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AI and Mass Spying

schneier.com

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Re: AI and Mass Spying

#181

Post by paganel »

jstarfish wrote: post #171
paganel wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Ha. You'd like to think so, but it's going to be awfully hard to coordinate resistance when the mass spying sweeps everyone up in a keyword-matching dragnet before the execution phase. This is the problem with every outgroup being labelled "terrorists." Sabotage will be the name of the game at that point. Find ways to quietly confuse, poison, overwhelm and undermine the system without attracting the attention of the…

I get your point, I think along those lines quite often myself.

As per the sabotage part, bad input data that does not accurately get labeled as such until way too late in the “AI learning cycle” is I think the way to go. Lots and lots of such bad input data. How we would get to that point, that I don’t know yet, but it’s a valid option going forward.

Re: AI and Mass Spying

#182

Post by pixl97 »

perihelions wrote: post #156
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…

Oh boy, real life Manna

https://marshallbrain.com/manna1

Re: AI and Mass Spying

#183

Post by gentleman11 »

dkjaudyeqooe wrote: post #126

This 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…

How does an adversarial ai help protect anyone's privacy or freedom to act in public in ways that big brother doesn't condone?

Re: AI and Mass Spying

#184

Post by justin66 »

somenameforme wrote: post #58

This 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…

> 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.

That might not be quite right. It might be that the reason such things did not come to the US was because the level of effort was out of line with the amount of political interest in doing it (and funding it). In that case, the existence of more advanced, cheaper surveillance technology and the anemic political opposition to mass surveillance are both problems.

Re: AI and Mass Spying

#185

Post by rambambram »

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.

This TV show immediately captured me and has always been in the back of my mind since. Then, it seemed like a future far far away, but now you remind me of it... I think it's scarily close already.

Around 2013 I came up with some hardware ideas about offline computing and even contemplated to name some versions after the characters in 'Person of Interest'.

I can really recommend this series, since it's a good story, has good actors and fits the zeitgeist very well.

edit: I also think it's time for me to get a malinois shepherd. ;)

Re: AI and Mass Spying

#186

Post by pixl97 »

dorchadas wrote: post #175
kafrofrite wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IIRC, in [1] it mentioned a few examples of AI that exhibited the same bias that is currently present in the judicial system, banks etc. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weapons_of_Math_Destruction

This is honestly what scares me the most. Our biases are built in to AI, but we pretend they're not. People will say "Well, it was the algorithm/AI, so we can't change it". Which is just awful and should scare the shit out of everyone . There was a book [0] written almost fifty years ago that predicted this. I still haven't read it, but really need to. The author claims it made him a pariah among other AI researchers…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computers_Don%27t_Argue while not about AI directly and supposedly satirical really captures how the system works.

Re: AI and Mass Spying

#187

Post by salawat »

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.

Hell, Stargate SG-1 had a few episodes that touched on the absolute hell of a Federal Government that had access to everything, or a computer system with RW access to people's gray matter and it:s own unknown optimization function (shrinking environmental protection dome resulting in live updates of people's consciousness on a societal scale to keep them in the dark as to it's happening ).

Re: AI and Mass Spying

#188

Post by asdff »

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…

AI didn't solve the problem of summarizing complex large datasets. For example a common way to deal with such datasets is to use a random subset of this dataset. This represents a single line of code potentially to perform this operation.

Re: AI and Mass Spying

#189

Post by willmadden »

This could be used to expose government and monied corruption, not just for surveilling peasants.

What is the market for this short term?

I think this could greatly curtail government corruption and serve as a stepping stone to AI government. It's also a cool and disruptive startup idea.

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