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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

#121

Post by Razengan »

b_b wrote: post #111
Razengan wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Seems a bit harsh to wish the suffering that this will cause on literally billions of people to prove a point, when we can intervene now instead.

Intervene how?

The governments and corporations of the "Free World" will only pander to China, for “access to their market”, and individuals can't do much against a regime that would happily mow its own citizens down with tanks and then erase all memory of the event within a single generation. [0]

Maybe independent developers could put a notice against Chinese authoritarianism in their apps and services when they're accessed from a Chinese IP, to raise awareness among their public.

[0] http://www.bing.com/images/search?q=Tiananmen+Square+1989

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

#122

Post by zshbleaker »

Mediterraneo10 wrote: post #100
briandear wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not even close. A false equivalence. Assuming a camera represents a unit of surveillance, then that comparison might hold, but it’s what China actually does with that stuff that makes the difference. There is always this knee-jerk “What about the US?” every time there is an article like this. If you haven’t lived in China and actually lived within their system, it’s easy to take for granted the freedom Americans…

> Clandestine Christians in China have never been involved in the planning or execution of violent acts in China Firstly, the Christian element to the Taiping Rebellion[0] is one reason why the Chinese state is wary of Christianity outside the carefully controlled state form that is permitted. Religion can obviously contribute to social unrest. Secondly, house churches in China tend to promote the vision of a coming…

Hi there. I was born in China and have been in here for more than two decades and I'm pretty sure that the reason CCP consider Christian as detrimental is absolutely nothing with Taiping Rebellion.

To understand this, you have to learn that what CCP did from 1950 to 1990 is aiming on sandificate the whole society. They successfully destroyed all tradition local communities under the name of "reform for communism", by killing landlords in rural and taking away fortunes of rich men in cities. Just like what happened to Jews in 1930s, German. People are atomic and not self organized. They only focus on their own interest and no concept of being a member of a local group.

However, Christians are encouraged to build local communities, and holding regularly meetings in Church or someone's home. This is level 0 alert for CCP.

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

#123

Post by chronic821 »

ineednoprocrast wrote: post #97
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…

I rarely post, but I feel it necessary to chime in here. I studied computational linguistics/natural language processing in grad school, out of an interest in accessibility issues (I had RSI) and related applications, and had naively neglected to look very hard about how I'd be likely use it in a career. Other people in my cohort went to work for the CIA. I couldn't move to the bay area for... reasons, (this was pre-…

> I feel morally obligated to use what I know to improve the state of the world. This has, unfortunately, led to a lot of unemployment and serious depression.

And as you would suspect, I'm a PhD grad working in the Bay area on mas surveillance AI. Half a million dollars a year.

I honestly don't know how to invest the money anymore. Index funds are boring at this point.

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

#124

Post by BurningFrog »

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?

My car has 3 cameras. Every phone I buy has at least 2 cameras.

None of them are part of a surveillance state. Are they part of these statistics?

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

#125

Post by sidmani »

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…

> TV sets with front camera

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telescreen

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

#126

Post by JumpCrisscross »

walrus01 wrote: post #89
symisc_devel wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, they really don't care about any open source license. In fact, they are notorious for GPL violation. What they were looking for is the Real-time face detector implemented directly in the C code which is available only for the commercial version of the library ( https://pixlab.io/downloads ).

If I were an unethical Chinese company that really wanted your library, I'd create a US LLC, get some web designers to make a decent looking page that looks real enough, license the C code for some small bespoke project, and then disappear once I had the code/library.

> I'd create a US LLC, get some web designers to make a decent looking page that looks real enough, license the C code for some small bespoke project, and then disappear once I had the code/library

This may be an unreasonable risk-reward tradeoff. On the upside, you saved some money. On the downside, you risked (a) an international incident, (b) being cut off from future updates and (c) bringing unnecessary attention to your surveillance project. Much better tradecraft to try buying cleanly, thereby incentivizing everyone on both sides to co-operate, while keeping the shady tactics as a back-up plan.

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

#127

Post by JumpCrisscross »

emptybits wrote: post #39
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?

Where is the NYT article about the US' dystopian dreams? The NYT writes plenty of articles about US surveillance gone-too-far. Even a naive query like this: https://www.nytimes.com/search?query=surveillance turns up plenty of exposure on the issue. At least in the USA, citizens can openly criticize and publish their government's corruption and failings and concerns about the surveillance state and abuses of power. Am…

> China doesn't have (and never really had?) these features

It used to, sort of. An immortal Party ruled over the state. Now it's devolved into a dictatorship, with the predictable pitfalls thereof.

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

#128

Post by prolikewh0a »

chronic821 wrote: post #123
ineednoprocrast wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I rarely post, but I feel it necessary to chime in here. I studied computational linguistics/natural language processing in grad school, out of an interest in accessibility issues (I had RSI) and related applications, and had naively neglected to look very hard about how I'd be likely use it in a career. Other people in my cohort went to work for the CIA. I couldn't move to the bay area for... reasons, (this was pre-…

> I feel morally obligated to use what I know to improve the state of the world. This has, unfortunately, led to a lot of unemployment and serious depression. And as you would suspect, I'm a PhD grad working in the Bay area on mas surveillance AI. Half a million dollars a year. I honestly don't know how to invest the money anymore. Index funds are boring at this point.

What point was there in posting this?

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

#129

Post by prolikewh0a »

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?

People willingly & with excitement walk into Amazon Go stores. It's so creepy to me. You can turn your phone off and it still tracks you and everything you buy.

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

#130

Post by prolikewh0a »

emptybits wrote: post #39
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?

Where is the NYT article about the US' dystopian dreams? The NYT writes plenty of articles about US surveillance gone-too-far. Even a naive query like this: https://www.nytimes.com/search?query=surveillance turns up plenty of exposure on the issue. At least in the USA, citizens can openly criticize and publish their government's corruption and failings and concerns about the surveillance state and abuses of power. Am…

>At least in the USA, citizens can openly criticize and publish their government's corruption and failings and concerns about the surveillance state and abuses of power. Americans can do this without fear of unjust incarceration or worse.

Snowden, Manning?

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