AI is fundamentally ‘a surveillance technology’

We are ALL vulnerable to disinformation.

We are ALL vulnerable to emotional manipulation.

We are ALL targets for the complex.

Our only saving grace is that we are not ALL worth monitoring directly. Most of us, by a wide majority, are barely even pixels on a screen somewhere. You can look at the ocean all you want but it's hard to pinpoint a single drop of water in it until it makes a splash.

I would go so far as to say it has become an evil complex that one day our 7th great grandchildren will revile and lament for us having lived through it.

Not because of any excessive torture but because of our being stuck in Tantalus's maw, so close to having everything we could want or need to have happy, jubilant lives and yet forever having it snatched out of reach by a relative handful of exceedingly greedy and selfish people.

> an economic system in which the product for sale is personal data collected on the internet, especially from search engines (= programs used to find information on the internet) and social media platforms (= websites and programs that allow people to communicate and share information on the internet)

I think this is the context folks are reaching for: it's not just a data-driven business model, it's driven by people's personal data in particular. As far as sharing willingly, it's _incredibly_ hard to buy a smartphone and prevent it from collecting your personal information (like location, movement patterns, app usage) without removing much of the functionality that makes it useful.

And once that data is collected, it's open season. I just ran across this piece from today where the government literally goes directly to private data brokers because the NSA takes too long: https://www.404media.co/us-counterintel-buys-netflow-data-te...

That particular case is about tracking VPNs (so not directly related to Google's data collection), but is a good example of how we can limit government's reach, but as long as they can buy data from private firms, there's a loophole in the 4th amendment, likely rooted in the third-party doctrine.

Seems like more fodder to abuse minorities behind the guise of fancy tech and supposedly "objective" algorithms. "All [minority] look the same" isn't just something racists say, it is pretty well documented that many people struggle to discern distinguishing facial features of other ethnicities and consistently perform more poorly on facial recognition tasks involving races other than their own.

Now you have an AI generated photo to go by that further does some fudging and blurring of distinctive features... Can you imagine which races in America, for instance, would be subject to more false positives to receive police/prosecutor attention and ultimately be more likely to wand up with charges drawn against them unjustly?

If you are poor, having charges drawn up by the DA means a plea deal and time in jail or prison 9 times out of 10. If you have money for a good lawyer your odds are better, but overall are still significantly worse than if you don't have charges drawn in the first place, despite the fact that there is no evidence of a crime beyond circumstantial crap, maybe some testilying by the arresting officer (their own term, not mine), and a bogus facial match.

You mean like me directly quoting parts of the article from both the beginning and end? Like me pointing out how the article talks about surveillance and then attempts to clumsily tie it to AI?

Fuck off lol

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