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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

#131

Post by ilikehurdles »

dang wrote: post #109
walrus01 wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Is your idea of local perspective a watered down and government-controlled local news source spouting government viewpoints? Really, dang, I’m curious what you would consider a valid local perspective that is something other than support of the regime. There were tons of local perspectives in links of the other comment.

And why is one viewpoint unworthy of HN but not the other?

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

#132

Post by whorleater »

justicezyx wrote: post #60
walrus01 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you want local perspective? this is what happens when it's implemented against a religious and ethnic minority: https://www.cnn.com/2018/02/02/asia/china-xinjiang-detention... https://www.rfa.org/english/news/uyghur/travel-0327201816200... https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/03/opinion/sunday/china-surv... https://www.economist.com/briefing/2018/05/31/china-has-turn...

Xinjiang is like Afghanistan, its not a police state, its a war zone. You should not only pity the minority, the Han people are equally forced there because the government needs maintain control. These articles, do care about the people, but not all of them.

This comment is not only hilariously unfounded, but also straight up wrong. Where is the Helmand province equivalent in Xinjiang?

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

#133

Post by unityByFreedom »

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-…

Join Kaggle. Plenty of linguistics work to be done there. After a few months you'll have some idea where you can apply this in a workplace that is in line with your morals.

At the very least it will keep you plenty busy and is fun.

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

#135

Post by astebbin »

prolikewh0a wrote: post #130
emptybits wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Snowden has certainly paid a price for his leaks. However, the Washington Post, New York Times, and others were not punished for re-publishing or discussing the content of these leaks. Historically, American papers have successfully defended their right to do so in court (the Pentagon Papers, Watergate). Leakers also do often maintain anonymity, obtain legal protection, or receive pardons when their leaks appear to serve the public interest (Daniel Ellsberg, Deep Throat, Manning). The situation in China for newspapers, journalists, and sources is far worse.

Manning, by the way, leaked an enormous unredacted cache of documents pertaining to active, ongoing military operations. This leak very likely resulted in the deaths of anti-Taliban and anti-Islamist informants and cooperators. Not all leaks are good at all times for all people, and some confidentiality rules exist for good reason.

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

#136

Post by [deleted] »

sidmani wrote: post #125
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

[deleted]

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

#137

Post by e12e »

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.

If you were Chinese intelligence you'd surly reqruit a lot of people in us colleges and make sure they got hired into firms working on this stuff.

But, if you're a nation state, I'm sure just throwing money at the open market will work too. I'm sure that for every company that refuse defence contracts, there are a number that will hapilly build a pink fluffy-looking drone with built in facial recognition, 250 grams of explosives and a proximity fuse. Or, just be willing to sell surveillance tech to authorative governments.

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

#138

Post by arcticbull »

prolikewh0a wrote: post #128
chronic821 wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

It seems like what he's suggesting is that selling out can be quite lucrative, and if you can deal with it, there are rewards to be had.

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

#139

Post by arcticbull »

dbcooper wrote: post #106
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!

I think this is the internal slogan at Netflix :)

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

#140

Post by astebbin »

woodandsteel wrote: post #79
nimrod0 wrote: post #4

It should be pointed out that, with or without AI, the cultural impulses are the same. This is an issue of authoritarianism, not of AI. If it should be feared more universally then the fear should be the authoritarian streak within all of us.

You're absolutely correct. Things are just as bad in the US as China, and so we should ignore what is happening in China and instead turn all our attentions inward.

I can’t tell if this comment is sincere or sarcastic. Poe’s Law in full effect:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe's_law

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