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Not OK, Google

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Re: Not OK, Google

#541

Post by Eupolemos »

jccalhoun wrote: post #379
Eupolemos wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I fear you will be unable to recognize when that burger was your choice and when it was a reaction. You probably won't notice. And that is harmless. I also fear you will be unable to notice in which areas of life and information the distinction between choice and reaction is harmless and which it isn't. Of course, I'm not talking about "You" you, but just people. Me as well. I feel we are widening the field of uncons…

> I feel we are widening the field of unconscious decisions and I see that as inherently bad I'm curious why you think this is bad. I don't necessarily think it is good but I also don't necessarily think it is actually happening

Which news-sources do you use?

Which news-sources are you going to learn about?

Which news-sources are you for some reason very unlikely to encounter?

Now apply a real-time AI filter-bubble, able to also include government policies in its decision-making, onto those questions.

I believe the most important thing in life is thinking. I believe a key element of thinking is looking at "easy stuff", the stuff we just live with every day and don't think about, and for some reason be forced to think about it and make it simple.

Take the Snowden-leak. We lived a nice life being the good guys and that kind of surveillance was publicly thought of as conspiracy theories. Suddenly we were forced to look at what was going on. How much of it are we okay with? On the grounds of what principles and tradeoffs? This is all very unpleasant, but we're all better off for facing those questions and work towards new principles. We take a chaotic gruel of cons and pros, and try to hammer them into a few simple principles our societies may function by. For instance, the separation of power into 3 has served us well.

I fear that we end up in a world where raising such unpleasant questions becomes almost impossible - and we'll never even notice. Not because of AI (I believe AI to be inevitable and fascinating) but because of the way AI is used.

Living a life assisted by an AI, made and paid for by someone else, seems like the epitome of naivete to me.

Re: Not OK, Google

#542

Post by euyyn »

spac wrote: post #72

I'm confused as to why in this thread there's very little contrastive commentary on the different stance taken by Apple and Google about privacy. Apple has made preserving user privacy a paramount goal, investing in research and technology to achieve it with minimal loss (however much it is) of (intelligent) functionality. I find that a very strong point for the Cupertino based company. (edited for legibility)

Notice that, despite not giving it Apple's successful marketing, Google also invests in R&D of differential privacy: https://www.quora.com/Does-Google-use-a-differential-privacy...

Re: Not OK, Google

#543

Post by euyyn »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #531
euyyn wrote: post #523

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> subtly influence your behavior towards the most profitable results This is the very common theory that a company will (shadily) try to offer you a worse product to make more profit. It fails to account for competing companies that would jump on that opportunity to offer their better product, and get the market share. But what's funny here is that the suggested alternative is to not get any product at all. As in: "P…

"Worse" is often subjective. And the problem is often just the removal of the possibility of a better product to take hold. For example, Google prioritizes Google services. It gets you on as many Google services as possible. Let's use, say, that it pushes you towards Play Music when you search for songs. Maybe Play Music is the best thing. Maybe it is not. Neither of us can answer that. But if a definitively better p…

> And if your theory that companies prioritizing results for profit would lose to companies that always prefer the best products, why is DuckDuckGo still in what... fourth or fifth place?

You'd need to argue that DuckDuckGo's search results are better; I don't think they are. That's what made Google first among many competing search engines, before there was even a clear business model in it. Today the incentive to outperform is bigger.

If a product Y definitely better than X comes along, and only Google Search fails to rank it higher, people will start thinking "I rather search on Bing too, as it finds better products in this category".

Re: Not OK, Google

#544

Post by ethanbond »

euyyn wrote: post #519
ethanbond wrote: post #429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Obviously the first two aren't the problematic ones. The issue is that an algorithm wouldn't know what distinguishes those from the third, obviously. How about sleeping pills? Opiates? Local extortionist cult?

I think that algorithms, and AI specifically, are perfectly able learn what distinguishes those. Maybe even better than someone who might not be in their best state of mind.

The handwaviness is telling. Why would an algorithm or its creators even care about the difference? The highest bidder is the highest bidder.

Re: Not OK, Google

#545

Post by ocdtrekkie »

dragonwriter wrote: post #530
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #520

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And a big point is that on a Navy-analogous vessel, it's reasonable to assume most activity on the ship is being monitored, for the safety of the ship and crew. The fact that the ship knows where everyone aboard is or that they can pull up the full Starfleet record for anyone who's ever been in Starfleet is not surprising, this is the military* and records and accountability are a big deal. But there's nothing to ind…

> But there's nothing to indicate that Federation civilians are monitored to that extent The clearest example of extensive off-starship monitoring (within the Federation) that I can think of in TNG is a civilian (though, to be fair, a civilian in a role analogous to a "defense contractor"), Dr. Leah Brahms. > I'd argue enough episodes are strong on fundamental individual rights, that it's hard to imagine Federation l…

I saw you give the Brahms example in another comment before I posted, so I am not surprised to see you bring it up. But I think you answered your own point. She worked heavily on the Galaxy-class starship's warp drive, which would be a relatively classified project that they would be very unhappy if the Romulans or any other hostile parties were intercepting data on.

And arguably, if she was working at Utopia Planitia Fleet Yards on the Galaxy class project, she presumably worked on a Starfleet orbital facility (technically, a number of facilities) over a span of years, where certainly enough data would be collected to make a poor replica of her personality, as in the show. I don't see anything suggesting specifically outside of basic biographical data, that she was being monitored in her civilian life.

La Forge, having interacted with that hologram extensively, and having surely read Starfleet's records... apparently didn't know she was married.

Re: Not OK, Google

#546

Post by dcherman »

mason55 wrote: post #338
jeffdavis wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's one of the interesting things about AI. There's no way to clairfy/correct when something is wrong, and most of the time you don't even know something is wrong. It's not clear whether these AI models have much incentive to correct anything. If 99% of people with attributes x,y and z are bad candidates for a job, will you even get an interview? Is there any attempt to account for the fact that attribute x is som…

There are all kinds of interesting thought experiments. What happens when a classifier innocently discovers that the best classification is by race? Do we care? How about if we remove race but it happens to discover that four features which are very strongly correlated to race are the best way to classify?

If that second scenario were to happen, then I think we should take a serious look at why that correlation is occurring rather than just throwing out the data because it's "racist". That we removed the classification and then it was re-discovered by other correlations really should suggest something. On the assumption that it wasn't engineered to be biased and was naturally arrived at by the algorithm itself, then that actually seems like an important data point, and could even be a nice litmus test of how we're addressing racial differences if the models evolve to be more positive over time.

Re: Not OK, Google

#547

Post by type0 »

Klathmon wrote: post #469
pmyjavec wrote: post #457

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you do with it? Like what is a typical use case / interaction ? Do you ask it to put on a movie or tell you the time ? I totally disagree people wanted all their personal information fed to private corporations in the "cloud" BTW. Completely disagree. It's Orwellian.

>What do you do with it? Like what is a typical use case / interaction ? Do you ask it to put on a movie or tell you the time ? Control the lights in the house, make sure the garage door and front door are closed and locked at night, adjust the temperature, play some music (specific band, song, or genre) on one of the TVs or on my computer, read me things like the weather, calendar entries, emails, ask it how long it…

In my experience lot of aging population feels that it's desirable to have such devices, that these could give them assistance to memorize tasks or do them automatically (e.g. closing garage door). There is many positives if it's implemented with ethical considerations.

> People aren't dumb, they know these devices aren't magic.

Yes they know that they aren't magic but for the most part they don't know how they work - so it's essentially black boxes with deceiving trade-offs, also almost no one reads TOS.

Re: Not OK, Google

#548

Post by Aeolun »

pmoriarty wrote: post #510
mooman219 wrote: post #486

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google has top notch practices in my opinion regarding privacy. If anything I would be more worried about smaller companies with shadier practices and lower security standards holding my personal information. There have been seemingly illegal practices from companies like Sears with how personal data is collected and used. It's easy to throw shade at a big companies, write a sarcastic title, then get clicks. Example:…

"Google has top notch practices in my opinion regarding privacy." Google might handle the data it collects better than other companies, but it would do much better still if it didn't collect any personal data at all. Hands off my data, Google!

Google wouldn't be Google without all that personal data though.

Re: Not OK, Google

#549

Post by Periodic »

bhauer wrote: post #278
pimlottc wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody was thinking about "the cloud" back in those days. Back then, your data, you programs all lived and ran on your own computer in your home. Most people didn't go online, and if you did, it was mostly to read and download data to use locally on your own computer. Connections were intermittent and slow. The idea that your own data would be stored online was almost unimaginable; even using network-depending applic…

I feel your message is the most important in this thread because it's the crux of the whole concern about privacy and the cloud. Where technology has failed us most is in the utterly stagnant evolution and maturation of secure private networks. The following is a utopian notion, but had private networks seen as much R&D as the public clouds, they would be significantly less cumbersome than today's clunky VPNs. Imagin…

The cloud is all about scale and only having to rent resources when you need them. If you have your home server you have to buy and maintain and pay for those resources at all times. When you make a quick cloud request you only "pay" for the resources you consume.

When I was working on Google Search what really astounded me is how we could leverage hundreds of machines in a single request and still have virtually no cost per search. The reason was that each search used a tiny amount of the total resources of those machines and for a very short time. A total search might have (made up numbers) one minute of computation time, but spread across 200 machines it only takes 300ms from start to finish.

That's the benefit the cloud will provide. You don't want to have a 1000-machine data center available at all times to store billions of possible documents and process your requests with low latency. If we went to a private-network model I fear that the turn-around time would be a lot closer to a human assistant. You'd ask it to do things and then it would get back to you sometime later (seconds? minutes? hours?) when it had finished it's research and come up with an answer.

Re: Not OK, Google

#550

Post by mancerayder »

Nursie wrote: post #534
kps wrote: post #479

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ... it was creepy as all hell that the people [...] knew enough about me No people know. Software metaphorically ‘knows’, but don't anthropomorphize it (it hates that).

But it's accessible to people, that's the issue. Not my tech, but systems far away that belong to others.

Exactly. You're expected to naively trust 'the algorithm', because people are nowhere to be found near your supposedly anonymized data.

Speaking of which, anyone following today's stories about the Yahoo email scandal, the pressure on the folks who own Signal, and recent litigation from Microsoft against government gag orders?

But, let's go back to talking about none of us have free will and talking about how clever Now is.

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