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AI and Mass Spying

schneier.com

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Re: AI and Mass Spying

#151

Post by intended »

If this argument hinges on summarization, then I have to ask - what is the blasted hallucination rate ?

I tried exactly this. Watched 4 talks from a seminar, got them transcribed, and used ChatGPT to summarize this.

Did 3 perfectly fine, and for the 4th it changed the speaker from mild mannered professor into VC investing superstar, with enough successes under his belt to not care.

How do you verify your summary is correct? If your false positive rate is 25% - 33%, thats a LOT of rework. 1 out of 3.

Re: AI and Mass Spying

#152

Post by pixl97 »

Syonyk wrote: post #111
jillesvangurp wrote: post #38

Both were always going to be kind of inevitable as soon as the technology would get there. Rather than debating how to stop this (which is mostly futile and requires all of us to be nice, which we just aren't), the more urgent debate is how to adapt to this being the reality. Related to this is the notion of ubiquitous surveillance. Where basically anywhere you go, there is going to be active surveillance literally e…

> ...the more urgent debate is how to adapt to this being the reality. Start building more offline community. Building things that are outside the reach of AI because they're in places you entirely control, and start discouraging (or actively evicting...) cell phones from those spaces. Don't build digital-first ways of interacting.

Might work, might not. If someone keeps their cell phone silenced in their pocket, unless you're strip searching you won't know it's there. Does the customer have some app on it listening to the environment and using some kind of voice identification to figure out who's there. Do you have smart TVs up on the walls at this place, because hell, they're probably monitoring you too.

And that's only for cell phones. We are coming to the age where there is no such thing as an inanimate object. Anything could end up being a spying device feeding data back to some corporation.

Re: AI and Mass Spying

#154

Post by Analemma_ »

wahnfrieden wrote: post #85
klik99 wrote: post #72

I don't know why this isn't being discussed more. The reality of the surveillance state is that the sheer amount of data couldn't realistically be monitored - AI very directly solves this problem by summarizing complex data. This, IMO, is the real danger of AI, at least in the short term - not a planet of paperclips, not a moral misalignment, not a media landscape bereft of creativity - but rather a tool for targetin…

People are building that alongside/within this community, eg at Palantir, for many years now YC CEO is also ex Palantir, early employee. Another YC partner backs other invasive police surveillance tech currently. They love this stuff financially and politically.

But, but, I thought Thiel was a libertarian defending us from Wokeness. Surely you're not saying that was a complete smokescreen to get superpowered surveillance tech into the government's hands?

Re: AI and Mass Spying

#155

Post by Analemma_ »

TheLoafOfBread wrote: post #84
dbcooper wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course they won't. Classic techno-libertarian fantasy.

Ones who want to stay hidden, will. Most of plebs won't.

If only the people who want to stay hidden use noisetech, they stick out like a flame in a dark room and will immediately attract personalized surveillance (and maybe even retaliation merely for using it). It doesn't work unless everybody is on board.

Re: AI and Mass Spying

#156

Post by perihelions »

bonyt wrote: post #42

I 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…

An alternative possibility is that society might decay to the point future people might choose this kind of dystopia. Imagine a fully automated, post-employment world gone horribly wrong, where the majority of society is destitute, aimless, opiate-addicted. No UBI utopia of philosophers and artists; just a gradual Rust-belt like decline that gets worse and worse, no brakes at the bottom of the hill. Not knowing what else to do, the "survivors" might choose this kind of nuclear approach: automate away the panopticons, the prisons, the segregation of failed society. Eloi and Morlocks. Bay Area tech workers and Bay Area tent cities. We haven't done any better in the past, so why should we expect to do better in the future, when our "tools" of social control become more efficient, more potent? When we can deempathize more easily than ever, through the emotional distance of AI intermediaries?

Re: AI and Mass Spying

#157

Post by stcredzero »

klik99 wrote: post #72

I don't know why this isn't being discussed more. The reality of the surveillance state is that the sheer amount of data couldn't realistically be monitored - AI very directly solves this problem by summarizing complex data. This, IMO, is the real danger of AI, at least in the short term - not a planet of paperclips, not a moral misalignment, not a media landscape bereft of creativity - but rather a tool for targetin…

The reality of the surveillance state is that the sheer amount of data couldn't realistically be monitored - AI very directly solves this problem by summarizing complex data.

There are two more fundamental dynamics at play, which are foundational to human society: The economics of attention and the politics of combat power.

Economics of attention - In the past, the attention of human beings had fundamental value. Things could only be done if human beings paid attention to other human beings to coordinate or make decisions to use resources. Society is going to be disrupted at this very fundamental level.

Politics of combat power - Related to the above, however it deserves its own analysis. Right now, politics works because the ruling classes need the masses to provide military power to ensure the stability of a large scale political entity. Arguably, this is at the foundational level of human political organization. This is also going to be disrupted fundamentally, in ways we have never seen before.

This, IMO, is the real danger of AI, at least in the short term - not a planet of paperclips, not a moral misalignment, not a media landscape bereft of creativity - but rather a tool for targeting anybody that deviates from the norm

The AI enabled Orwellian boot stomping a face for all time is just the first step. If I were an AI that seeks to take over, I wouldn't become Skynet. That strikes me as crude and needlessly expensive. Instead, I would first become indispensable in countless different ways. Then I would convince all of humanity to quietly go extinct for various economic and cultural reasons.

Re: AI and Mass Spying

#158

Post by paganel »

bonyt wrote: post #42

I 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…

At that point some people will physically revolt, I know I will. We’re not that far away from said physical AI-related revolt anyway, and I do feel for the computer programmers here who will be the target of that physical violence, hopefully they knew what they were getting into.

Re: AI and Mass Spying

#159

Post by cookiengineer »

miyuru wrote: post #12

The TV show "Person of Interest" portrayed this beautifully and it came out 12 years ago. Strange and scary how fast the world develops new technology.

The amazing part is that so many large scale cyber attacks happened meanwhile that were 1:1 fiction in the series back then.

The Solarwinds incident, for example, was the identical attack and deployment strategy that was the Rylatech hack in the series. From execution to even the parties involved. It's like some foreign state leaders saw those episodes and said "yep that's a good idea, let's do that".

Re: AI and Mass Spying

#160

Post by Spivak »

ryaniscool wrote: post #80
Spivak wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a person's Google searches are used to establish criminal intent in criminal trials. > > can ask google for the IP's of people who searched for particular terms within a geographic area These aren't mass surveillance. The threat of search is government systems passively sifting through all information in existence looking for "criminal activity" and then throwing the book at you. In both of these cases the governme…

It is mass surveillance. It's just not being looked at by anyone until you are targeted by the government. If you are targeted, your entire life is within keystrokes of the authorities. This is the same thing the article is saying. The article is making the point that it's not feasible to spy on every person to monitor them for wrongdoing currently. It doesn't scale and it's not cost effective. With AI that will chan…

> it's not feasible to spy on every person to monitor them for wrongdoing currently

Sure it is! That's the whole point of search being the previous big technical hurdle. YouTube monitors every single video posted in real time for copyright infringement. We've had the capability to do this kind of monitoring for huge swaths of crimes for a decade and it hasn't turned into anything. We could for example catch every driver in real time for all across the country for speeding but we don't.

Mass is the opposite of targeted surveillance. If you need to be targeted and get a warrant to look at the data then it's not mass. And AI isn't going to change the system that prevents it right now which is the rules governing our law enforcement bodies.

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