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…
AI and Mass Spying
161–170 of 349 posts
Re: AI and Mass Spying
#162Time to decentralize everything. I think we are already in the early stages of this new trend. We can run AI locally and hard drives are so large we can have a local copy of an entire library, with millions of ebooks, in our own home now. That is in addition to generating our own energy off grid (so no smart meter data to monitor), thanks to the low cost of solar panels as well. Bye bye Big Brother.
Terence Eden is in the UK: https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2013/02/solar-update/
This says his house uses 13kWh/day and you can see from the graph by dividing the monthly amount by 31 days that the solar panels on the roof generate around 29/day during summer and 2.25/day in winter. They would need five or six rooves of solar panels to generate enough to be off-grid. And that's not practical or low cost.
Re: AI and Mass Spying
#163Earlier quoted context omitted.
> ...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 ar…
This is no different from "So-and-so joined the group, but is secretly an FBI informer!" sort of problems, in practice. It's fairly low on my list of things to be concerned about, but as offline groups grow and are then, of course, talked about by a compliant media as "Your neighbor's firepit nights could be plotting terrorist activities because they don't have cell phones!" when prompted, it's a thing to be aware of.
Though you don't need a strip search. A decent NLJD (non-linear junction detector) or thermal imager should do it if you cared.
I'm more interested in creating (re-creating?) the norms where, when you're in a group of people interacting in person, cell phones are off, out of earshot. It's possibly a bit more paranoid than needed, but the path of consumer tech is certainly in that direction, and even non-technical people are creeped out by things like "I talked to a friend about this, and now I'm seeing ads for it..." - it may be just noticing it since you talked about it recently (buy a green car, suddenly everyone drives green cars), or you may be predictable in ways that the advertising companies have figured out, but it's not a hard sell to get quite a few people to believe that their phones are listening. And, hell, I sure can't prove they aren't listening.
> Do you have smart TVs up on the walls at this place...
I mean, I don't. But, yes, those are a concern too.
And, yes. Literally everything can be listening. It's quite a concern, and I think the only sane solution, at this point, is to reject just about all of that more and more. Desktop computers without microphones, cell phones that can be powered off, and flat out turning off wireless on a regular basis (the papers on "identifying where and what everyone is doing in a house by their impacts on a wifi signal" remain disturbing reads).
I really don't have any answers. The past 30 years of tech have led to a place I do not like, and I am not at all comfortable with. But it's now the default way that a lot of our society interacts, and it's going to be a hard sell to change that. I just do what I can within my bounds, and I've noticed that while I don't feel my position has changed substantially in the past decade or so (if anything, I've gotten further out of the center and over to the slightly paranoid edge of the bell curve), it's a lot more crowded where I stand, and there are certain issues where I'm rather surprisingly in the center of the bell curve as of late.
Re: AI and Mass Spying
#164Earlier quoted context omitted.
> " Heck, jaywalking tickets given out as though by speed camera. " This has been a thing since 2017: https://futurism.com/facial-recognition-china-social-credit - "Since April 2017, this city in China's Guangdong province has deployed a rather intense technique to deter jaywalking. Anyone who crosses against the light will find their face, name, and part of their government ID number displayed on a large LED screen…
There are lots of false positives too, like this case where a woman who’s face appeared in a printed advertisement on the side of a bus was flagged for jaywalking. https://www.engadget.com/2018-11-22-chinese-facial-recogniti...
Top Left Panel: This panel shows the pedestrian crossing with no visible jaywalking. The crossing stripes are clear, and there are no pedestrians on them.
Top Center Panel: Similar to the top left, it shows the crossing, and there is no evidence of jaywalking.
Top Right Panel: This panel is mostly obscured by an overlaid image of a person's face, making it impossible to determine if there is any jaywalking.
Bottom Left Panel: It is difficult to discern specific details because of the low resolution and the angle of the shot. The red text overlays may be covering some parts of the scene, but from what is visible, there do not appear to be any individuals on the crossing.
Bottom Right Panel: This panel contains text and does not provide a clear view of the pedestrian crossing or any individuals that might be jaywalking.
Re: AI and Mass Spying
#165"Bitcoin will enable terrorism" "Ghost guns will enable criminals to commit murder" "Social media will enable hate speech" AI will be a useful and world changing innovation which is why FUD rag articles like this will become more prevalent until it's total adoption, even by the article writer themselves
Re: AI and Mass Spying
#166I 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…
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Consistent enforcement with much lower, escalating fines would do a lot more to actually change behaviour. And the only way to get there at scale is via a lot of automation.
Re: AI and Mass Spying
#167Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's just your phone.
>> That's just your phone. That is how most people will interface with their "personal assistant bot". Don't be surprised if it listens to all your phone conversations, reads all your text messages and email, and curates all your contacts in order to "better help you". When you login to your $LARGE_CORPORATION account on your laptop or desktop computer, the same bot(s) will be there to "help" and collect data in a si…
Re: AI and Mass Spying
#168This is why AI software must not be restricted, so that ordinary people and the civic minded can develop personal and public AI systems to counter corporate AI. The future of AI is adversarial. Now freedom to develop AI software doesn't mean freedom to use it however you please and its use should be regulated, in particular to protect individuals from things like this. But of course people cannot be trusted, so you n…
Re: AI and Mass Spying
#169Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yea this is a good point. If justice is executed by systems, rather than people (the end result from this scenario), we have lost the ability to challenge the process or the people involved in so many ways. It will make challenging how the law is executed almost impossible because there will be no person there to hold responsible.
I think that’s a good reason to question whether this would be due process. Why do we have due process? One key reason is that it gives people the opportunity to be heard. One could argue that being heard by an AI is no different from being heard by a human, just more efficient. But why do people want the opportunity to be heard? It’s partly the obvious, to have a chance to defend oneself against unjust exercises of…
This is a hypothesis.
I would say that the consumers of now-unsexed "AI" sex-chat-bots (Replika) felt differently. So there are actually people who feel heard talking to an AI. Who knows, if it gets good enough maybe more of us would feel that way.
Re: AI and Mass Spying
#170What's the best docker image for that, simple in configuration?