The People's Republic is a real shithole.
Inside China’s Dystopian Dreams: A.I., Shame and Lots of Cameras
61–70 of 223 posts
Re: Inside China’s Dystopian Dreams: A.I., Shame and Lots of Cameras
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Perhaps this "war on science", however naive and inarticulate its proponents, is actually a war on the abuses of technology, such as the parent describes. No, it definitely isn't. It's the willful and deceitful spreading of lies and portraying of scientists as bogeyman rather than the bringers of bad news. It's the purposeful act of dumbing down citizens and putting lies instead of facts in their heads to use 15 ye…
There have been quite a few cases where "science" was used for "willful and deceitful spreading of lies". See for example how now we find out that the whole "fats are bad for you, carbs are good" scientific "fact" was manufactured by the sugar industry. This has infested the highest level of the scientific establishment (the american dietary recomandations), so you can't say that it was only the uninformed who were d…
yes, but that is most definitely NOT the point of the anti-science propaganda (moon landing is a hoax, chemtrails, flat earth, etc.++).
The point of that nonsense is to sow distrust in all institutions, especially science. Since the susceptible people have no real idea about how science works, it's just swapping out one belief structure or another (even tho it's promoted as 'think for yourself', that doesn't work if you don't have the tools -- your ignorance is just as good as any experts' knowledge).
Once the actual experts are distrusted, any belief can be swapped in for these people, who are now useful idiots (in the Lennin sense).
Re: Inside China’s Dystopian Dreams: A.I., Shame and Lots of Cameras
#63The article says there are four times as many cameras in China than in the US. This means approximately the same number of cameras per citizen. Where is the NYT article about the US' dystopian dreams?
Each camera in China is far more invasive due to how they're used. The government views cameras as the means for total population control. The goal is to process, cross-reference, and store surveillance across the entire country, to know and control every minute of people's lives. Compare to the US, where most cameras do not have facial recognition, are not interconnected, and do not store data long term.
Re: Inside China’s Dystopian Dreams: A.I., Shame and Lots of Cameras
#64This article examines A.I., policing and authoritarianism from a Western perspective, rather than the local perspective. I think it would have served the article's balance to get a more local and relativist view on the intersectionality of the things they are looking to be objective about. That said, if the technology delivers on the potential the gov't claims, I think they will have to relax the laws or make it flex…
China is a huge, huge country, historically it's been difficult for the central government to exercise its control all over its territory. This would be the realization of that historical desire.
That sounds like a better argument for China breaking up than it does using force and dystopian surveillance to maintain a lock on power.
Re: Inside China’s Dystopian Dreams: A.I., Shame and Lots of Cameras
#65The technology isn't quite there, and Chinese law enforcement clearly exaggerates in order to maximize the current impact. However, we are very close to the point where everything could be tracked, and recorded in a usable way - including the exact location of most citizens at all times, discrepancies in utility bills, shopping, internet activity (except possibly for those few with impeccable OpSec, and even that for…
> Dissidents and revolutionaries would hardly be able to do much. Hence the scary question: Once the technology is available (now) and complete surveillance is implemented (soon), is there a going back?
"If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever."
Re: Inside China’s Dystopian Dreams: A.I., Shame and Lots of Cameras
#66I’m a PhD student focusing on large scale video analysis. It’s an unfortunate fact that a lot of the applied research in this space is motivated by surveillance, particularly in systems, eg what’s come out of Microsoft’s efforts here [0]. A colleague who attended CVPR said most of the industry booths were either surveillance or self driving cars. I wish researchers would start to think more creatively about what we c…
> The least we can do is try to use this technology for social good. For example, a USC/Google team used computer vision tools to identify gender bias in modern cinema
That sounds entirely worthless.
A social good involves helping somebody who needs aid.
This proposal merely fills a perceived need by political dogmatics. This is exactly a sociopolitical memory leak.
Re: Inside China’s Dystopian Dreams: A.I., Shame and Lots of Cameras
#67I fully expect this to keep getting advanced further. There has been no protest whatsoever within China and even many people of Chinese origin living in US with US citizenship seem to think this is necessary and good for the people. I have been told that "outsiders" won't "understand" this. The bottom line is that if people are not rebelling against current measures of social credit, government only has incentive to keep going.
Sooner or later government would require things like TV sets with front camera. So when a person watches TV, camera watches that person. There have been huge progress made in emotional inference which can allow government to measure emotional responses to what person is viewing. Imagine there is a news of rebellian getting crushed and if you are consistently showing supportive emotions, you can get black listed for further investigation. Cities can get microphones at restaurants and other places to analyse what conversations are happening and find hot spots where "trouble makers" hang out. Previously we had only vast sensor networks. Now we can turn each sensor in to autonomous spy that works loyally without salaries and demands nothing but cheap electricity. Computers allows for scale when humans are being replaced. If you want million spies scattered all around, its possible fairly cheaply now. I would also expect lots of other countries to adopt variant of these tech, typically under the notion of improving safety and security for general public.
Re: Inside China’s Dystopian Dreams: A.I., Shame and Lots of Cameras
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think you are wrong. It will be hard to roll back any system which abolishes violent crime. The people will accept it as long as it not abused that much.
This is a tricky line of thinking. Once surveillance is there you can always hide behind the “now we’re safer”, the issue is that you can always survey more and always claim that going back would be less safe and so on and so forth. A good example for this is airport security. As far as I’m aware it’s quite unclear how effective all the security apparatus is yet it piled up over the years since 9/11, full body scans…
It ultimately doesn’t matter much what we’re willing to bear. Those in power do not easily surrender tools that can keep them there.
Re: Inside China’s Dystopian Dreams: A.I., Shame and Lots of Cameras
#69India has almost the same population as China, and yet they don't choose to wield an authoritative system of population control and management with all the psychological techniques of manipulation and deception that China is. So how is India doing - worse than China? Every country is different so can't really be compared like that, but I am fascinated to see whether Chinese people will come to rise up against such an…
You are confusing incompetence with benevolence. if India had money and AI PhDs anywhere even half way close to China, politicians there would have rushed to implement social credit system and it would have been called "Karma Card". It would have promise to improve security for women getting raped and people getting robed. I haven't studied Indian constitution myself but I have been told that its one of the shittiest constitution out there modeled to emulate English monarchy+parliamentary system and has zero protection on fundamental individual freedoms explicitly specified like it does in US constitution. There is nothing in India constitution that can prevent future Karma Card to get implemented in India. But don't feel bad... most countries are in same boat. Insistence for individual freedom is fairly unique to US and may be handful of other countries at lesser extent. This is because US being new country formed in a period, in circumstances and by group of people very heavily influenced by Bill by Rights and extreme distaste for monarchy. Many other former English colonies on the hand had developed huge appreciation for the same and ended up with systems that simply emulates English political system.
Re: Inside China’s Dystopian Dreams: A.I., Shame and Lots of Cameras
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Perhaps this "war on science", however naive and inarticulate its proponents, is actually a war on the abuses of technology, such as the parent describes. No, it definitely isn't. It's the willful and deceitful spreading of lies and portraying of scientists as bogeyman rather than the bringers of bad news. It's the purposeful act of dumbing down citizens and putting lies instead of facts in their heads to use 15 ye…
There have been quite a few cases where "science" was used for "willful and deceitful spreading of lies". See for example how now we find out that the whole "fats are bad for you, carbs are good" scientific "fact" was manufactured by the sugar industry. This has infested the highest level of the scientific establishment (the american dietary recomandations), so you can't say that it was only the uninformed who were d…
But the lie was overcome by the efforts of countless dietary researchers employed at major institutions, so it was not at all a conspiracy of all the scientists. That is quite the contrary of what the people who have declared war on science are claiming.