Is this really an insight to ANYONE on hackernews? How is this article providing anything new to the conversation except to bring it back into discussion?
AI and Mass Spying
201–210 of 349 posts
Re: AI and Mass Spying
#202Earlier quoted context omitted.
Feels pretty legit though. My freedom-from is impacted by other people's freedom-to: by curtailing their freedom, mine is expanded. Sure they won't like it - but I don't like it the other way round either.
I'd argue that if we want to support individual growth and creativity, freedom-to should have higher priority than freedom-from, which consciously or not has seems to be the traditional default in the US perhaps due to its culture of supporting innovation and its break-away past. I believe some refer to these as positive and negative freedoms, respectfully.
This is also why a number of people truly revolt against the idea of higher density living. If the only way to have your freedom-from is to be free from other people, then you move away from other people.
I've watched it play out on my mother-in-law's street. What was once a quiet dead end street is now a noisy, heavily trafficked road because a large apartment building was put up at the end.
The number of freedom-to people have significantly decreased her quality of life blasting music as they walk or drive by at all hours, along with a litany of other complaints that range from anti-social to outright illegal behavior. Even setting aside the illegal stuff, she is significantly less happy living where she is now.
Re: AI and Mass Spying
#203Time to decentralize everything. I think we are already in the early stages of this new trend. We can run AI locally and hard drives are so large we can have a local copy of an entire library, with millions of ebooks, in our own home now. That is in addition to generating our own energy off grid (so no smart meter data to monitor), thanks to the low cost of solar panels as well. Bye bye Big Brother.
> " That is in addition to generating our own energy off grid (so no smart meter data to monitor), thanks to the low cost of solar panels as well. " Terence Eden is in the UK: https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2013/02/solar-update/ This says his house uses 13kWh/day and you can see from the graph by dividing the monthly amount by 31 days that the solar panels on the roof generate around 29/day during summer and 2.25/day in wi…
You just need a few sheds full of batteries
Re: AI and Mass Spying
#204Time to decentralize everything. I think we are already in the early stages of this new trend. We can run AI locally and hard drives are so large we can have a local copy of an entire library, with millions of ebooks, in our own home now. That is in addition to generating our own energy off grid (so no smart meter data to monitor), thanks to the low cost of solar panels as well. Bye bye Big Brother.
> " That is in addition to generating our own energy off grid (so no smart meter data to monitor), thanks to the low cost of solar panels as well. " Terence Eden is in the UK: https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2013/02/solar-update/ This says his house uses 13kWh/day and you can see from the graph by dividing the monthly amount by 31 days that the solar panels on the roof generate around 29/day during summer and 2.25/day in wi…
You “just” need a few sheds full of batteries
Re: AI and Mass Spying
#205Nick Bostrom proposed the "Vulnerable World Hypothesis" which (amongst other things) says that a technology as powerful and accessible as AI requires mass surveillance to stop bad actors using it as a weapon. https://nickbostrom.com/papers/vulnerable.pdf It's disturbing, but also hard (for me) to refute.
I remember, in the early millennium, reading Kurzweil’s idealism about the coming singularity, and feeling similar. So much of the advanced technology that he thought will soon be in the hands of ordinary people, could be potentially so lethal that obviously the state would feel the need to restrict it.
(That was one argument against Kurzweil’s vision. Another is that state regulation and licensing moves so slowly at each major technological change, that it would take us decades to get to the point he dreams of, not mere years. You aren’t going to see anything new rolled out in the healthcare sector without lots and lots of debating about it and drawing up paperwork first.)
Re: AI and Mass Spying
#206This 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…
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Re: AI and Mass Spying
#207This 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…
No, it's not just a political problem intelligence gathering can happen at scale, including of civilians, by adversarial countries or international corporations.
"Going the nuclear route and making the collection of data on individuals, aggregated or otherwise, illegal would hardly be some major leap of reach of jurisprudence."
It would in fact be a huge leap. Sure, you could make illegal pretty easily, but current paradigms allow individuals to enter into contracts. Nothing stopping a society from signing (or clicking) away their rights like they already do. That would require some rather hefty intervention by congress, not just jurisprudence.
Re: AI and Mass Spying
#208Both 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.
Its demise is also inevitable, so it would be a matter of being wise in figuring out how long it takes us to see/feel the downsides, or how long until we (or it) build something "better".
Re: AI and Mass Spying
#209I 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…
> Many of our criminal laws are written with the implicit assumption that it takes resources to investigate and prosecute a crime, I think this depends on the law. For jaywalking, sure. For murder and robbery probably less so. And law enforcement resources seem scarce on all of them.
Murder and robbery too. Those crimes are just worth investigating.
Re: AI and Mass Spying
#210This 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…
> Make it a crime to grow a plant in the privacy of your own home and then consume that plant? Sure, why not? Make it a crime for a business to have the wrong opinion when it comes to who they want to serve or hire? Sure, why not? Wow, that's a hell of a comparison. The former case being a documented case of basic racism and political repression, assuming you're talking about cannabis. And the latter being designed f…
Don't know why you're getting downvoted for this, it's exactly what the parent said, and a completely wild (and off topic) statement.