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And then the men with guns tell you to do it anyway

shkspr.mobi

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Re: And then the men with guns tell you to do it anyway

#141

Post by alansaber »

raincole wrote: post #78

> Should multinational corporations instruct local executives to be loyal to their parent company or the rulers of the country they live in? If Trump administration/US congress told you to use your AI agent to eavesdrop their political enemies should you be loyal to them? To kill children in middle east? To help them in a war against your mother country? When the rulers of countries and corporations conspire, the amo…

Seems logical that the best way to uphold a moral society is for everyone to take a modicum of responsibility for their own actions

Re: And then the men with guns tell you to do it anyway

#142

Post by alansaber »

mlsu wrote: post #13

Technology is, of course, downstream of society. We have treated government with a startling glibness, a deep unseriousness. At the end of the day, the government can kill you and your entire family, and the only thing that can stop them from doing that are the laws of civil society. It is incredibly serious. Unfortunately, we have been unserious going on several decades. They have realized that the front door is unl…

Politics has always been unserious and based in spectacle.

Re: And then the men with guns tell you to do it anyway

#143

Post by lurk2 »

rayiner wrote: post #117
jameskilton wrote: post #3

A good article, but missing one very important word: trust. Civil society only exists when there is a collective general trust that most people are trying to do the right thing. Said society also finds it incredibly important to remove or nullify those who aren't trustworthy because "a rotten apple spoils the whole bunch ". Trust is hard to earn, and easy to lose, and it only takes one person exploiting the trustwort…

> Civil society only exists when there is a collective general trust that most people are trying to do the right thing The phrase "the right thing" is load-bearing, to steal a Claudeism. The Muslim Brotherhood that ran the country before El-Sisi thought they were doing "the right thing." El-Sisi also thought he was doing "the right thing." Egyptians mostly thought El-Sisi was doing “the right thing” during this time…

> In any society, you're going to have diverse views of "the right thing." To have a functioning civil society, you actually need the opposite of what you're saying. You need a collective general trust that people will follow the rules regardless of what they think is "the right thing." […] The only way we can cooperate is if we agree to neutral rules and procedures, and have a collective general trust that we'll all follow the rules regardless of our view of wrong or right.

This requires that we accept that there is such a thing as a neutral procedure, and even if we accept that such a neutral procedure exists in principle, it doesn’t follow that we agree on what that procedure looks like. Deferring physical conflicts is only possible if factionalism doesn’t win out. The last decade and a half of western political history has been defined by the recognition of certain factions that this deferral can’t go on forever.

Re: And then the men with guns tell you to do it anyway

#144

Post by [deleted] »

jMyles wrote: post #8

> How would you design a system that simultaneously achieved all these goals: There is an obvious solution that achieves all of these, that, on 1000 year timescales, seems inevitable: deprecation of the nation-state. The internet solves every problem the nation-state purports to. For example, the very real problem of coordination, eloquently and convincingly outlined in the federalist papers (tldr: we need a central…

[deleted]

Re: And then the men with guns tell you to do it anyway

#145

Post by alansaber »

logifail wrote: post #18

Last week I had boarded a flight at LHR and the crew were just starting their safety briefing when everyone's phones went off with that wildfires 'emergency' alert message. I was unimpressed with the message, along with the (non-UK) crew.

My completely unsubstantiated impression is that it was the govt putting out a feeler on whether it should use the alert system more frequently (and afaik it was relatively unpopular)

Re: And then the men with guns tell you to do it anyway

#146

Post by aidenn0 »

> it’s bad civic hygiene to build technologies that could someday be used to facilitate a police state.

So: microphones, tape recorders, radios, television, and even the printing press are all bad civic hygiene? They have all been used to facilitate police states...

Re: And then the men with guns tell you to do it anyway

#147

Post by fragmede »

protocolture wrote: post #136
djoldman wrote: post #15

> How would you design a system that simultaneously achieved all these goals: > Rapid sending of messages > Careful checking of the content of messages > Ability to quickly target a specific geographic area > Inability to mistakenly send a test message > Requiring strong proof that the message is authentic before sending > Resilient enough to work after significant damage to infrastructure > That networks have the ab…

> Requiring strong proof that the message is authentic before sending "Before Sending" is the lynchpin here. The receiver needs to be performing verification, and have the ability to blacklist sources. Which requires distributed infra.

Some sort of chain... of blocks, that would require distributed consensus before the message would go out? Hmm...

Re: And then the men with guns tell you to do it anyway

#148

Post by ruifjfj274 »

It’s time like these that I wish technologists didn’t devalue social scientists so much as to effectively alienate them from forums like this.

Comments on these subjects are far less enlightening than when I want to know how to operate the latest LLM.

Tech has gone some distance from when jobs put the early Apple teams together and stated that he thought everyone would be exceptional in their field without computers, it just so happens that computers help them achieve results in their field.

It feels like computers became a field so vast, powerful, that it can sustain itself economically whilst alienating the very people that connect it to societies and the issues faced by them

That is to say, I wish we had expert sociologists on this forum who can add value just as we have people who can with their slice of technology

Re: And then the men with guns tell you to do it anyway

#150

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

decimalenough wrote: post #118

> But it is easy to see why some people feel this might open the gateway to messages which, at best, are irrelevant If you're in South Korea, you can expect to get around half a dozen emergency notifications every day . Typical contents include "it's cold, so dress warmly", "roads are icy, so drive carefully", and "Mrs Kim, 79, suffers from dementia and was last seen in Seoul wearing a black coat". You can set your p…

> You can set your phone to filter these out, but then you'll also miss the notification about North Korea commencing artillery bombardment.

Do you know why there aren't more granular controls? On my phone in the US the toggleable alert options are:

Extreme Threats

Severe Threats

AMBER alerts (child abduction alerts)

Public Safety Messages

State and Local Tests

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