The limiting factor is usually, someone has to pay for the spying and the punishment. A lot (most?) of troublemakers just aren’t worth the trouble of spying or punishing.
Fining offenses is a great way to fund finding more offenses.
AI and Mass Spying
121–130 of 349 posts
Re: AI and Mass Spying
#122I 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…
> Is this a better world, If the same monitoring is present on buses and private planes, homeless hostels and mega-mansions then it absolutely is better.
"The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread."
Re: AI and Mass Spying
#123"if everybody is being spied on, nobody is being spied on"
???
Re: AI and Mass Spying
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
If it increases ticket issuance for passenger vehicle noise violations (eg - "sport" exhausts, booming stereo system, motorcycles), I'm down.
"If it hurts people I hate I accept" - Every endorsement of authoritarian rule ever
Reminds me of this quote attributed to a past Peruvian president and general, Benavides:
“For my friends, everything; for my enemies, the law.”
Re: AI and Mass Spying
#125This 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…
> This is a political problem, not a technological one.
The political problem is a component of the technological problem. It's a seriously bad thing when technologies are developed without taking into account the potential for abuse.
People developing new technologies can try to wash their hands of the foreseeable social consequences of their work, but that doesn't make their hands clean.
Re: AI and Mass Spying
#126This is why AI software must not be restricted, so that ordinary people and the civic minded can develop personal and public AI systems to counter corporate AI. The future of AI is adversarial.
Now freedom to develop AI software doesn't mean freedom to use it however you please and its use should be regulated, in particular to protect individuals from things like this. But of course people cannot be trusted, so you need to be able to deploy your own countermeasures.
Re: AI and Mass Spying
#127I 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…
Or maybe if such a thing is applied for real it will lead to the elimination of bullshit laws (jaywalking, ...), since suddenly 10% of the population would be fined/incarcerated/...
Re: AI and Mass Spying
#128I 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…
So the way out of this is that you have the constitutional right to confront your accuser in court. When accused by a piece of software that generally means they have to disclose the source code and explain how it came to its answers.
Not many people have exercised this right with respect to DUI breathalyzers but it exists and was affirmed by the Supreme Court. And it will also apply to AI.
Re: AI and Mass Spying
#129Both 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.
This is the way.
Re: AI and Mass Spying
#130This 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…
> This is a political problem, not a technological one.
Somewhat of a distinction without a difference, IMO. Politics (consensus mechanisms, governance structures, etc) are all themselves technologies for coordinating and shaping social activity. The decision on how to implement new (surveillance) tooling is also a technological question, as I think that the use of the tool in part defines what it is. All this to say that changes in the capabilities of specific tools are not the absolute limits of "technology", decisions around implementation and usage are also within that scope.
> 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.
While perhaps not as all-encompassing as what ended up being built in the USSR, the US absolutely implemented a massive surveillance network pointed at its citizenry [0].
>...managed effective at scale spying with primitive technology
I do think that this is a particularly good point though. This is a not new trend, development in tooling for communications and signal/information processing has led to many developments in state surveillance throughout history. IMO AI should be properly seen as an elaboration or minor paradigm shift in a very long history, rather than wholly new terrain.
> Make it a crime for a business to have the wrong opinion when it comes to who they want to serve or hire?
Assuming you're talking about the Civil Rights Act: the specific crime is not "having the wrong opinion", it's inhibiting inter-state movement and commerce. Bigotry doesn't serve our model of a country where citizens are free to move about within its borders uninhibited and able to support oneself.
[0] https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/hist...