So far you were a line in the log. Now someone is actually looking at you with three eyes.
AI and Mass Spying
261–270 of 349 posts
Re: AI and Mass Spying
#262Earlier 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.
Good luck building things with out leaving an ai reachable paper trail. You'd have to grow your own trees, mine your own iron and coal, refine your own plastic from your own oil field.
Sounds fun to me and my social group. We not-quite-joke about the coming backyard refineries. I'm working on the charcoal production at the moment (not a joke, I have some small retorts in weekly production, though I'm mostly aiming for biochar production instead of fuel charcoal production).
Realistically, though, if all you have to work with are my general flows of materials in and out, I'm a lot less worried than if you have, say, details of home audio, my social media postings, etc (nothing I say here is inconsistent with my blog, which is quite public). And there are many things I don't say in these environments.
Re: AI and Mass Spying
#263Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
I think the most charitable interpretation of their point is something along the lines of simply highlighting the far-reaching and ad-hoc nature of lawmaking capabilities. I don’t think antiracism laws were the best example though.
Re: AI and Mass Spying
#264Earlier quoted context omitted.
"If it hurts people I hate I accept" - Every endorsement of authoritarian rule ever
Effectively enforcing laws we agreed to is hardly authoritarian.
You'd disagree about 10 seconds after they did...
If suddenly you could be effectively found and prosecuted for every single law that existed it is near a 100% probability that you'd burn the government to the ground in a week.
There are so many laws no one can even tell you how many you are subject to at any given time at any given location.
Re: AI and Mass Spying
#265This kind of thing will probably never fly, because Americans expect that they can break the law and in most cases will not suffer any consequences. Anything that threatens this would be, in their eyes, oppression. Imagine if you immediately got a text informing you of your $300 speeding ticket within a few seconds of you going a mile per hour over. People would riot. However, Americans expect that the law is enforce…
Yeah this is all uniquely American and not prevalent in every society on earth throughout all of human history.
https://crookedtimber.org/2018/03/21/liberals-against-progre...
>For millennia, conservatism had no name, because no other model of polity had ever been proposed. “The king can do no wrong.” In practice, this immunity was always extended to the king’s friends, however fungible a group they might have been. Today, we still have the king’s friends even where there is no king (dictator, etc.). Another way to look at this is that the king is a faction, rather than an individual.
Re: AI and Mass Spying
#266Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 incre…
I think if you bring up a dystopian nightmare, it assumes someone in power acting in bad faith. If their power is great enough, like maybe a government intelligence agency, it doesn't need things like due process, etc., to do what it wants to do. For example, Joe McCarthy & J. Edgar Hoover didn't need the evidence that could have been produced by AI-aided mass surveillance to justify getting people people who opposed…
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Re: AI and Mass Spying
#267This very scenario was one of the key threats in book Homo Dues and that was over 5 years ago.
Russia could do surveillance, but was limited by manpower.
Now AI solves this, there can be an AI bot dedicated to each individual.
Wasn't there another article on HN just day, that Car Makers, Phone, Health monitors all can now aggregate data to know 'your mood' when in an accident? To know where you are going, how you are feeling?
This is the real danger with AI. Even current technology is good enough for this kind of surveillance.
Re: AI and Mass Spying
#268This 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 p…
> current paradigms allow individuals to enter into contracts
And such contracts can be illegal or unenforceable. Just as the parent was suggesting it could be illegal to collect data, it is currently illegal to sell certain drugs. You can’t enter into a contract to sell cannabis across state lines in the United States for example.
Re: AI and Mass Spying
#269This 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 incre…
This is the correct take. As the cost to do a bad thing decreases, the amount of political will society needs to exert to do that bad thing decreases as well.
In fact, if that cost gets low enough, eventually society needs to start exerting political will just to avoid doing the bad thing. And this does look to be where we're headed with at least some of the knock-on effects of AI. (Though many of the knock-on effects of AI will be wildly positive.)
Re: AI and Mass Spying
#270Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 incre…
I think if you bring up a dystopian nightmare, it assumes someone in power acting in bad faith. If their power is great enough, like maybe a government intelligence agency, it doesn't need things like due process, etc., to do what it wants to do. For example, Joe McCarthy & J. Edgar Hoover didn't need the evidence that could have been produced by AI-aided mass surveillance to justify getting people people who opposed…
I think it is greyer than this.
Joe McCarthy and J. Edgar Hoover, distasteful as they are, I believe acted in what they would claim is good faith. The issue isn't that someone is a bad actor. It is that they believe they are a good actor and are busy stripping away others' rights in their pursuit.