Next would be to use/create devices that are using Radio for Communication and payments, devices like Satslink as an example. It drives innovation at the same time, so I wouldn't be too concerned.
AI and Mass Spying
101–110 of 349 posts
Re: AI and Mass Spying
#102This is a political problem, not a technological one. The USSR (alongside Germany and others) managed effective at scale spying with primitive technology: paperwork for everything and every movement, informants, audio surveillance, and so on. The reason such things did not come to places like the US in the same way is not because we were incapable of such, but because there was no political interest in it. And when o…
It's both. Technology really does make a difference. Its existence has effects.
Re: AI and Mass Spying
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
"If it hurts people I hate I accept" - Every endorsement of authoritarian rule ever
Feels pretty legit though. My freedom-from is impacted by other people's freedom-to: by curtailing their freedom, mine is expanded. Sure they won't like it - but I don't like it the other way round either.
This doesn't add up. At best your overall freedom remains the same. You gain quiet, you lose the freedom to make noise yourself. Seems like a net-negative to me.
Consider how little freedom you would have if laws were enforced to the lowest common denominator of what people find acceptable.
Re: AI and Mass Spying
#104I think another aspect of this is mass criminal law enforcement enabled by AI. Many of our criminal laws are written with the implicit assumption that it takes resources to investigate and prosecute a crime, and that this will limit the effective scope of the law. Prosecutorial discretion. Putting aside for the moment the (very serious) injustice that comes with the inequitable use of prosecutorial discretion, let's…
> Is this a better world, If the same monitoring is present on buses and private planes, homeless hostels and mega-mansions then it absolutely is better.
Private property? Nah, nothing better about that.
Re: AI and Mass Spying
#105This is a political problem, not a technological one. The USSR (alongside Germany and others) managed effective at scale spying with primitive technology: paperwork for everything and every movement, informants, audio surveillance, and so on. The reason such things did not come to places like the US in the same way is not because we were incapable of such, but because there was no political interest in it. And when o…
It is not as simple as being a political problem. Many of the policy decisions we think of as being political were actually motivated by the cost/availability of technology. As this cost goes down, new options become practical. We think of the Stasi's capabilities as being remarkable: but in fact, they would probably have been thrilled to trade most of their manual spying tools for something as powerful as a modern geofence warrant, a thing that is routinely used by US law enforcement (with very little policy debate.)
Re: AI and Mass Spying
#106"has", not "will".
Re: AI and Mass Spying
#107A friend of mine was recently a witness for the FBI. He was working in a small office in the middle of nowhere and happened to have a very loud argument with the suspect. A few minutes later he left the building and when he was about to start his car, he got a call from an agent asking him if he wanted to be a witness in the case they were working on.
This stopped to soon. What happened next?
The suspect was allegedly embezzling covid relief money and the argument was about things like "why are we using company time to go to your house and install the new flat screen TV you just bought?"
The moral of the story is that you should never steal money from the U.S. government because that is one thing that they will not tolerate and I do not know the limits of what they will do in order to catch you.
Also the suspect was convicted (so they probably aren't a suspect anymore) and last I heard was being flown to Washington D.C. for sentencing. That person is probably in some kind of prison now but I haven't been following the story very closely.
Re: AI and Mass Spying
#108Re: AI and Mass Spying
#109We actually recently published a research paper on exactly this topic (see https://llm-privacy.org/ for demo and paper). The paper shows that current LLMs already have the reasoning capability to infer personal attributes such as age, gender or location even when this information is not explicitly mentioned in the text. Crucially, they can do this way cheaper and way faster than humans. So I would say that spying scenarios mentioned in this blog post are definitely in the realm of possibility.
Re: AI and Mass Spying
#110Soon in the name of "security" you'll have your face scanned on average every few minutes and it's going to be mandatory in many aspects of our lives. That's the pathetic world IT has helped to build.
Ha. People have been scanning their finger print or face to open their phone for years.