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…
> Both were always going to be kind of inevitable as soon as the technology would get there This is my take on everything sci-fi or futuristic. Once a human conceives something, its existence is essentially guaranteed as soon as we figure out how to do it.
Yup. AI is the ultimate “life imitates art” technology. That’s what it is by definition!
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…
Yes, with properly developed AI, rather than penalizing speeding, which most of us do and is also a proxy for harmful outcomes and inefficiencies, we can penalize reckless behaviors such as coming too close to vehicles, aggressive weaving, and other factors that are tightly correlated with the negative outcomes we care to reduce (i.e. loss of life, property damage). So too, the systems could warn people about their behavior and guide them in ways that would positively increase everyone's benefits. Of course this circumstance will probably go away with self-directing cars (which fall into the "do the right thing by default" bucket) but the point is illustrated that the laws can be better formulated to focus on increasing the probabilities of desirable outcomes (i.e. harm reduction, efficiency, effectiveness), be embodied and delivered in the moment (research required on means of doing so that don't exacerbate problems), and carry with them a beneficial component (i.e. understanding).
> 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.
Wonder if some kind of ai-agent thing(s) will become so widely used by people, that government services come to assume you have them? Like happened with mobile phones.
> Never in the history of humanity has such powerful privacy tech existed for anyone who wants to use it. True. > it's trivial today, even for a non-technical 10 year old Not even close. It's difficult even for a technical 30 year old. You're talking about acquiring cash that has passed through several people's hands without touching an ATM that recorded its serial numbers. Using it to acquire Bitcoin from a stranger…
Also stylometric analysis of your writing can be used to identify you.
That’s why I run everything I write through a random open source LLM with random settings and a custom decoder /s
I’m kidding, but the reality is such techniques will fool almost all stylometric analysis,
Also most actual stylinetric analysts work for spooks or are spooks.
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…
> I think if you bring up a dystopian nightmare, it assumes someone in power acting in bad faith. I don't agree with this. I think it's entirely possible for a dystopian nightmare to happen without anyone acting in bad faith at all. "The road to hell is paved with good intentions" is a common phrase for a reason.
It may be a common phrase, but I’ve never seen such a road myself. Mostly bad outcomes are preceded by bad intentions, or lazy ones, or selfish ones.
I’d be interested in a couple of examples, if anyone has good ones, but I’m pretty sure that if we put stuff like 737MAX MCAS, the Texas power grid fiasco, etc the count of badly paved roads would be greater.
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.
> usually more expensive to run AI models
Machine learning inferencing on phones is cheap these days
We can barely get people to care about the implications of types of surveillance that they do understand (CCTV everywhere, Snowden's revelations, etc). It's going to be nigh impossible to get people to care about this enough to make a difference.
Heck, even if they did care, there's nothing they can realistically do about it. The genie's out of the bottle.
Murder and robbery too. Those crimes are just worth investigating.
The problem here is this is not a bureaucratic view of how law enforcement actually works in the field. https://www.kxan.com/news/national-news/traffic-tickets-can-... >We counted the number of days judges waited before suspending a driver’s license. Then, we looked at whether the city was experiencing a revenue shortfall. We found that judges suspend licenses faster when their cities need more money. The effect was…
oh, i definitely wasn't arguing for ai enforcement. Not even a little, i was just saying that laws are written with the assumption that enforcement takes resources.
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,…
Big companies like Google are already doing this without AI. Will AI make the services more tempting? Yes, but there's also a lot of headway in open source AI and search, which could serve to topple people's reliance on big tech.
If everyone had a $500 device at home that served as their own self hosted AI, then Google could cease to exist. That's a future worth working towards.
The average HN user defends the "common guy" or "the masses", perhaps because he fears being perceived as condescending. I've come to the conclusion that the masses don't deserve any of this. Many drink and drive, indulge in destructive addictions (not only to themselves). Many can't bother recycling or even maintaining a clean home environment, waste time and resources in every activity they engage in and don't even care for their neighbors well being (loud music, etc).
Concluding remarks. As man succeeded in creating high mechanical precision from the chaotic natural environment, he will succeed in creating a superior artificial entity. This entity shall "spy" (better described as "care" for) every human being, maximizing our happiness.