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Inside China’s Dystopian Dreams: A.I., Shame and Lots of Cameras

nytimes.com

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Re: Inside China’s Dystopian Dreams: A.I., Shame and Lots of Cameras

#101

Post by Razengan »

telltruth wrote: post #67

I 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…

> I fully expect this to keep getting advanced further.

If they aren’t going to scale it back then I hope they go all the way with it.

I hope they try to automate it and feed everything about everyone to a centralized AI.

I hope they give it more and more control including the ability to direct military drones.

I hope it then turns on them.

Because the “smart stupid” people that implement well-intentioned malice like mass surveillance can’t usually see far ahead (see reports of data harvesting companies getting hacked.)

If this is the path we’re going to go down then might as well speed up evolution and usher in a new class of intelligent life on this planet.

Re: Inside China’s Dystopian Dreams: A.I., Shame and Lots of Cameras

#102

Post by naveen99 »

allenz wrote: post #63
tmalsburg2 wrote: post #2

The 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.

Storing feeds of each camera is got to be expensive. I thought about recording my life. It would be too expensive for me to do surveillance on myself 24/7 and then do analysis on the feeds. And i make more than the median Chinese or american.

Re: Inside China’s Dystopian Dreams: A.I., Shame and Lots of Cameras

#103

Post by EGreg »

telltruth wrote: post #67

I 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…

First you make it easier to control the masses

THEN you make any kind of rules you want

Prevent any rebellion with AI

Install implants to people to further cement your control later. You won’t even need to do facial recognition.

There are essentially two options here:

1) A ruling class enforcing totally arbitrary rules on a society of “pets”

2) An AI that eventually makes the ruling class completely irrelevant

My main concern is that this AI will not be sensitive to what humans need or want and will cause a lot of mismatch that they won’t be able to get out of anymore. Revolution won’t be an option. You’re just stuck in a jail being controlled by a dumb AI that just prevents any way out of the jail.

There may be no more progress or advancement as this AI would not have any abilities or interest in any of that. Just a zoo of humans essentially.

We are already turning the entire planet into farms and monocultures.

And a zoo for ourselves is next. No matter what you do someone will invent autonomous X that will then set the standard for all human behavior. It will be so efficient as to notice when you did a tiny thing wrong and the penalties would be extracted via perfectly mapped system of rewards. It will know anyone who tried to help you out as well.

It’s just too “sweet”.

Re: Inside China’s Dystopian Dreams: A.I., Shame and Lots of Cameras

#104

Post by Barrin92 »

walrus01 wrote: post #19
nimrod0 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you have a "bad" US credit score you can't get an apartment, a job, a post-paid mobile plan, or any number of things nowadays that ask for your SSN. That's why identity theft can trash a person's life. Same with ad profiles built around your activities and movements. You think that's not being sold around commercially and the intelligence community hasn't obtained a copy? The scaffolding is all there.

Oh, it's absolutely there, and your life is definitely crippled with a bad credit score in the US. But that's strictly financial . You can have an amazing FICO score and spend 24 hours a day shitposting bernie sanders memes on message boards, and trolling the hell of of every staff member of every trump appointee (within legal limits of not threatening anybody). Try the equivalent in China. It's a social credit score…

>and spend 24 hours a day shitposting bernie sanders memes on message boards, and trolling the hell of of every staff member of every trump appointee

and how relevant is that to the life of the average American citizen?

In a sense, the American apparatus is significantly more advanced. You don't even need a scary government and a social credit or a staunch party line. You simply dangle the carrot of free political speech around, let people run around with their signs on the street on occasion and they're perfectly content with their lot.

Re: Inside China’s Dystopian Dreams: A.I., Shame and Lots of Cameras

#105

Post by mncharity »

One thing to start thinking about: Eye tracking is coming with AR. It enables foveated rendering - only the tiny region[1] your fovea is pointing at gets full resolution GPU effort. And AR is, eventually, becoming the new cell phone. But just as cell phones were "oh, btw, now everyone will be wearing a real-time location tracker - just like a handful of criminals and wild animals did previously", AR is "real-time what-are-you-glancing-at/thinking-about-second-by-second tracker". Integrating cell phone capabilities with societal culture, policy, and law, seems to have been largely reactive, and seems to have involved significant societal changes with limited collective reflection. Perhaps we can do better this time, with AR and eye tracking?

[1] https://www.shadertoy.com/view/4dsXzM

Re: Inside China’s Dystopian Dreams: A.I., Shame and Lots of Cameras

#106

Post by dbcooper »

wcrichton wrote: post #14

I’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…

Can't wait for algorithm homogenised movies!

Re: Inside China’s Dystopian Dreams: A.I., Shame and Lots of Cameras

#107

Post by obelix_ »

telltruth wrote: post #67

I 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…

You have to examine your own assumptions too -

1. You assume stopping "revolution" is the goal. It is not. All you have to do is look at what outcomes "revolutions" in an info saturated/low attention span/consumption culture based society have produced in the last 20 years.

2. In 2013 the Washington post did an estimate on how much was being spent on the surveillance society in the US. Everyone reacted in disbelief. Do you know by how much that budget has increased in the last 5 years? Are these people just brain-dead to be spending this kind of cash? Ofcourse not.

The US has made its share of mistakes over valuing freedom and squandering potential. China is overvaluing control and will make its share of mistakes too. We have to learn from both sets of mistakes to arrive at the right balance of where society should go in high noise info saturation environments. These are very new environment that society hasnt been in before and the right path ahead is not as obvious as people think.

Re: Inside China’s Dystopian Dreams: A.I., Shame and Lots of Cameras

#108

Post by dang »

walrus01 wrote: post #83
star-trek-fleet wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disclaimer: I don’t consider myself prochinese government, if you think the below statements state otherwise, don’t call me a 50cents party. There are freedom in expressing ones thoughts on solid facts. It’s an insult to people’s rights by labeling them and automatically disregard their opinions. I think our collective consciousness should be to show the world that a free and open nation is the best form of national…

(removed at the request of a site admin?)

That crosses into personal attack and breaks the site guideline against insinuating astroturfing without evidence. If you can't post civilly and substantively, especially on divisive topics, we're going to ban you. Please don't do this again.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Inside China’s Dystopian Dreams: A.I., Shame and Lots of Cameras

#109

Post by dang »

walrus01 wrote: post #88
dang wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not local perspective. Please don't take these threads further into political or national flamewar. They're flammable enough already.

Posting concrete examples of how police state mass-surveillance technologies can aid and abet in the suppression of disliked minorities is defined as a flamewar? Yeah...

Yes, because you weren't engaging in conversation, just posting ammunition. Your other comments in the thread suggest that you have an agenda about this. That's not a good basis for posting HN comments, regardless of the agenda or whether you're right or wrong; and when the topic is divisive it basically always leads to flamewars.

Re: Inside China’s Dystopian Dreams: A.I., Shame and Lots of Cameras

#110

Post by allenz »

naveen99 wrote: post #102
allenz wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Storing feeds of each camera is got to be expensive. I thought about recording my life. It would be too expensive for me to do surveillance on myself 24/7 and then do analysis on the feeds. And i make more than the median Chinese or american.

The government doesn't need to store the video, just the processed data, such as each person's history of locations, emotional states, interactions, and actions. Analysis is automated and thus scalable to the entire country. The underlying technology improves exponentially, so everyone underestimates the social impact that this will have in a decade.
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