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AI and Mass Spying

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Re: AI and Mass Spying

#241

Post by asdff »

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.

Good luck building things with out leaving an ai reachable paper trail. You'd have to grow your own trees, mine your own iron and coal, refine your own plastic from your own oil field.

Re: AI and Mass Spying

#242

Post by doktrin »

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…

> But reality is, even if they put all their private data on a website, heresallmyprivatedata.com, nobody cares. It'll have 0 external views.

This is obviously false. Personal data is a multi billion dollar industry operating across all shades of legality.

Re: AI and Mass Spying

#243

Post by chagen »

asdff wrote: post #227
empath-nirvana wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But you don't need to do a random subset with AI. You can summarize everything, and summarize the summaries and so on. I will say that at least gpt4 and gpt3, after many rounds of summaries, tends to flatten everything out into useless "blah". I tried this with summarizing school board meetings and it's just really bad at picking out important information -- it just lacks the specific context required to make summari…

Thats the exact issue with gpt. You don't know how its making the summary. It could very well be wrong in parts. It could be oversummarized to a bla bla state like you say. There's no telling whether you have outputted garbage or not, at least not without secondary forms of evidence that you might as well use anyway and drop the unreliable language model. You can summarize everything with traditional statistical meth…

What LLMs can do efficiently is crawl through and identify the secondary forms of evidence you mentioned. The real power behind retrieval architectures with LLMs is not the summarization part- the power comes from automating the retrieval of relevant documents from arbitrarily large corpuses which weren't included in the training set.

Re: AI and Mass Spying

#244

Post by matthewdgreen »

asdff wrote: post #220
matthewdgreen wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 g…

While this is true, I don't think we are there yet with AI since its usually more expensive to run AI models than it is to perform more traditional statistical modelling.

A text recognition and face/object recognition model runs on my iPhone every night. A small LLM is used for autocorrect. Current high-end smartphones have more than enough RAM and compute to run pretty sophiscated 7B-param quantized LLMs. This level of capability will find its way down to even entry-level Walmart phones in about five years. Server side, things are going to be even cheaper.

Re: AI and Mass Spying

#245

Post by dfxm12 »

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…

I think if you bring up a dystopian nightmare, it assumes someone in power acting in bad faith. If their power is great enough, like maybe a government intelligence agency, it doesn't need things like due process, etc., to do what it wants to do. For example, Joe McCarthy & J. Edgar Hoover didn't need the evidence that could have been produced by AI-aided mass surveillance to justify getting people people who opposed his political agenda blackballed from Hollywood, jailed, fired from their jobs, etc.

If everyone involved is acting in good faith, at least ostensibly, there are checks and balances, like due process. It's a fine line and doesn't justify the existence of mass spying, but I think it is an important distinction in this discussion & I think is a valuable lesson for us. We have to push back when the FBI pushes forward. I don't have much faith after what happened to Snowden and the reaction to his whistleblowing though.

Re: AI and Mass Spying

#246

Post by JakeAl »

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…

I would say instead it's a PEOPLE problem, not a technology problem.

To quote Neil Postman, politics are downstream from technology, because the technology (medium) controls the message. Just look at BigTech interfering with the messages by labeling them "disinfo." If one wants to say BUSINESS POLITICS, then that's probably more accurate, but we haven't solved the Google, MS, DuckDuckGo, Meta interfering with search results problem so I don't think we can trust BigTech to not exploit users even more for their personal data, or trust them not to design AI so it inherently abuses it's power for BigTech's own ends, and they hold all the cards and have been guiding things in the interest of technocracy.

Re: AI and Mass Spying

#248

Post by mullingitover »

dfxm12 wrote: post #225
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…

Make it a crime for a business to have the wrong opinion when it comes to who they want to serve FWIW, businesses who refuse to do business with people generally win their legal cases [0], [1], [2], and I'm not sure if they are ever criminal... 0 - https://www.npr.org/2023/06/30/1182121291/colorado-supreme-c... 1 - https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/04/us/politics/supreme-court... 2 - https://www.dailysignal.com/2023/11…

These are selection bias, businesses who "refuse to do business with people" and then suffer the legal ramifications of their discrimination usually have lawyers who wisely tell them not to fight it in court because they'll rightfully lose. In these particular cases, it took a couple decades of court-packing to install the right reactionaries to get their token wins.

Re: AI and Mass Spying

#249

Post by wahnfrieden »

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.

By "politically" I meant that they are openly engaged in politics, in coordination, in support of the installation and legalized use of these kinds of surveillance/enforcement technologies and the policies that support their growth in private sector. This is just obvious and surface level open stuff I'm saying but I'm not sure how aware people are of the various interests involved.

Re: AI and Mass Spying

#250

Post by erikerikson »

Author: welcoming to knowing. This is unavoidable. Outside of extreme measures that will themselves mark, the network effects of use will overwhelm any effort to evade.

The question I think is how too navigate and what consequences will follow. We could use these capabilities to enslave but we could also use them to free and empower.

Scams rely on scale and the ineffective scaling social mechanisms to achieve profit. Imagine if the first identification of a scam informed every potential mark to which the scam began to be applied. Don't forget to concern yourself with false positives too, of course.

The injustice of being unable to take action in disputes due to a lack of evidence would evaporate. Massive privacy, consent, and security risks and issues result so will we be ready to properly protect and honor people and their freedoms?

At the end of this path may lay more efficient markets; increased capital flows and volumes; and a more fair, just, equitable, and maximized world more filled with joy, love, and happiness. There are other worse options of course.

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