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Anthropic Is Building a Predictive Surveillance System to Monitor Activists
41–50 of 152 posts
Re: Anthropic Is Building a Predictive Surveillance System to Monitor Activists
#42Remember guys: Anthropic are the good guys! They care about morals, alignment, and safety! So this invasive surveillance to crush dissent must be good for us! AI is an authoritarian's dream. The future is bright! Dear leader Dario will lead us there!
> AI is an authoritarian's dream.
Correction: Closed AI is an authoritarian's dream.
Re: Anthropic Is Building a Predictive Surveillance System to Monitor Activists
#43The editorializing in this article is quite something. If I strip out the editorializing, I think the conclusions are: 1. Someone told Claude they had an AR-15 and the CEO of Anthropic was "in their sights". Anthropic reported this to the police. 2. Anthropic contracts with a security agency. 3. Anthropic is looking to build in-house capability for security. Anthropic clearly has high-value targets (see, e.g. the per…
That's not the only example discussed. Anthropic also partners with the Palantir-like Samdesk:
> In a wide-ranging conversation about threat monitoring and analysis, the interview also touches on monitoring activists. “Last year we had an executive travel into a major city when we received some intelligence through Samdesk about a planned protest,” Ellison said. The originally scheduled protest was moved up due to permitting issues. “Samdesk gave us about 60 minutes of advanced notice that the protest organizers had moved the timeline,” Ellison explained. “That extra hour was critical. Without it our executives would have departed their meetings, they would have ran right into the heart of the disruption.”
So they're monitoring activists outside of Anthropic's systems.
Re: Anthropic Is Building a Predictive Surveillance System to Monitor Activists
#44The editorializing in this article is quite something. If I strip out the editorializing, I think the conclusions are: 1. Someone told Claude they had an AR-15 and the CEO of Anthropic was "in their sights". Anthropic reported this to the police. 2. Anthropic contracts with a security agency. 3. Anthropic is looking to build in-house capability for security. Anthropic clearly has high-value targets (see, e.g. the per…
1b. Anthroptic refused to provide the police with evidence of said AR-15 wielding person. "Some guy said he's after me, why would I lie about such a thing?"
Re: Anthropic Is Building a Predictive Surveillance System to Monitor Activists
#45Remember guys: Anthropic are the good guys! They care about morals, alignment, and safety! So this invasive surveillance to crush dissent must be good for us! AI is an authoritarian's dream. The future is bright! Dear leader Dario will lead us there!
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Re: Anthropic Is Building a Predictive Surveillance System to Monitor Activists
#46It's not clear from the article if this is a mass intake of all internet usage or simply within their own platforms.
This doesn't sound like something coming from Anthropic's platforms:
> In a wide-ranging conversation about threat monitoring and analysis, the interview also touches on monitoring activists. “Last year we had an executive travel into a major city when we received some intelligence through Samdesk about a planned protest,” Ellison said. The originally scheduled protest was moved up due to permitting issues. “Samdesk gave us about 60 minutes of advanced notice that the protest organizers had moved the timeline,” Ellison explained. “That extra hour was critical. Without it our executives would have departed their meetings, they would have ran right into the heart of the disruption.”
Re: Anthropic Is Building a Predictive Surveillance System to Monitor Activists
#47My question in all of these cases is always the same: what are you going to do about it?
Because if it’s just more words being tossed on HN, then the answer is: nothing.
Re: Anthropic Is Building a Predictive Surveillance System to Monitor Activists
#48> “That extra hour was critical. Without it our executives would have departed their meetings, they would have ran right into the heart of the disruption.” > [..] “What could have been a high-stress situation,” Democratic protest is now a high-stress situation?
Of course it is. Are you instead thinking of the carefully controlled and choreographed “protests” in countries like China where the government and especially the police knows with absolute certainty what the crowd is protesting against and how they are protesting, with an overwhelming police presence that’s ready to shut down the whole protest at the first whiff of trouble?
And of course it is a high-stress situation if you are merely a passerby with no advance knowledge of what the protest is all about, which is what is happening here. Are the protesters aligned with or against your own values? Will anything you wear or the way you look become the ire of the protesters? Suppose for the sake of argument you did not vote for Donald Trump, would it not be stressful if no one told you in advance that a group of Trump supporters are protesting against the “unfair” votes right in front of you?
Sometimes you just don’t want politics in your life and just want the equivalent of boring suburbs.
Re: Anthropic Is Building a Predictive Surveillance System to Monitor Activists
#49> “I do agree that the public has a negative view of AI (and that this is a big problem), but I don’t think it is primarily caused by me or any other AI leader warning about AI’s risks,” Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei wrote on Twitter last month. “I think it is fundamentally a crisis of trust … I think that ordinary people don’t trust companies, governments, or the tech industry and always suspect that we are cooking up…
It's baffling how oblivious these people appear to be. I still can't tell if it's an act or not. If it is, what benefit do they get from playing dumb? If not, how did we let people who don't understand basic cause and effect or basic human emotion become in charge of the future of the world?
Re: Anthropic Is Building a Predictive Surveillance System to Monitor Activists
#50> “I do agree that the public has a negative view of AI (and that this is a big problem), but I don’t think it is primarily caused by me or any other AI leader warning about AI’s risks,” Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei wrote on Twitter last month. “I think it is fundamentally a crisis of trust … I think that ordinary people don’t trust companies, governments, or the tech industry and always suspect that we are cooking up…
It's baffling how oblivious these people appear to be. I still can't tell if it's an act or not. If it is, what benefit do they get from playing dumb? If not, how did we let people who don't understand basic cause and effect or basic human emotion become in charge of the future of the world?
I don't think they're oblivious, I think they're lying. Playing dumb/plausible deniability can give them enough wiggle room to execute plans that would otherwise be stopped before it's too late.