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AI and Mass Spying

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Re: AI and Mass Spying

#231

Post by aidenn0 »

petsfed wrote: post #222
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…

You and I are in agreement that the surveillance needs to stop, but I think we differ on how to explain the problem. My explanation follows, but note that its not directed at you. At its peak, the KGB employed ~500,000 people directly, with untold more employed as informants. The FBI currently employs ~35,000 people. What if I told you that the FBI could reach the KGB's peak level of reach, without meaningfully incre…

Cost is one factor, but so is visibility. If we replaced humans following people around with cheap human-sized robots following people around, it would still be noticeable if everybody had a robot following them around.

Instead we track people passively, often with privately owned personal devices (cell phones, ring doorbells) so the tracking ability has become pervasive without any of the overt signs of a police state.

Re: AI and Mass Spying

#232

Post by thesuperbigfrog »

tech_ken wrote: post #132
thesuperbigfrog wrote: post #27

The new Google, Meta, Microsoft, etc. bots won't just crawl the web or social networks--they will crawl specific topics and people. Lots of cultures have the concept of a "guardian angel" or "ancestral spirits" that watch over the lives of their descendants. In the not-so-distant technofedualist future you'll have a "personal assistant bot" provided by a large corporation that will "help" you by answering questions,…

Poetic as this is, I always feel like if we can imagine it then it won't happen. The only constant is surprise, we can only predict these types of developments accidentally

It's starting to happen now.

Here is one example: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-copilot

"AI for everything you do"

"Work smarter, be more productive, boost creativity, and stay connected to the people and things in your life with Copilot—an AI companion that works everywhere you do and intelligently adapts to your needs."

If Microsoft builds them, then Google, Apple, and Samsung will too. How else will they stay competitive and relevant?

Re: AI and Mass Spying

#233

Post by potsandpans »

127361 wrote: post #41
_Nat_ wrote: post #37

Seems inevitable enough that we may have to accept it and try to work within the context of (what we'd tend to think of today as) mass-spying. I mean, even if we pass laws to offer more protections, as computation gets cheaper, it ought to become easier-and-easier for anyone to start a mass-spying operation -- even by just buying a bunch of cheap sensors and doing all of the work on their personal-computer. A decent…

Living off-grid is how I'm dealing with the whole situation nowadays.

How's it working out for you? I have similar plans and have most of the big pieces budgeted / ideated. But realistically I'm still 1 to 2 years out.

Re: AI and Mass Spying

#234

Post by anigbrowl »

AlexandrB wrote: post #103
pmg102 wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I can go into the countryside and make noise all day. I don't see that there's a pre-existing freedom to inflict loud noises on my neighbors for no useful purpose.

Re: AI and Mass Spying

#235

Post by ben_w »

barrysteve wrote: post #216
ben_w wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That would resolve the spying cost, but not the punishment cost. My go-to example here is heroin: class A drug in the UK, 7 years for possession and life for supply, so far as I can see nobody has anything good to say about it, and it has around three times as many users in the UK as the entire UK prison population. Could implement punishment for that specific crime, at huge cost, but you can't expand that to all cri…

A computer owned society doesn't really need jails. You can deny 90% of services to a criminal and track and limit their movement digitally. We are already in the jail.

I think prisoners are usually denied voting rights? Might be wrong about that.

Certainly don't get many travel opportunities.

Re: AI and Mass Spying

#236

Post by petsfed »

zooq_ai wrote: post #221
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…

Why nobody worries? Because this is an elite person problem. At the end of the day, all those surveillance still has to be consumed by a person and only around 10,000 people in this world (celebs, hot women, politicians and wealthy) will be surveilled. For most of HN crowd (upper middle-class, suburban family) who have zero problems in their life must create imaginary problems of privacy / surveillance like this. But…

Its not an elite person problem.

Certainly, some of the more exotic and flashy things you can do with surveillance are an elite person problem.

But the two main limits to police power are that it takes time and resources to establish that a crime occurred, and it takes time and resources to determine who committed a crime. A distant third is the officer/DA's personal discretion as to whether or not to purse enforcement of said person. You still get a HUGE amount of systemic abuse because of that discretion. Imagine how bad things would get if our already over-militarized police could look at anyone and know immediately what petty crimes that person has committed, perhaps without thinking. Did a bug fly in your mouth yesterday, and you spit it out on the sidewalk in view of a camera? Better be extra obsequious when Officer No-Neck with "You're fucked" written on his service weapon pulls up to the gas station you're pumping at. If you don't show whatever deference he deems adequate, he's got a list of petty crimes he can issue a citation for, entirely at his discretion. But you'd better do it, once he decides to pursue that citation, you're at the mercy of the state's monopoly on violence, and it'll take you surviving to your day in court to decide if needs qualified immunity for the actions he took whilst issuing that citation.

That is a regular person problem.

Re: AI and Mass Spying

#237

Post by asdff »

lurker_jMckQT99 wrote: post #214
JohnFen wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In the not-so-distant technofedualist future you'll have [...] I guarantee that I won't. That, at least, is a nightmare that I can choose to avoid. I don't think I can avoid the other dystopian things AI is promising to bring, but I can at least avoid that one.

I guarantee that you will. That is a nightmare that you can not choose to avoid unless you are willing to sacrifice your social life. Remember how raising awareness about smartphones, always on microphones, closed source communication services/apps worked? I do not. I run an Android (Google free) smartphone with a custom ROM, only use free software apps on it. How does it help when I am surrounded by people using the…

Think about it in terms of what is rational. If there were serious costs to having your data leaked out like this people would rationally have a bit more trepidation. On the other hand, we are in the era where everyone by now has probably been pwned a half dozen times or more, to no effect usually on your real life. You might get disgusted that instagram watches what you watch to serve you more of that stuff and keep you on longer, other people love that sort of content optimization, I literally hear them gloat how their social media content feeds at this point have been so perfectly honed to show them whatever hobbies or sports they are interested in. Take a picture and it pushes to 5 services and people love that. Having an app already pull your contacts for you and match them up to existing users is great in the eyes of most people.

You are right that on the one hand these things could be used for really bad purposes, but they are pretty benign. Now if you start going "well social media posts can influence elections," sure, but so can TV, newspapers, the radio, a banner hauled by a prop plane, whatever, not like anythings changed. If anything its a safer environment for combating a slip to fascism now vs in the mid century when there were like three channels on TV and a handful of radio programs carefully regulated by the FCC and that's all the free flow of info you have short of smuggling the printed word like its the 1400s.

Given all of this, I can't really blame people for accepting the game they didn't create for how it is and gleaming convenience from it. Take smartphones out of the equation, take the internet out, take out computers, and our present dystopia is still functionally the same.

Re: AI and Mass Spying

#238

Post by mym1990 »

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…

A difference in today's world is that private companies are amassing data that then gets turned around to the highest bidder. The government may not have had an interest in collecting the data before but now the friction to obtaining it and the insights is basically just money, which is plenty available.

Your opinion on bannable offenses is pretty bewildering. There was a point in time when people thought it would be crazy to outlaw slavery, from your post I might think that you would not be in support of what eventually happened to that practice.

Re: AI and Mass Spying

#239

Post by tech_ken »

thesuperbigfrog wrote: post #232
tech_ken wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Poetic as this is, I always feel like if we can imagine it then it won't happen. The only constant is surprise, we can only predict these types of developments accidentally

It's starting to happen now. Here is one example: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-copilot "AI for everything you do" "Work smarter, be more productive, boost creativity, and stay connected to the people and things in your life with Copilot—an AI companion that works everywhere you do and intelligently adapts to your needs." If Microsoft builds them, then Google, Apple, and Samsung will too. How else will th…

I mean by this definition I’d say it happened when they introduced Siri or Hey Google. The creation of these tools and their massive/universal adoption a la web-crawlers is still a large gap though. Getting to point where you consider them as a dark “guardian angel” or “ancestral spirit” goes even a step farther I think

Re: AI and Mass Spying

#240

Post by ghufran_syed »

dbcooper wrote: post #81
TheLoafOfBread wrote: post #78

Then people will start using AI to generate random traffic noise to fool AI watching them.

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

Starting with the "classic" techno-libertarian slaves who each claimed "I am spartacus"
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