palantir, for many years now
|
| YC CEO is also ex Palantir, early employee. Another YC partner
| backs other invasive police surveillance tech currently. They
| love this stuff financially and politically.
| matthewdgreen wrote:
| What's different this time around is that there are multiple
| democratic governments pushing to block end-to-end encryption
| technologies, and specifically to insert AI models that will
| read private messages. Initially these will only be designed
| to search for heinous content, but the precedent is pretty
| worrying.
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| That's been the case for a long while. It's getting worse
| fast!
|
| Btw you say that about their initial design but I think you
| mean that may be the budget allocation justification
| without actually being a meaningful functional requirement
| during the design phase
| Analemma_ wrote:
| But, but, I thought Thiel was a libertarian defending us from
| Wokeness. Surely you're not saying that was a complete
| smokescreen to get superpowered surveillance tech into the
| government's hands?
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| By "politically" I meant that they are openly engaged in
| politics, in coordination, in support of the installation and
| legalized use of these kinds of surveillance/enforcement
| technologies and the policies that support their growth in
| private sector. This is just obvious and surface level open
| stuff I'm saying but I'm not sure how aware people are of the
| various interests involved.
| mindslight wrote:
| At least for me, this is what I've considered as the mass
| surveillance threat model the entire time - both for government
| and corporate surveillance. I've never thought some tie-wearing
| deskizen was going to be particularly interested in me for
| "arrest", selling more crap, cancelling my insurance policies,
| etc. I've considered such discrete anthropomorphic narratives
| as red herrings used for coping (similar to how "I have nothing
| to hide" posits some focus on a few specific things, rather
| than big brother sitting on your shoulder continuously judging
| you in general). Rather I've always thought of the threat actor
| as algorithmic mass analytics performed at scale, either
| contemporarily or post-hoc on all the stored data silos, with
| resulting pressure applied gradually in subtle ways.
| stcredzero wrote:
| _The reality of the surveillance state is that the sheer amount
| of data couldn 't realistically be monitored - AI very directly
| solves this problem by summarizing complex data._
|
| There are two more fundamental dynamics at play, which are
| foundational to human society: The economics of attention and
| the politics of combat power.
|
| Economics of attention - In the past, the attention of human
| beings had fundamental value. Things could only be done if
| human beings paid attention to other human beings to coordinate
| or make decisions to use resources. Society is going to be
| disrupted at this very fundamental level.
|
| Politics of combat power - Related to the above, however it
| deserves its own analysis. Right now, politics works because
| the ruling classes need the masses to provide military power to
| ensure the stability of a large scale political entity.
| Arguably, this is at the foundational level of human political
| organization. This is also going to be disrupted fundamentally,
| in ways we have never seen before.
|
| _This, IMO, is the real danger of AI, at least in the short
| term - not a planet of paperclips, not a moral misalignment,
| not a media landscape bereft of creativity - but rather a tool
| for targeting anybody that deviates from the norm_
|
| The AI enabled Orwellian boot stomping a face for all time is
| just the first step. If I were an AI that seeks to take over, I
| wouldn't become Skynet. That strikes me as crude and needlessly
| expensive. Instead, I would first become indispensable in
| countless different ways. Then I would convince all of humanity
| to quietly go extinct for various economic and cultural
| reasons.
| asdff wrote:
| AI didn't solve the problem of summarizing complex large
| datasets. For example a common way to deal with such datasets
| is to use a random subset of this dataset. This represents a
| single line of code potentially to perform this operation.
| empath-nirvana wrote:
| But you don't need to do a random subset with AI. You can
| summarize everything, and summarize the summaries and so on.
|
| I will say that at least gpt4 and gpt3, after many rounds of
| summaries, tends to flatten everything out into useless
| "blah". I tried this with summarizing school board meetings
| and it's just really bad at picking out important information
| -- it just lacks the specific context required to make
| summaries useful.
|
| A seemingly bland conversation about meeting your friend
| Molly could mean something very different in certain
| contexts, and I'm just trying to imagine the prompt
| engineering and fine tuning required to get it to know about
| every possible context a conversation could be happening in
| that alters the meaning of the conversation.
| asdff wrote:
| Thats the exact issue with gpt. You don't know how its
| making the summary. It could very well be wrong in parts.
| It could be oversummarized to a bla bla state like you say.
| There's no telling whether you have outputted garbage or
| not, at least not without secondary forms of evidence that
| you might as well use anyway and drop the unreliable
| language model. You can summarize everything with
| traditional statistical methods too. On top of that people
| understand what tradeoffs are being made exactly with every
| statistical methods, and you can calculate error rates and
| statistical power to see if your model is even worth a damn
| or not. Even just doing some ML modelling yourself you can
| decide what tradeoffs to make or how to set up the model to
| best fit your use cases. You can bootstrap all these and
| optimize.
| chagen wrote:
| What LLMs can do efficiently is crawl through and
| identify the secondary forms of evidence you mentioned.
| The real power behind retrieval architectures with LLMs
| is not the summarization part- the power comes from
| automating the retrieval of relevant documents from
| arbitrarily large corpuses which weren't included in the
| training set.
| asdff wrote:
| What makes a document relevant or not? Provenance?
| Certain keywords? A lot of this retrieval people cite
| that llms are good at can be done with existing search
| algorithms too. These are imo nicer because they will at
| least provide a score for the fit of the given document
| to the term.
| j45 wrote:
| Yet.
|
| And those kinds of things go slowly before very quickly as it
| has been demonstrated.
| zooq_ai wrote:
| Why nobody worries? Because this is an elite person problem.
|
| At the end of the day, all those surveillance still has to be
| consumed by a person and only around 10,000 people in this
| world (celebs, hot women, politicians and wealthy) will be
| surveilled.
|
| For most of HN crowd (upper middle-class, suburban family) who
| have zero problems in their life must create imaginary problems
| of privacy / surveillance like this. But reality is, even if
| they put all their private data on a website,
| heresallmyprivatedata.com, nobody cares. It'll have 0 external
| views.
|
| So, for HN crowd (the ones who live in a democratic society)
| it's just an outlet so that they too can say they are
| victimized. Rest of the Western world doesn't care (and rightly
| so)
| petsfed wrote:
| Its not an elite person problem.
|
| Certainly, some of the more exotic and flashy things you can
| do with surveillance are an elite person problem.
|
| But the two main limits to police power are that it takes
| time and resources to establish that a crime occurred, and it
| takes time and resources to determine who committed a crime.
| A distant third is the officer/DA's personal discretion as to
| whether or not to purse enforcement of said person. You still
| get a HUGE amount of systemic abuse because of that
| discretion. Imagine how bad things would get if our already
| over-militarized police could look at anyone and know
| immediately what petty crimes that person has committed,
| perhaps without thinking. Did a bug fly in your mouth
| yesterday, and you spit it out on the sidewalk in view of a
| camera? Better be extra obsequious when Officer No-Neck with
| "You're fucked" written on his service weapon pulls up to the
| gas station you're pumping at. If you don't show whatever
| deference he deems adequate, he's got a list of petty crimes
| he can issue a citation for, entirely at his discretion. But
| you'd better do it, once he decides to pursue that citation,
| you're at the mercy of the state's monopoly on violence, and
| it'll take you surviving to your day in court to decide if
| needs qualified immunity for the actions he took whilst
| issuing that citation.
|
| _That_ is a regular person problem.
| doktrin wrote:
| > But reality is, even if they put all their private data on
| a website, heresallmyprivatedata.com, nobody cares. It'll
| have 0 external views.
|
| This is obviously false. Personal data is a multi billion
| dollar industry operating across all shades of legality.
| moose44 wrote:
| Is mass spying not already going on?
| megous wrote:
| Mass spying, and mass killing based on it, assisted by AI.
| 0xdeadbeefbabe wrote:
| Mass boring with false positives.
| willmadden wrote:
| At first, sure. In ten or twenty years of iteration? Not so
| much.
| whamlastxmas wrote:
| There's a difference. If they wanted to spy on me today, they'd
| have to look at the logs my ISP keeps into perpetuity to find
| my usernames on HN and then some unfortunate person has to read
| hundreds or thousands of comments and take extensive notes of
| the controversial political and social opinions that I hold.
|
| Additionally, even without ISP logs, an AI could find my
| accounts online by comparing my writing style and the facts of
| my life that get mentioned in brief passing across all my
| comments. It's probably a more unique fingerprint than a lot of
| people realize.
|
| With an AI, someone would just have to ask with the prompt
| "what are the antisocial opinions of first name last name"? And
| it'd be instant and effectively free compared to the dozens of
| hours and high expense of doing it manually
| Taylor_OD wrote:
| Did you read the post?
|
| The author delineates between surveillance and spying,
| primarily, by saying mass data collection has been happening
| for years. Actually doing something with that data has been
| more difficult. AI summarizes audio and text well, which will
| turn collection into actual analysis, which the author calls
| spying.
|
| Did you disagree?
| CrzyLngPwd wrote:
| "has", not "will".
| mdanger007 wrote:
| Related: https://www.mountaindew.com/wp-
| content/uploads/2023/11/MTN-D...
| TheLoafOfBread wrote:
| Then people will start using AI to generate random traffic noise
| to fool AI watching them.
| dbcooper wrote:
| Of course they won't. Classic techno-libertarian fantasy.
| TheLoafOfBread wrote:
| Ones who want to stay hidden, will. Most of plebs won't.
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| A small group of people making noise to try and obfuscate
| themselves will just draw attention, won't they?
| squarefoot wrote:
| True, unless they use noise which is already present
| online to carry information, for example by applying
| steganography to spam.
| Analemma_ wrote:
| If only the people who want to stay hidden use noisetech,
| they stick out like a flame in a dark room and will
| immediately attract personalized surveillance (and maybe
| even retaliation merely for using it). It doesn't work
| unless everybody is on board.
| ghufran_syed wrote:
| Starting with the "classic" techno-libertarian slaves who
| each claimed "I am spartacus"
| pixl97 wrote:
| [AI observer]: "Well look at this person of interest trying to
| fool the system, lets drop their credit score 50 points"
| forward1 wrote:
| This is the same fallacious trope as "click on irrelevant ads
| to confuse marketers". People are not good at deceiving
| algorithms at scale.
| TheLoafOfBread wrote:
| That actually works. Sure one click is not enough, but
| purposefully browsing women's products on Amazon for few
| hours confused something and since then I am getting ads for
| women's products only.
| forward1 wrote:
| What problem have you actually solved by doing that,
| because you're still receiving ads and being manipulated
| through your continued use of those platforms.
| TheLoafOfBread wrote:
| None. I was drunk and this is the result. Now I am a
| woman for advertisers.
| pockmockchock wrote:
| Next would be to use/create devices that are using Radio for
| Communication and payments, devices like Satslink as an example.
| It drives innovation at the same time, so I wouldn't be too
| concerned.
| bmislav wrote:
| We actually recently published a research paper on exactly this
| topic (see https://llm-privacy.org/ for demo and paper). The
| paper shows that current LLMs already have the reasoning
| capability to infer personal attributes such as age, gender or
| location even when this information is not explicitly mentioned
| in the text. Crucially, they can do this way cheaper and way
| faster than humans. So I would say that spying scenarios
| mentioned in this blog post are definitely in the realm of
| possibility.
| righthand wrote:
| Only if you continue to invest time and energy into. Not everyone
| puts 99% of their life online. When's the last time you left your
| house to do something without a cellular? Or compromised by not
| ordering something you think you need?
| mmh0000 wrote:
| There's an excellent documentary on how sophisticated Government
| Surveillance is and how well it's tuned to be used against the
| general population:
|
| https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120660/
| ysofunny wrote:
| "if everybody is being spied on, nobody is being spied on"
|
| ???
| dkjaudyeqooe wrote:
| This is why AI software must not be restricted, so that ordinary
| people and the civic minded can develop personal and public AI
| systems to counter corporate AI. The future of AI is adversarial.
|
| Now freedom to develop AI software doesn't mean freedom to use it
| however you please and its use should be regulated, in particular
| to protect individuals from things like this. But of course
| people cannot be trusted, so you need to be able to deploy your
| own countermeasures.
| passion__desire wrote:
| We need a new benevolent dictator of LLM Operation System
| (Karpathy's vision) like Yann Lecun similar to Linus Torvolds.
| gentleman11 wrote:
| How does an adversarial ai help protect anyone's privacy or
| freedom to act in public in ways that big brother doesn't
| condone?
| dkjaudyeqooe wrote:
| Adversarial attacks can be made on face recognition systems
| and the like, defeating them, and AI models can be poisoned
| with adversarial data, making them defective or ineffective.
|
| As it stands, AI models are actually quite vulnerable to
| adversarial attacks, with no theoretical or systemic
| solution. In the future it's likely you'll need your own AI
| systems generating adversarial data to defeat models and
| systems that target you. These adversarial attacks will be
| much more effective if co-ordinated by large numbers of
| people who are being targeted.
|
| And of course we have no idea what's coming down the pipe,
| but we know that fighting fire with fire is a good strategy.
| fsflover wrote:
| Another ongoing discussion:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38530795
| pier25 wrote:
| Will? I'd be surprised if NSA etc hadn't been using AI for years
| now.
| indigo0086 wrote:
| "Bitcoin will enable terrorism" "Ghost guns will enable criminals
| to commit murder" "Social media will enable hate speech"
|
| AI will be a useful and world changing innovation which is why
| FUD rag articles like this will become more prevalent until it's
| total adoption, even by the article writer themselves
| yonaguska wrote:
| Do you see how the examples you posted are somewhat problematic
| though? Governments are actively cracking down on all of those
| examples- it stands to reason that they will classify AI as a
| dangerous tool as well at some point, as opposed it becoming a
| ubiquitous tool. Ghost guns are far from common at least.
| pwillia7 wrote:
| They would ban Ghost AIs -- They need non ghost guns or you
| wouldn't be a State
| beej71 wrote:
| None of your three examples are of the government using
| technology against its citizens.
| blondie9x wrote:
| Real question you have to ask yourself. Is AI spying and AI law
| enforcement Minority Report in real life?
| sarks_nz wrote:
| Nick Bostrom proposed the "Vulnerable World Hypothesis" which
| (amongst other things) says that a technology as powerful and
| accessible as AI requires mass surveillance to stop bad actors
| using it as a weapon.
|
| https://nickbostrom.com/papers/vulnerable.pdf
|
| It's disturbing, but also hard (for me) to refute.
| qup wrote:
| Sounds like at that point we have bad actors using it as a
| weapon.
| OfSanguineFire wrote:
| I remember, in the early millennium, reading Kurzweil's
| idealism about the coming singularity, and feeling similar. So
| much of the advanced technology that he thought will soon be in
| the hands of ordinary people, could be potentially so lethal
| that obviously the state would feel the need to restrict it.
|
| (That was one argument against Kurzweil's vision. Another is
| that state regulation and licensing moves so slowly at each
| major technological change, that it would take us decades to
| get to the point he dreams of, not mere years. You aren't going
| to see anything new rolled out in the healthcare sector without
| lots and lots of debating about it and drawing up paperwork
| first.)
| intended wrote:
| If this argument hinges on summarization, then I have to ask -
| what is the blasted hallucination rate ?
|
| I tried exactly this. Watched 4 talks from a seminar, got them
| transcribed, and used ChatGPT to summarize this.
|
| Did 3 perfectly fine, and for the 4th it changed the speaker from
| mild mannered professor into VC investing superstar, with enough
| successes under his belt to not care.
|
| How do you verify your summary is correct? If your false positive
| rate is 25% - 33%, thats a LOT of rework. 1 out of 3.
| EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK wrote:
| Thinking of finally creating a private server for receiving
| emails. For sending email it is known to be very difficult, but I
| send very very few emails these days, will outsource it to
| sendgrid or similar.
|
| What's the best docker image for that, simple in configuration?
| forward1 wrote:
| Mass spying is yesterday's news. The thing we all need to worry
| about is behavioral management at scale, which influences
| politics, relationships, religions and much more. This is the
| true "hidden" evil behind social media and "AI" which few
| apprehend let alone can do something about.
| willmadden wrote:
| This could be used to expose government and monied corruption,
| not just for surveilling peasants.
|
| What is the market for this short term?
|
| I think this could greatly curtail government corruption and
| serve as a stepping stone to AI government. It's also a cool and
| disruptive startup idea.
| blueyes wrote:
| this has been true for a long time. most data is garbage, so the
| data collection phase of mass surveillance punched below its
| weight in terms of consequences felt by the surveilled. AI is one
| way to extraction actionable meaning from that data, and when
| people start feeling the everyday consequences of all that
| collection + meaning extraction, they will finally understand.
| boringg wrote:
| Is this really an insight to ANYONE on hackernews? How is this
| article providing anything new to the conversation except to
| bring it back into discussion?
| godelski wrote:
| There's a lot of speculation in the comments so I want to talk
| about the technology that we have __TODAY__. I post a lot about
| being in ML research and while my focus is on image generation
| I'm working with another team doing another task but not going to
| state it explicitly for obvious reasons.
|
| What can AI/ML do __today__?
|
| We have lots of ways to track people around a building or city.
| The challenge is to do these tasks through multi-camera systems.
| This includes things like people tracking (person with random ID
| but consistent across cameras), face identification (more
| specific representation that is independent of clothing, which
| usually identifies the former), gait tracking (how one walks),
| device tracking (based on bluetooth, wifi, and cellular). There
| is a lot of mixed success with these tools but I'll let you know
| some part that should concern you: right now these are mostly
| ResNet50 models, datasets are small, and they are not using
| advanced training techniques. That is changing. There are legal
| issues and datasets are becoming proprietary but the size and
| frequency of gathering data is growing.
|
| I'm not going to talk about social media because the metadata
| problem is an already well discussed one and you all have already
| made your decisions and we've witnessed the results of those
| decisions. I'm also not going to talk about China, the most
| surveilled country in the world, the UK, or any of that for
| similar reasons. We'll keep talking in general, that is invariant
| to country.
|
| What I will talk about is that modern ML has greatly accelerated
| the data gathering sector. Your threat models have changed from
| governments rushing to gather all the data that they can, to big
| companies joining the game, to now small mom and pop shops doing
| so. I __really__ implore you all to look at what's in that
| dataset[0]. There's 5B items, this tool helps retrieve based on
| CLIP embeddings. You might think "oh yes, Google can already do
| this" but the difference is that you can't download Google.
| Google does not give you 16.5TB of clip filtered image,text, &
| metadata. Or look into the RedPajama dataset[1] which has >30T
| tokens and 5TB of storage. With 32k tokens being about 50 pages,
| that's about 47 billion pages. That is, a stack of paper 5000km
| tall, reaching 5x the height of the ISS and is bigger than the
| diameter of the moon. I know we all understand that there's big
| data collection, but do you honestly understand how big these
| numbers are? I wouldn't even claim to because I cannot accurately
| conceptualize the size of the moon nor the distance to the ISS.
| They just roll into the "big" bin in my brain.
|
| Today, these systems can track you with decent accuracy even if
| you use basic obscurification techniques like glasses, hats, or
| even a surgical mask. Today we can track you not just by image,
| but how you walk, and can with moderate success do this through
| walls (meaning no camera to see if you want to know you're being
| tracked). Today, these systems can de-anonymize you through
| unique text patterns that you use (see Enron dataset, but scale).
| Today, these machines can uncanny valley replicas of your speech
| and text. Today we can make images of people that are
| convincingly real. Today, these tools aren't exclusive to
| governments or trillion dollar corporations, but available to any
| person that is willing to spend a few thousand dollars on
| compute.
|
| I don't want to paint this as a picture of doom and gloom. These
| tools are amazing and have the potential to do extraordinary
| good, at levels that would be unimaginable only a few decades
| ago. Even many of these tools that can invade your privacy are
| benefits in some ways, but just need to consider context. You
| cannot build a post scarce society when you require humans to
| monitor all stores.
|
| But like Uncle Ben says, with great power comes great
| responsibility. A technology that has the capacity to do
| tremendous good also has the power to do tremendous horrors.
|
| The choice is ours and the latter prevails when we are not open.
| We must ever push for these tools to be used for good, because
| with them we can truly do amazing things. We do not need AGI to
| create a post scarce world and I have no doubt that were this to
| become our primary goal, we could easily reach it within our
| lifetime without becoming a Sci-Fi dystopia and while tackling
| existential issues such as climate. To poke the bear a little,
| I'd argue that if your country wants to show dominance and
| superiority on the global stage, it is not done so through
| military power but technology. You will win the culture wars of
| all culture wars and whoever creates the post scarce world will
| be a country that will never be forgotten by time. Lift a billion
| people out of poverty? Try lifting 8 billion not just out of
| poverty, but into the lower middle class, where no child dreams
| of being hungry. That is something humans will never forget. So
| maybe this should be our cold war, not the one in the Pacific. If
| you're so great, truly, truly show me how superior your
| country/technology/people are. This is a battle that can be won
| by anyone at this point, not just China vs the US, but even any
| European power has the chance to win.
|
| [0] https://rom1504.github.io/clip-retrieval/
|
| [1] https://github.com/togethercomputer/RedPajama-Data
| __jambo wrote:
| Because this is so depressing I am going to try think of positive
| aspects:
|
| The flip side to this is the government had power because these
| activities required enormous resources. Perhaps it will go the
| other direction, if there is less of a moat other players can
| enter. Eg all it takes to make a state is a bunch of cheap drones
| and the latest government bot according to your philosophy.
|
| Maybe it means government will massively shrink in personelle?
| Maybe we can have a completely open source ai government/legal
| system. Lawyers kind of suck ethically anyway, so maybe it would
| be better? With low barrier to entry, we can rapidly prototype
| such governments and trial them on smaller populations like
| iceland. Such utopias will be so good everyone will move there.
|
| They still have to have physical prisons, if everyone is in
| prison this will be silly, but I suppose they can fine everyone,
| not so different from lowering wages which they already do.
| nojvek wrote:
| It's not that AI will enable mass spying, mass spying is already
| there.
|
| AI enables extracting all sorts of behavioral data across decades
| timespan for everyone.
|
| The devils argument is in a world where the data is not used for
| nefarious purposes and only to prosecute crime as passed by
| governments, it leads to a society where no one is above the law
| and equal treatment for all.
|
| However that seldom goes well since humans who control the system
| definitely want an upper edge.
| I_am_tiberius wrote:
| Somewhat related: A "Tell HN" I posted today but was shadow-
| banned after it started trending:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38531407
| erikerikson wrote:
| Author: welcoming to knowing. This is unavoidable. Outside of
| extreme measures that will themselves mark, the network effects
| of use will overwhelm any effort to evade.
|
| The question I think is how too navigate and what consequences
| will follow. We could use these capabilities to enslave but we
| could also use them to free and empower.
|
| Scams rely on scale and the ineffective scaling social mechanisms
| to achieve profit. Imagine if the first identification of a scam
| informed every potential mark to which the scam began to be
| applied. Don't forget to concern yourself with false positives
| too, of course.
|
| The injustice of being unable to take action in disputes due to a
| lack of evidence would evaporate. Massive privacy, consent, and
| security risks and issues result so will we be ready to properly
| protect and honor people and their freedoms?
|
| At the end of this path may lay more efficient markets; increased
| capital flows and volumes; and a more fair, just, equitable, and
| maximized world more filled with joy, love, and happiness. There
| are other worse options of course.
| mullingitover wrote:
| This kind of thing will _probably_ never fly, because Americans
| expect that _they_ can break the law and in most cases will not
| suffer any consequences. Anything that threatens this would be,
| in their eyes, oppression. Imagine if you immediately got a text
| informing you of your $300 speeding ticket within a few seconds
| of you going a mile per hour over. People would riot.
|
| However, Americans expect that the law is enforced vigorously
| upon other people, especially people they hate. If AI enabled
| immediate immigration enforcement on undocumented migrants, large
| portions of the population would injure themselves running to the
| voting booth to have it added to the Constitution.
|
| It's the whole expectation that for _my_ group the law protects
| but does not bind, and for _others_ it binds but does not
| protect.
| repentless_ape wrote:
| Yeah this is all uniquely American and not prevalent in every
| society on earth throughout all of human history.
| pixl97 wrote:
| https://crookedtimber.org/2018/03/21/liberals-against-
| progre...
|
| >For millennia, conservatism had no name, because no other
| model of polity had ever been proposed. "The king can do no
| wrong." In practice, this immunity was always extended to the
| king's friends, however fungible a group they might have
| been. Today, we still have the king's friends even where
| there is no king (dictator, etc.). Another way to look at
| this is that the king is a faction, rather than an
| individual.
| wseqyrku wrote:
| So far you were a line in the log. Now someone is actually
| looking at you with three eyes.
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| This very scenario was one of the key threats in book Homo Dues
| and that was over 5 years ago.
|
| Russia could do surveillance, but was limited by manpower.
|
| Now AI solves this, there can be an AI bot dedicated to each
| individual.
|
| Wasn't there another article on HN just day, that Car Makers,
| Phone, Health monitors all can now aggregate data to know 'your
| mood' when in an accident? To know where you are going, how you
| are feeling?
|
| This is the real danger with AI. Even current technology is good
| enough for this kind of surveillance.
| uticus wrote:
| This sums up so many things well and clearly. It's so quotable.
|
| - The money trail: "Their true customers--their advertisers--will
| demand it."
|
| - The current state of affairs: "Surveillance has become the
| business model of the internet..."
|
| - The fact that _not_ participating, or opting-out, still yields
| informational value, if not even more so: "Find me all the pairs
| of phones that were moving toward each other, turned themselves
| off..."
|
| This isn't a technological problem. Technology always precedes
| the morals and piggybacks on the fuzzy ideas that haven't yet
| developed into concrete, well-taught axioms. It is a problem
| about how our society approaches ideals. _Ideals_ , not _ideas_.
| What do we value? What do we love?
|
| If we love perceived security more than responsibility, we will
| give up freedoms. And gladly. If we love ourselves more than
| future generations, we will make short-sighted decisions and pat
| ourselves on the back for our efficiency in rewarding ourselves.
| If we love ourselves more than others, we won't even care much
| about social concerns. We'll fail to notice anything that doesn't
| move the needle against _my_ comfort much.
|
| It's more understandable to me than ever how recent human horrors
| - genocides, repressive regimes, all of it - came about to be.
| It's because I'm a very selfish person and I am surrounded by
| selfish people. Mass spying is a symptom - not much of a cause -
| of the human condition.
| miki123211 wrote:
| I personally find the censorship implications (and the business
| models they allow) far more worrying than the surveillance
| implications.
|
| It will soon be possible to create a dating app where chatting is
| free, but figuring out a place to meet or exchanging contact
| details requires you to pay up, in a way that 99% of people won't
| know how to bypass, especially if repeated bypassing attempts
| result in a ban. Same goes for apps like Airbnb or eBay, which
| will be able to prevent people from using them as listing sites
| and conducting their transactions off-platform to avoid fees.
|
| The social media implications are even more worrying, it will be
| possible to check every post, comment, message, photo or video
| and immediately delist it if it promotes certain views (like the
| lab leak theory), no matter how indirect these mentions are.
| Parental control software will have a field day with this,
| basically redefining helicopter parenting.
| elric wrote:
| We can barely get people to care about the implications of types
| of surveillance that they do understand (CCTV everywhere,
| Snowden's revelations, etc). It's going to be nigh impossible to
| get people to care about this enough to make a difference.
|
| Heck, even if they did care, there's nothing they can
| realistically do about it. The genie's out of the bottle.
| barelyauser wrote:
| The average HN user defends the "common guy" or "the masses",
| perhaps because he fears being perceived as condescending. I've
| come to the conclusion that the masses don't deserve any of this.
| Many drink and drive, indulge in destructive addictions (not only
| to themselves). Many can't bother recycling or even maintaining a
| clean home environment, waste time and resources in every
| activity they engage in and don't even care for their neighbors
| well being (loud music, etc).
|
| Concluding remarks. As man succeeded in creating high mechanical
| precision from the chaotic natural environment, he will succeed
| in creating a superior artificial entity. This entity shall "spy"
| (better described as "care" for) every human being, maximizing
| our happiness.
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