AI (or probably more accurately, ML) is an efficiency technology. Surveillance is one thing it can make more efficient, sure.
AI is fundamentally ‘a surveillance technology’
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Re: AI is fundamentally ‘a surveillance technology’
#42The current wave of AI seems more like an investment scam to me. Like crypto currencies and NFTs were.
The interesting difference here is the emotions involved in the marketing and public perception; crypto was largely about hope, NFTs were greed and a quick buck, AI seems to be a mix of embracing the future and fear of the future.
Almost all the software engineers I know are sceptical of this wave of AI at best, or openly dismissive at worst.
The people I know buying into the hope and/or fear are people with no actual hands on experience, or no technical knowledge beyond the 10,000ft view their engineers describe to them.
Generalising, of course, but this has been my observation as the dust settled from the AI boom late last year.
Re: AI is fundamentally ‘a surveillance technology’
#43Does anybody know of a facial recognition AI that actually classifies faces as (non)-liars as she claims? Not sure about this take. You need data at the end of the day, to build good AI models. These days it feels like anyone's public takes are more or less just a means to promote their own cause. And I say this as a happy and long-time Signal user.
Well, the full quote from Whittaker is: > “You know, you walk past a facial recognition camera that’s instrumented with pseudo-scientific emotion recognition, and it produces data about you, right or wrong, that says ‘you are happy, you are sad, you have a bad character, you’re a liar, whatever.’ While I'm not aware of any technology that claims to classify faces as liars the rest of the statement is broadly true. An…
> While I'm not aware of any technology that claims to classify faces as liars the rest of the statement is broadly true. And if you wanted to cross-check a face against a database of known liars, the entire statement is true.
Well, I don't think the "bad character" thing is there either. The problem is with these statements is they are lies that contain some truth. Cameras exist. AI to try and detect basic facial expressions exists. Mapping from basic facial expressions to underlying emotions exists. But I doubt many people are trying this, except as a way to justify a marketing budget (we want to push our smile numbers from 8% to 8.2% - give me $5m for my marketing department). And I have never heard of anything connecting "liar" or "bad character" to AI detection.
> And if you wanted to cross-check a face against a database of known liars, the entire statement is true.
Filling in the gaps with technically true statements should not justify the emotional change in you this sort of article seems to be trying to engender. It's pretty much not true, and the bits that might be true and honest - e.g. emotion detection - doesn't work well, and is probably not deployed anywhere.
As for using facial recognition to replace time cards, and replace photos of banned customers - sure? Might work?
Re: AI is fundamentally ‘a surveillance technology’
#44The current wave of AI seems more like an investment scam to me. Like crypto currencies and NFTs were.
I also agree that it is a bubble, but I feel like it is more of a "dotcom" type of bubble rather than crypto/NFT type of bubble, if it makes any sense.
However, the dangers here are immense. There was https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xoVJKj8lcNQ where they argued for 2028 being an AI election where the person with most computing power wins. Propaganda produced by humans on small scale killed 300 000 people in the US alone in this pandemic https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2022/05/13/1098071... imagine the next pandemic when it'll be produced on an industrial scale by LLMs. Literally millions will die of it.
This bubble must be extinguished by all force US regulators possess. There's not much time left, it must banned with prejudice.
Re: AI is fundamentally ‘a surveillance technology’
#45The current wave of AI seems more like an investment scam to me. Like crypto currencies and NFTs were.
The interesting difference here is the emotions involved in the marketing and public perception; crypto was largely about hope, NFTs were greed and a quick buck, AI seems to be a mix of embracing the future and fear of the future. Almost all the software engineers I know are sceptical of this wave of AI at best, or openly dismissive at worst. The people I know buying into the hope and/or fear are people with no actua…
Same as the dot com boom from my perspective. There is real value to be had, but when everyone gets on the bandwagon the real value is obscured by wild speculation.
I reckon find some boring undervalued AI startup with a reliable revenue stream from the outset then sit on it for a couple of decades.
Re: AI is fundamentally ‘a surveillance technology’
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
It does. All communication technology is surveillance technology.
Not by definition. For example, radio broadcast isn't.
Definitions don't matter. The device I carry in my pocket is "defined" as a "smartphone" despite being a computer that just happens to have an app that simulates an archaic device called a "telephone" installed on it.
It also provides convenient access for law enforcement to monitor all of my social media accounts and communications and metadata and scan my storage for contraband. Preferably with a warrant but of course probably with any number of backdoors installed by design. We all know at this point that warrants don't matter either.
Radio broadcast can certainly be used for surveillance, in that at the very least the location of the broadcast signal can be triangulated and monitored. Which is how law enforcement can also use the "smartphone" in my pocket to track my location in realtime.
Even when it's turned off. Because the definition of the "off" button doesn't matter, either. It isn't an "off button" it's a button that runs an app that simulates "turning the phone off," but might just put it into a low power state or who knows?
Your computer spies on you. The web spies on you. Your appliances spy on you. Your car spies on you. Your lightbulbs spy on you. The locks on your front door spy on you. Unless you're primitive enough not to use modern "smart" technology (which isn't defined as surveillance technology but which always seems to be in the news because it gets used or abused as exactly that.) Everything, everywhere, spies on you all the time. And if it doesn't, wait a few years, someone will find a way to make sure that it does. But none of it will be surveillance "by definition." Convenience, customer obsession, safety, the definitions will be plentiful but none of them will matter.
Re: AI is fundamentally ‘a surveillance technology’
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, the full quote from Whittaker is: > “You know, you walk past a facial recognition camera that’s instrumented with pseudo-scientific emotion recognition, and it produces data about you, right or wrong, that says ‘you are happy, you are sad, you have a bad character, you’re a liar, whatever.’ While I'm not aware of any technology that claims to classify faces as liars the rest of the statement is broadly true. An…
> While I'm not aware of any technology that claims to classify faces as liars the rest of the statement is broadly true. And if you wanted to cross-check a face against a database of known liars, the entire statement is true. Well, I don't think the "bad character" thing is there either. The problem is with these statements is they are lies that contain some truth. Cameras exist. AI to try and detect basic facial ex…
I see the reverse “lie that contains some truth” in your argument. Obviously this stuff will be used for all of these purposes as soon as it’s able, and probably a little bit before then.
Re: AI is fundamentally ‘a surveillance technology’
#48I think people do a disservice to their cause when they make semantic arguments like this.
Isn't enough to say that AI can be used for enhanced surveillance by malicious actors? What does it mean to be a "surveillance technology"? Now you have people arguing about whether AI fits the definition of this made up term instead of talking about the potentially nefarious surveillance applications.
Re: AI is fundamentally ‘a surveillance technology’
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
The interesting difference here is the emotions involved in the marketing and public perception; crypto was largely about hope, NFTs were greed and a quick buck, AI seems to be a mix of embracing the future and fear of the future. Almost all the software engineers I know are sceptical of this wave of AI at best, or openly dismissive at worst. The people I know buying into the hope and/or fear are people with no actua…
Same as the dot com boom from my perspective. There is real value to be had, but when everyone gets on the bandwagon the real value is obscured by wild speculation. I reckon find some boring undervalued AI startup with a reliable revenue stream from the outset then sit on it for a couple of decades.
These are the guys making the actual money. A few mil in VC is fun but will only get you so far; finding a boring, useful niche to sit in and supply a market long-term is so underrated these days.
Re: AI is fundamentally ‘a surveillance technology’
#50AI (or probably more accurately, ML) is an efficiency technology. Surveillance is one thing it can make more efficient, sure.
It's the thing it does make more efficient, which was predictable.
And accuracy doesn't matter. If it's 99% and the powerful are whitelisted for human review, that's enough. That's enough to pull a mesh so fine over every human being on the planet, forever, that reaches deeply into them before they can even begin to form a personality.
The jump from individuals listening to individual phone calls as they were happening to what became possible in the decades after that might be smaller than the jump from that to the capability of transcribing anything anyone utters, even in their sleep, automatically, and adding it to a giant corpus of data to fish for suspects or assets or blackmail recipients in, in seconds. With then being able to act on those people as if they were a dataset (set a few flags, which systems or humans downstream heed without question, done).
It's a very grave threat, and I find it interesting that people decades ago who wrote about it called it that, but now that we're in it, we find it very easy to just shrug it off. But it's the same lethal threat to what it means to be human. Privacy is required for thought, without thought there's no humanity worth mentioning, QED.