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AI is fundamentally ‘a surveillance technology’

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Re: AI is fundamentally ‘a surveillance technology’

#111

Out of topic question. Would it be possible to combine machine learning with something like 23andMe and match 100 000 person photos with their DNA. Would we have an AI model which basically can tell how the persons looks like from a strand of hair? Imagine finding some DNA on a crime scene. Witnesses can say that this person was a bit overweight so you slide some slider to the right a bit and get a pretty good AI gen…

And oh so biased

Re: AI is fundamentally ‘a surveillance technology’

#112

Out of topic question. Would it be possible to combine machine learning with something like 23andMe and match 100 000 person photos with their DNA. Would we have an AI model which basically can tell how the persons looks like from a strand of hair? Imagine finding some DNA on a crime scene. Witnesses can say that this person was a bit overweight so you slide some slider to the right a bit and get a pretty good AI gen…

I think it's fundamentally possible but the training set needed might be so large that you're better off just actually cataloging the DNA of most humans and pulling up the picture of the closest match.

Re: AI is fundamentally ‘a surveillance technology’

#113
post #67

No shit. As already said years ago. [0] Closed source software is surveillance technology. Internet of Things is surveillance technology. Blockchain / crypto is surveillance technology. Virtual Reality is surveillance technology. AI is surveillance technology. Very disappointed that it took you guys this long to realize that, but it is too late to stop all of it entirely. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3161…

I'm not saying it's contradictory to say closed source is surveillance tech and open source is surveillance tech, but it's certainly unintuitive.

For my part, it feels like some tech is designed for specific use cases (eg pinboard, kagi). If you trust those developers they don't need to open source their work.

If you look at it from a systems perspective, ad tech benefits from scale and data, so when a product is built "for everyone" and monetized with ads.... Yeah it's going to be surveillance tech

Re: AI is fundamentally ‘a surveillance technology’

#114

Out of topic question. Would it be possible to combine machine learning with something like 23andMe and match 100 000 person photos with their DNA. Would we have an AI model which basically can tell how the persons looks like from a strand of hair? Imagine finding some DNA on a crime scene. Witnesses can say that this person was a bit overweight so you slide some slider to the right a bit and get a pretty good AI gen…

There are already features you can extract from DNA. 23andMe shows you your traits and confidence level depending on the research.

But you know just bring it to the real thing: With DNA, Video and ML you will be able to track and find that person through face recognition and probability automatically.

Hail skynet

Re: AI is fundamentally ‘a surveillance technology’

#115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As soon as it’s able to detect lying, it’ll be used for that purpose. Probably a little bit before it’s actually capable of doing it reliably.

> As soon as it’s able to detect lying, it’ll be used for that purpose. That's not the thing I was talking about. > Probably a little bit before it’s actually capable of doing it reliably. I think you said that already?

Okay sure let’s take your “bad character” version: of course this is being done. Someone already linked to a commercially available version of it for shoplifters. Of course this type of technology was used to identify protestors in Hong Kong. It was probably also used to identify Jan 6’ers.

And in fact you yourself already hedged that this probably is happening, “ But I doubt many people are trying this, except as a way to justify a marketing budget.” Aka you believe that at least some people are already attempting this.

Re: AI is fundamentally ‘a surveillance technology’

#116

Earlier 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 Hadn't there been similar systems for phone conversations, based on voice stress analysis? I totally expect this to move to AI based systems, including audio and visual data, if it hasn't been done already. (Also, if a person has been tagged as "liar" – truthfully or not – in any customer history file, this data will be available, as soon…

I always assumed that tech didn't work, and was designed to act as a deterrent, and/or to let businesses like insurers give claimants a hard time and thus boost their profit margins.

Re: AI is fundamentally ‘a surveillance technology’

#117
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Authorities penalized families over a mere suspicion of fraud based on the system’s risk indicators" Don't do that part, nothing to do with AI, it's about humans being lazy

And AI enables it to greater ex extents then ever before.

So do computers, still the humans to blame

Re: AI is fundamentally ‘a surveillance technology’

#118
This has no more validity than "the internet is fundamentally a surveillance technology." It's a conflation of a tool's sometimes harmful usage with an inseparable aspect of its nature.

And the idea that AI "requires the surveillance business model" is demonstrably false. Thousands of researchers over the last 7 decades have contributed to the development of the collection of technologies we call AI without that business model.

However this is Meredith Whittaker so we can assume she knows that. So yeah, those are provocative statements made for rhetorical effect to emphasize that power will use technology to do bad things and enshrine and enhance its power.

Re: AI is fundamentally ‘a surveillance technology’

#119
What is it, in general, that makes people feel so motivated to defend AI? Every commenter can't be the CEO of some AI adjacent company.. Beyond that, why care so much? You can still use it even if its imperfect, you can even still use it while recognizing the fraught society it is being introduced into and the consequences of that introduction. And even in that recognition, we can be excited for what this stuff might actually be useful for.

But the discourse in general seems to always resolve into something indistinguishable from kids arguing that the PS3 is superior to the xbox.

Isn't the "hacker" spirit one which itches to utilize and exploit? To be empowered and to be quick to kill your darlings? Why are we so quick to subordinate ourselves here? To appeal to ambiguous authorities? Is it all just some tacit futurism the AI fanboys have fallen in line with? Where has the confidence, the spirit, the sense of breezy mastery gone? There has got to still be interesting people around, those that are too cool for BigCompany Product.

Re: AI is fundamentally ‘a surveillance technology’

#120

Out of topic question. Would it be possible to combine machine learning with something like 23andMe and match 100 000 person photos with their DNA. Would we have an AI model which basically can tell how the persons looks like from a strand of hair? Imagine finding some DNA on a crime scene. Witnesses can say that this person was a bit overweight so you slide some slider to the right a bit and get a pretty good AI gen…

>Recent advances in Forensic DNA Phenotyping of appearance, ancestry and age [July 2023]

https://www.fsigenetics.com/article/S1872-4973(23)00045-5/fu...

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>DNA Facial Mapping

https://www.policechiefmagazine.org/dna-facial-mapping/

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>How Australian police will use DNA sequencing to predict what suspects look like [2021]

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2021/dec/08/how-a...

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>The Role of Hair in DNA Testing

https://www.hairphysician.com/the-role-of-hair-in-dna/

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