Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

AI and Mass Spying

schneier.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

221–230 of 349 posts

Re: AI and Mass Spying

#221

Post by zooq_ai »

klik99 wrote: post #72

I don't know why this isn't being discussed more. The reality of the surveillance state is that the sheer amount of data couldn't realistically be monitored - AI very directly solves this problem by summarizing complex data. This, IMO, is the real danger of AI, at least in the short term - not a planet of paperclips, not a moral misalignment, not a media landscape bereft of creativity - but rather a tool for targetin…

Why nobody worries? Because this is an elite person problem.

At the end of the day, all those surveillance still has to be consumed by a person and only around 10,000 people in this world (celebs, hot women, politicians and wealthy) will be surveilled.

For most of HN crowd (upper middle-class, suburban family) who have zero problems in their life must create imaginary problems of privacy / surveillance like this. But reality is, even if they put all their private data on a website, heresallmyprivatedata.com, nobody cares. It'll have 0 external views.

So, for HN crowd (the ones who live in a democratic society) it's just an outlet so that they too can say they are victimized. Rest of the Western world doesn't care (and rightly so)

Re: AI and Mass Spying

#222

Post by petsfed »

somenameforme wrote: post #58

This 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…

You and I are in agreement that the surveillance needs to stop, but I think we differ on how to explain the problem. My explanation follows, but note that its not directed at you.

At its peak, the KGB employed ~500,000 people directly, with untold more employed as informants.

The FBI currently employs ~35,000 people. What if I told you that the FBI could reach the KGB's peak level of reach, without meaningfully increasing its headcount? Would that make a difference?

The technology takes away the cost of the surveillance, which used to be the guardrail. That fundamentally changes the "political" calculus.

The fact that computers in 1945 were prohibitively expensive and required industrial logistics has literally zero bearing on the fact that today most of us have several on our person at all times. Nobody denies that changes to computer manufacturing technologies fundamentally changed the role the computer has in our daily lives. Certainly, it was theoretically possible to put a computer in every household in 1945, but we lacked the "political" will to do so. It does not follow that because historically computers were not a thing in society, we should not adjust our habits, morals, policies, etc today to account for the new landscape.

So why is there always somebody saying "it was always technically possible to [insert dystopian nightmare], and we didn't need special considerations then, so we don't need them now!"?

Re: AI and Mass Spying

#223

Post by nojvek »

It’s not that AI will enable mass spying, mass spying is already there.

AI enables extracting all sorts of behavioral data across decades timespan for everyone.

The devils argument is in a world where the data is not used for nefarious purposes and only to prosecute crime as passed by governments, it leads to a society where no one is above the law and equal treatment for all.

However that seldom goes well since humans who control the system definitely want an upper edge.

Re: AI and Mass Spying

#224

Post by [deleted] »

somenameforme wrote: post #58

This 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…

[deleted]

Re: AI and Mass Spying

#225

Post by dfxm12 »

somenameforme wrote: post #58

This 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 for a business to have the wrong opinion when it comes to who they want to serve

FWIW, businesses who refuse to do business with people generally win their legal cases [0], [1], [2], and I'm not sure if they are ever criminal...

0 - https://www.npr.org/2023/06/30/1182121291/colorado-supreme-c...

1 - https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/04/us/politics/supreme-court...

2 - https://www.dailysignal.com/2023/11/06/christian-wedding-pho...

Re: AI and Mass Spying

#226

Post by [deleted] »

asdff wrote: post #220
matthewdgreen wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is not as simple as being a political problem. Many of the policy decisions we think of as being political were actually motivated by the cost/availability of technology. As this cost goes down, new options become practical. We think of the Stasi's capabilities as being remarkable: but in fact, they would probably have been thrilled to trade most of their manual spying tools for something as powerful as a modern g…

While this is true, I don't think we are there yet with AI since its usually more expensive to run AI models than it is to perform more traditional statistical modelling.

[deleted]

Re: AI and Mass Spying

#227

Post by asdff »

empath-nirvana wrote: post #218
asdff wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI didn't solve the problem of summarizing complex large datasets. For example a common way to deal with such datasets is to use a random subset of this dataset. This represents a single line of code potentially to perform this operation.

But you don't need to do a random subset with AI. You can summarize everything, and summarize the summaries and so on. I will say that at least gpt4 and gpt3, after many rounds of summaries, tends to flatten everything out into useless "blah". I tried this with summarizing school board meetings and it's just really bad at picking out important information -- it just lacks the specific context required to make summari…

Thats the exact issue with gpt. You don't know how its making the summary. It could very well be wrong in parts. It could be oversummarized to a bla bla state like you say. There's no telling whether you have outputted garbage or not, at least not without secondary forms of evidence that you might as well use anyway and drop the unreliable language model. You can summarize everything with traditional statistical methods too. On top of that people understand what tradeoffs are being made exactly with every statistical methods, and you can calculate error rates and statistical power to see if your model is even worth a damn or not. Even just doing some ML modelling yourself you can decide what tradeoffs to make or how to set up the model to best fit your use cases. You can bootstrap all these and optimize.

Re: AI and Mass Spying

#228

Post by Syonyk »

mindslight wrote: post #177
Syonyk wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ...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.

> Building things that are outside the reach of AI because they're in places you entirely control This sounds great in principle, but I'd say "outside the reach of AI" is a much higher bar than one would naively think. You don't merely need to avoid its physical nervous system (digital perception/control), but rather prevent its incentives leaking in from outside interaction. All the while there is a strong attractor…

Oh, I'm aware it's a high bar. Like most people here, I've worked my life in tech, and I'm in the deeper weeds of it.

But I don't see an alternative unless, as you note, one just gives into the "flow" of the AI, app based, "social" media, advertising and manipulation driven ecosystem that is now the default.

I'm aware I'm proposing resisting exactly that, and that it's an uphill battle, but the tradeoff is retaining your own mind, your own ability to think, and to not be "influenced" by a wide range of things chosen by other people to cross your attention in very effective ways.

And I'm willing to work out some of what works in that space, and to share it with others.

Re: AI and Mass Spying

#229

Post by j45 »

asdff wrote: post #188
klik99 wrote: post #72

I don't know why this isn't being discussed more. The reality of the surveillance state is that the sheer amount of data couldn't realistically be monitored - AI very directly solves this problem by summarizing complex data. This, IMO, is the real danger of AI, at least in the short term - not a planet of paperclips, not a moral misalignment, not a media landscape bereft of creativity - but rather a tool for targetin…

AI didn't solve the problem of summarizing complex large datasets. For example a common way to deal with such datasets is to use a random subset of this dataset. This represents a single line of code potentially to perform this operation.

Yet.

And those kinds of things go slowly before very quickly as it has been demonstrated.

Re: AI and Mass Spying

#230

Post by anigbrowl »

namaria wrote: post #82
otteromkram wrote: post #55

Earlier 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

False equivalence. GP complained about a specific behavior, not about specific people.
Post reply on HN