No, I would more carefully pick and choose which sites I care to visit since I have to pay for them. I can, of course, pick and choose the sites now based on how bad the advertisement is, but because advertisement is so prevalent, I don’t really get a choice because most sites use advertisement. Ironically, the sites I’d be most willing to pay for (like HN) are also the ones with few or no adverts.
The most valuable ones mostly aren't ad supported or paid anyway, and without competition from ad supported sites even more free ones for more purposes would exist and thrive (e.g. if Reddit died all those free volunteer run forums that used to be such a big part of the Web would come back)
This is the actual question to ask. Advertising is either a convenient scapegoat by ruling classes, or it is inherently destructive. Either way, a clear headed free society would ban advertising in its current form and seek other means of providing the utility of advertisement for goods and services. At the end of the day, that is all advertising is supposed to provide. Yet somehow this relatively insignificant aspect of society is put front and center as the reason for all sort of shenanigans.
Is that so? If you look at people's behavior, most people seem to accept targeted advertising. Every bit of evidence I've seen indicates that the outrage against the practice comes from a small minority with a disproportionate voice --- much like many other sources of chronic public outrage today. Regular people, to the best of my knowledge, don't care.
I think most people have no idea what is going on and literally would not be able to understand it even if it were laid out in black and white. Even then, most people "understand" that smoking causes cancer. Behavior is not always a good predictor of people's internal mental states. Addiction is real. Damn that dopamine. Is smoking somehow fine because lots of people do it and it kills you slow? (I say that as someone who can't help but have a cig now and then).
Disagree. I think the last fifty years proves that the vast majority of people will almost always go with convenience over some abstract ideal of "privacy".
People don't care about privacy in the abstract but do care once it becomes concrete. If you ask someone if they are willing to let an impersonal algorithm analyze their data in exchange for a free service, the answer is generally yes. If you ask them if you can read their email and peruse their browsing history, the answer is almost always no.
The problem privacy advocates have is forging a link between the abstract and the concrete. I don't really care that Experian compiles a list of my credit data. I really do care when they fuck up and leak it publicly. The tricky thing is that the former is a prerequisite for the latter, so I should care about that, too.
If you ask someone if they are willing to let an impersonal algorithm analyze their data in exchange for a free service, the answer is generally yes. If you ask them if you can read their email and peruse their browsing history, the answer is almost always no.
Exactly. That's why I put "privacy" in quotes. I think people are smarter than you give them credit for. I don't give out the password to my email account, but do I care that much if Google has some machine learning algorithm with a bunch of data points buried in there that I use the word "NYC" a lot? No, I really don't care. And yeah, they might get hacked and leak my emails to the world. That would suck. But that risk is worth it to me, and judging by the hundreds of millions of people with Gmail accounts, I'm not alone.
If you have nothing to hide, you also have nothing to say. You also have zero to gain by expressing your assent to what is happening already anyway. You are actually drowning out many people who have no voice in this matter but silently believe in very important things like human rights, of which privacy is absolutely key to freedom and free expression.
I generally think open dialogue is a good thing, but your comment just bolsters those in positions of power to the detriment of everyone else for literally nothing other than reducing your own minor personal annoyance. Want better ads? Mail them a dossier on your life story and leave the rest of us out of it.
This makes me shudder. Companies with powerful AI and enough data could control the population in ways indiscernible to an individual. By organizing goods in stores and placing the right ads at the right time it could be possible to lead users on a treasure hunt to a political or economic opinion.
How do you know you're not in the vanguard of that attack on humanity? How do you know the comment you just posted isn't propaganda in service of your puppetmaster. Perhaps you're bringing about that which you fear, powerless in the grip of an omnipotent AI possessed by a faceless bureaucracy somewhere.
I'll try to tackle the idea that you have nothing to hide. Let's assume that every last moment of your life has been collected, indexed, then either sold or hacked. It's all out there, for anyone to see. If you think this is implausible, consider that most people are never outside of arms reach of their gps/microphone/camera and that much of the data that's ever been collected has already been hacked or sold.
Would you prefer to hide:
-recordings of your sexual encounters from your family?
-the raunchiest porn you've ever looked at from your co-workers?
-your live GPS location from home burglars?
-your bank account balance from friends?
-your tax filings from scam artists?
-your off-color remarks you made 15 years ago while drunk from the person conducting your job interview?
-the drugs you tried in college from law enforcement?
-The minor legal transgression you committed from the person looking to shut down your political protest?
-the psychological trigger even you were unaware of from the deep learning algorithm designed to addict you to gambling.
-your sexual orientation from the autocratic government of the vacation spot you visited?
The only people who truly have nothing to hide are those who truly have nothing to lose. If that's you, then I'm sincerely sorry.
The Borg may turn out to be prophetic. We could turn into a hive mind of sorts.
I've already been calling Internet fads, echo chambers, and meme outbreaks "Borgsongs." I seem to recall this term from STTNG for the omnipresent hive signal experienced by Borg.
Imagine a neural network who could design memes/songs by directly measuring a bunch of test subject brains. Kind of like a focus group.
A short story even asked the question, could you engineer a meme/song so powerful that it could literally make you go insane? We know this stuff exists (brainwashing, cults, ...), but can you super concentrate it?
That stuff is kind of like adversarial examples for human brains, and it probably is possible to deeply study the brain and create super indoctrination techniques.
At some point we are going to be forced to start regulating persuasion.
This is a core idea in Infinite Jest. I wouldn't recommend it to everyone, but if you fancy the writing style it is surreally poignant on today's addiction culture.
However, such memetic behavior such as fads, echo chambers, and meme outbreaks predates the internet and even modern technology. So, according to your logic, it would seem we have always been the Borg.
And (possibly replacing telephone with telegraph and radio) those events pretty much turned the civilization upside down. They were transformative. So was the Internet.
Now we have another qualitative step - never before people were actually connected 24/7, with constant Internet activations coming to our pocket.
I've been wanting to write a SciFi short story about this for years now. I expect that human-to-human communication will get faster and faster, especially once we get brain-to-computer implants. At that point at least from the outside making will be indistinguishable from a hive mind or even single lifeform made up of cells. On the other hand are we really that different from ants already? Maybe ants think of them last themselves as highly individualistic.
Kind of reminds me about how they say the highest level of automation of self-driving cars will be no steering wheel. Who decided that that was higher on the scale and a good thing? The "progress" defined here is complete control over all actions of individuals in society by an AI god.
These scales by which progress toward the future is measured are a key ingredient of social engineering. One task that Free Software Foundation type organizations could take upon themselves is to define a road map for future progress of technology that recognizes freedom and human dignity.
> Kind of reminds me about how they say the highest level of automation of self-driving cars will be no steering wheel. Who decided that that was higher on the scale and a good thing?
Everyone who's ever sat in traffic. It's a miserable experience and it is indeed a fundamentally better thing to be able to use that time in a more productive or entertaining fashion. Few people care if the steering wheel is entirely absent, so long as it's not needed and it's not in the way.
> The "progress" defined here is complete control over all actions of individuals in society by an AI god.
Who is defining progress that way? Everyone I know who wants a self-driving car wants it to go where they tell it to.
> Everyone who's ever sat in traffic. It's a miserable experience and it is indeed a fundamentally better thing to be able to use that time in a more productive or entertaining fashion. Few people care if the steering wheel is entirely absent, so long as it's not needed and it's not in the way.
I'm sure many car enthusiasts care whether the steering wheel is entirely absent. Some people enjoy driving, albeit usually in times/places without much traffic. If someone who found driving therapeutic instead spends their commute time staring at a social media feed on their phone because that's their default action when they aren't sure what to do, would that be fundamentally better for them?
> Who is defining progress that way? Everyone I know who wants a self-driving car wants it to go where they tell it to.
Of course everyone wants self-driving cars to go where they tell it, but that is different from having control over where the car goes. What if the AI that controls the self-driving car takes 99% of people to their destination, but rounds up a few political dissidents and whisks them away to an unknown location. Most everyone would get what they want, but none of the passengers are able to control where the AI takes them. Like Stallman says, "Either the users control the program or the program controls the users."
> I'm sure many car enthusiasts care whether the steering wheel is entirely absent....
Perhaps I was ambiguous. You're reading my intent backwards. Few people specifically want the steering wheel to be gone. They generally just want to not care about it.
> If someone who found driving therapeutic instead spends their commute time staring at a social media feed on their phone because that's their default action when they aren't sure what to do, would that be fundamentally better for them?
The car enthusiasts I know still don't like sitting in traffic. It's not the fun sort of driving.
> Of course everyone wants self-driving cars to go where they tell it, but that is different from having control over where the car goes. What if the AI that controls the self-driving car takes 99% of people to their destination, but rounds up a few political dissidents and whisks them away to an unknown location. Most everyone would get what they want, but none of the passengers are able to control where the AI takes them. Like Stallman says, "Either the users control the program or the program controls the users."
I don't know what to say in response to this. This feels over the top absurd to me. If your government is this fundamentally evil and amoral, I don't think driving your own car is going to protect you. There are already lots of ways to get rid of political dissidents.
You got trapped in the car driving mode of thinking. Commuting and traffic is a necessary burden to most people. Most see automation as a way to reduce that burden by letting them spend the cognitive resources necessary for driving on something else.
The core problem is not the car, or who is driving it, but the fact that people need to spend a not insignificant amount of time traveling to and from the location or their employment.
The "progress" defined here is complete control over all actions of individuals in society by an AI god.
Umm, no, the "progress" is machines that I don't have to micro-manage anymore. Imagine an oven in your house that you had to constantly adjust to keep it at the desired temperature. No, that would be stupid, we've solved that problem decades ago. Now imagine a car that you had to control by hand with the necessary micro adjustments needed to keep it between the lines. No, that would be...well, it will be stupid, and a solved problem, one of these days.
"Hey, oven, make your interior 425F so I can bake a pizza."
"Hey, car, drive me to Dusty Strings in Fremont. Oh, why am I talking to you? You see it on my calendar, and you've been warmed up and ready waiting for me."
I don't know what dystopian future you're imagining, but I don't see the AI gods whisking me off to places I don't want to go. I see machines that finally, FINALLY, do what I want without me having to speak baby talk to them.
"Hey, oven, make your interior 425F so I can bake a pizza”
Oven: “Sorry mike. I can only go to 400F unless you upgrade your ovenware plan to $2.99 a month. Or use an ovenware family brand pizza! For every 3 ovenware brand pizzas you cook, you get a chance to win a free pie! Oh by the way on your trip to Dusty Springs tomorrow stop by Chad’s Bakery for their famous pies.”
As a side note: myself and the public fully retain the rights to Google's self-driving cars, as my work has created it through answering captchas. We observe our rights through force, if necessary. This is where we're heading.
The "progress" defined here is complete control over all actions of individuals in society by an AI god.
I know you're using hyperbole here, and many people will disagree with what I'm going to write next, but that's exactly what I think the long term goal of technology should be. Not just individuals but all of our systems as well.
I guess if we're throwing around the term God it kind of loses it's juice.
God in this sense would be "thing that can do things nobody understands." In that sense, yes. Artificial General Intelligence (or maybe even Narrow AI) which can do things that humans can't understand for our benefit would look like "God" to most people.
Nobody can point to a reasonable causal chain of action for previously described "Gods." In the situation I'm advocating for, we would be able to do that - though likely still to a lesser degree than full interpretability.
I think it's far less about control and more about bulletproofing the technology.
If the self-driver becomes better than the best human drivers, there's limited gains in real safety if a 15-year-old with his learner's permit/drunkard/suicidal/homicidal/distracted person can still grab the wheel and steer it into a wall manually.
We may find that there are some opportunities that only become feasible if we remove the human factor. I could see a road network with much higher speeds for advanced self-driving vehicles, especially if you rely on the vehicles being able to communicate directly with each other and signaling mechanisms to keep traffic more orderly than a typical freeway.
There may also be some interesting business angles in it-- I fully expect that the feature after "we removed the steering wheel" is "we put a lie-flat bed, workstation or minibar where it lived."
I read some of google's patent mentioned in the text and thought it was interesting. They basically want a connected network of devices that communicate with each other and with google. Most of the devices follow the following algorithm: watch -> think -> act -> report. What is interesting is the 'report' phase of the algorithm.
I think there is a battle between two competing AI philosophies. One philosophy thinks AI should be central: all devices need to talk to the overmind for learning. The other philosophy thinks AI should be local: the device should learn on its own, kind of like a biological agent. I think the 'biological agent' form of AI is interesting when it comes to privacy of information. Only you and the device have the data.
The future of AI should be interesting with these two philosophies in mind.
Judging by the relative success of biological and social systems, systems that communicate effectively with each other end up much smarter than systems that don't communicate as effectively. Smarter as in winning the competition for resources more often.
The big question is whether we can build systems that communicate, but don't create vast disparities of information between overminds and everybody else. At this point the handful of information slurping mega-corporations have a huge information advantage compared with the average person. If nothing changes, this is the end of the humanistic world order based on the primacy of the individual brain.
>One philosophy thinks AI should be central > The other philosophy thinks AI should be local
I suspect is usually a mixture. For example Google Translate runs locally if you download a language pair, yet the training is not local. Google Gboard Swipe runs locally: in airplane mode I just added a new word to the dictionary and swipe recognised it, also contact names. However Google sends swipe information to a central location to improve the service...
This is scary, but it is important we recognize that we can be controlled and have our behaviour modified by altering our environment - and that is can be a good things.
Who hasn't delete Steam from their computer for a few weeks, thrown out junk food or set up a good workspace in order to promote a behavior in ourselves we want to cultivate, to be more like the person we want to be?
The important thing is that in those situations our environment remained under our control and conscious, and we need to ensure our personal and digital environment remain under our control, and its goals are transparent - and I am not sure companies like Google do or will always agree.
The key thing to keep in mind here is incentives and motivation.
You have a motivation toward self improvement, you make a change to your environment, monitor it, and see what happens. You want to increase your physical fitness, awareness, education, life position, finances, etc. and you make corresponding changes where you and yours are the primary beneficiaries.
Google has a motivation to deliver value to their shareholders. They want to deliver more, so they take advantage of their privileged position in our lives and change our environment for us without asking, monitor it, and see what happens. They have far more capability for analysis and, considering the scale, far more financial motivation to make tiny adjustments that we would pass over in our own optimizations.
Is it necessarily evil or bad for us? No, it doesn't have to be, but I have very little faith in Google to make any choices that even border on altruistic when it's far more profitable to exploit us. Let's remember that fundamentally they are an advertising company, and that drives most of the money in the business; advertising isn't just ads as we know them, but fundamentally the business of changing your mind, suggesting things, and influencing your behaviour to make you exchange some money for some service or good.
When you have a privileged position of influence, and you're willing to sell it to literally anyone who signs up, there is clearly a lot of potential for abuse.
No, it doesn't have to be, but I have very little faith in Google to make any choices that even border on altruistic when it's far more profitable to exploit us.
I think there's a case to be made here that Google's motivations can mirror those of the users and that it's in Google's best long term interest for that to be the case.
It seems obvious to me that a company that can be aligned with their customer's desires will have the most longevity, which may mean forgoing temporary, short term revenue gains.
I'm not so naiive to think that it currently is the state of things, or that it's simple for this to be the case - quite the opposite. Rather, my point is that there is no law of economics that guarantees users and corporations must be in conflict or that corporations will always do better financially by exploiting users to the users' detriment (or that a competitor that does that will beat one that doesn't).
> Rather, my point is that there is no law of economics that guarantees users and corporations must be in conflict or that corporations will always do better financially by exploiting users to the users' detriment (or that a competitor that does that will beat one that doesn't).
But isn't there?
I think the core point of Meditations on Moloch[0] was that there kind of is, that in the limit, competitive environments will always sacrifice every value other than the one over which they're competing, and that an "AI god" would probably be the only thing that's strong enough to break these chains.
I mean nothing written here isn't already covered more thoroughly in undergraduate economics curricula.
However those don't conflict with my point that there is nothing preventing a firm and the sum of their users from having strictly aligned goals in the context of their relationship.
Competition simply means that there could be other firms who may be able to align their goals with users goals more tightly, and run the other firm out of business. Much more to be probed here, like consistency, short and long term goals and desire/goal uncertainty on the part of the user and firm. None of those seem to be intractable issues.
Good point until you dragged Google into it. They're no different than the tobacco companies of 60 years ago who were getting doctors to say smoking was good for you. Or the makers of junk food and Steam in your examples who would really prefer that you not toss their stuff, but you do anyway. No one is forcing you to use Google, and it's not that difficult to limit your exposure to whatever shenanigans they're engaging in to influence you, just like every organization has since the beginning of organizations. In fact, I think it's probably easier now than it has been at many points in history. How easy was it to escape the influence of the Catholic church a few hundred years ago?
It's not bizarre. The "do this or else lose your job (and therefore go into poverty, making yourself and everyone you know miesrable, and possibly die of illness or starvation)" is probably the most common method of forcing people to do things against their will and conscience in the western world.
Yeah, the outcome for quitting or being fired is usually crushing poverty followed by starvation or dying in the gutter from an untreated illness. That’s why everyone still works the same first job that they got in high school.
I want to see employees have more negotiating power, but you’re being ridiculous. Yes, there’s a whole segment of employees who are exploited by their employers because they are financially vulnerable and may not be able to easily get another job. I’ve worked some of those jobs. They’re mostly not the types of jobs where there’s a lot of concern because their boss makes them use Google Apps.
And going down this road, there’s a huge variety of things you can say your boss “forces” you to do, where it becomes meaningless.
My boss “forces” me to use this brand of office furniture. My boss “forces” me to be here during business hours. My boss “forces” me to do work, for crying out loud! The inhumanity!
You seem to think that if anyone has any ability to cause you inconvenience or even harm if you don’t do their bidding, they’re forced you.
If you hired a human assistant (or had an assistant at work), they would know when you're working and generally what you're up to. It would make sense that a digital assistant would need to know these things, too. It's inherently a high-trust relationship.
Of course, the risks are different when you're trusting a device from a large corporation to take on a role that a human would do.
I wouldn't buy one, but some people will decide it's worth it, and I don't think they are losing their freedom by giving orders to a machine.
The digital "assistant". If we're using the analogy of assistants, then the same logic applies as with real assistants.
The device doing its job can have my information, but sending it back to the mothership, even if it's for the purposes of improving the service for such devices in general, then it's the equivalent of a real assistant babbling about my private stuff to their colleagues, which is immoral and a fireable offence.
What if you hire a maid for a day from a service, and you find out that they have been keeping tabs on your dietary habits and daily routine and reporting it back to their employer? That's closer to what Google is doing.
The speaker is just the user interface. You've effectively hired a large corporation to work in your house. Alexa doesn't work for Amazon, Alexa is Amazon.
Google at least makes this explicit with "Ok, Google".
Exactly. You've hired a monstrously large entity to snoop on all your activities. This is in no way equivalent to hiring a human person, which has orders of magnitude smaller information and economic footprint. An analogy that keeps things in proportion:
'You've effectively hired KGB/CIA to work in your house, the human assistant is just the interface'.
It's more like putting your money in a bank. Yes, anything you use the bank for, the bank knows; you don't expect a bank teller to keep anything secret from the rest of the bank. And yes, the government can find out your transactions with a warrant. Still, people do keep their money in banks.
Banks are more regulated than Internet companies, though, so maybe there is something to be done there.
That's not how it works internally, and everyone knows it.
You've hired a tiny, tiny string of server activations, through which your voice gets interpreted and turned into query to be run, with some amount of side effects that may affect your device directly. Just because some people cannot see through the abstraction of a company name, doesn't mean we should let it be the accepted view.
Foucault, of course, talks about this. In Discipline and Punish:
>But the Panopticon was also a laboratory; it could be used as a machine to carry out experiments, to alter behaviour, to train or correct individuals. To experiment with medicines and monitor their effects. To try out different punishments on prisoners, according to their crimes and character, and to seek the most effective ones. To teach different techniques simultaneously to the workers, to decide which is the best. To try out pedagogical experiments – and in particular to take up once again the well-debated problem of secluded education, by using orphans ...
It's interesting to note that the argument made in this post is exactly what Deleuze said two decades after Foucault [1], that the mechanisms of "discipline" are moving outside of enclosed spaces because of the ever-longer trails of data that we leave everywhere.
Something just occurred to me: it seems like a lot of the outrage over ads and privacy is just intellectual elitism:
"Sure, I am too aware of these techniques and mentally strong to ever be influenced by marketing, but what about the rest of humanity? Google will control their minds like a virus and soon destroy the world!"
81 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 147 ms ] threadDo you want to pay for all the hundred sites you visit in a year?
The problem privacy advocates have is forging a link between the abstract and the concrete. I don't really care that Experian compiles a list of my credit data. I really do care when they fuck up and leak it publicly. The tricky thing is that the former is a prerequisite for the latter, so I should care about that, too.
Exactly. That's why I put "privacy" in quotes. I think people are smarter than you give them credit for. I don't give out the password to my email account, but do I care that much if Google has some machine learning algorithm with a bunch of data points buried in there that I use the word "NYC" a lot? No, I really don't care. And yeah, they might get hacked and leak my emails to the world. That would suck. But that risk is worth it to me, and judging by the hundreds of millions of people with Gmail accounts, I'm not alone.
I generally think open dialogue is a good thing, but your comment just bolsters those in positions of power to the detriment of everyone else for literally nothing other than reducing your own minor personal annoyance. Want better ads? Mail them a dossier on your life story and leave the rest of us out of it.
Would you prefer to hide:
-recordings of your sexual encounters from your family?
-the raunchiest porn you've ever looked at from your co-workers?
-your live GPS location from home burglars?
-your bank account balance from friends?
-your tax filings from scam artists?
-your off-color remarks you made 15 years ago while drunk from the person conducting your job interview?
-the drugs you tried in college from law enforcement?
-The minor legal transgression you committed from the person looking to shut down your political protest?
-the psychological trigger even you were unaware of from the deep learning algorithm designed to addict you to gambling.
-your sexual orientation from the autocratic government of the vacation spot you visited?
The only people who truly have nothing to hide are those who truly have nothing to lose. If that's you, then I'm sincerely sorry.
I've already been calling Internet fads, echo chambers, and meme outbreaks "Borgsongs." I seem to recall this term from STTNG for the omnipresent hive signal experienced by Borg.
A short story even asked the question, could you engineer a meme/song so powerful that it could literally make you go insane? We know this stuff exists (brainwashing, cults, ...), but can you super concentrate it?
At some point we are going to be forced to start regulating persuasion.
We burned stuff long before modern steam turbines and internal combustion engines...
Now we have another qualitative step - never before people were actually connected 24/7, with constant Internet activations coming to our pocket.
These scales by which progress toward the future is measured are a key ingredient of social engineering. One task that Free Software Foundation type organizations could take upon themselves is to define a road map for future progress of technology that recognizes freedom and human dignity.
Everyone who's ever sat in traffic. It's a miserable experience and it is indeed a fundamentally better thing to be able to use that time in a more productive or entertaining fashion. Few people care if the steering wheel is entirely absent, so long as it's not needed and it's not in the way.
> The "progress" defined here is complete control over all actions of individuals in society by an AI god.
Who is defining progress that way? Everyone I know who wants a self-driving car wants it to go where they tell it to.
I'm sure many car enthusiasts care whether the steering wheel is entirely absent. Some people enjoy driving, albeit usually in times/places without much traffic. If someone who found driving therapeutic instead spends their commute time staring at a social media feed on their phone because that's their default action when they aren't sure what to do, would that be fundamentally better for them?
> Who is defining progress that way? Everyone I know who wants a self-driving car wants it to go where they tell it to.
Of course everyone wants self-driving cars to go where they tell it, but that is different from having control over where the car goes. What if the AI that controls the self-driving car takes 99% of people to their destination, but rounds up a few political dissidents and whisks them away to an unknown location. Most everyone would get what they want, but none of the passengers are able to control where the AI takes them. Like Stallman says, "Either the users control the program or the program controls the users."
Perhaps I was ambiguous. You're reading my intent backwards. Few people specifically want the steering wheel to be gone. They generally just want to not care about it.
> If someone who found driving therapeutic instead spends their commute time staring at a social media feed on their phone because that's their default action when they aren't sure what to do, would that be fundamentally better for them?
The car enthusiasts I know still don't like sitting in traffic. It's not the fun sort of driving.
> Of course everyone wants self-driving cars to go where they tell it, but that is different from having control over where the car goes. What if the AI that controls the self-driving car takes 99% of people to their destination, but rounds up a few political dissidents and whisks them away to an unknown location. Most everyone would get what they want, but none of the passengers are able to control where the AI takes them. Like Stallman says, "Either the users control the program or the program controls the users."
I don't know what to say in response to this. This feels over the top absurd to me. If your government is this fundamentally evil and amoral, I don't think driving your own car is going to protect you. There are already lots of ways to get rid of political dissidents.
The core problem is not the car, or who is driving it, but the fact that people need to spend a not insignificant amount of time traveling to and from the location or their employment.
It seems to be defined as convenience by any means necessary.
Umm, no, the "progress" is machines that I don't have to micro-manage anymore. Imagine an oven in your house that you had to constantly adjust to keep it at the desired temperature. No, that would be stupid, we've solved that problem decades ago. Now imagine a car that you had to control by hand with the necessary micro adjustments needed to keep it between the lines. No, that would be...well, it will be stupid, and a solved problem, one of these days.
"Hey, oven, make your interior 425F so I can bake a pizza."
"Hey, car, drive me to Dusty Strings in Fremont. Oh, why am I talking to you? You see it on my calendar, and you've been warmed up and ready waiting for me."
I don't know what dystopian future you're imagining, but I don't see the AI gods whisking me off to places I don't want to go. I see machines that finally, FINALLY, do what I want without me having to speak baby talk to them.
Oven: “Sorry mike. I can only go to 400F unless you upgrade your ovenware plan to $2.99 a month. Or use an ovenware family brand pizza! For every 3 ovenware brand pizzas you cook, you get a chance to win a free pie! Oh by the way on your trip to Dusty Springs tomorrow stop by Chad’s Bakery for their famous pies.”
Assuming that you didn't leave a dish in there the night before.
And that your child didn't hide a favorite toy in there... or a sibling.
I know you're using hyperbole here, and many people will disagree with what I'm going to write next, but that's exactly what I think the long term goal of technology should be. Not just individuals but all of our systems as well.
I'm struggling with this myself so I'm just echoing.
I guess if we're throwing around the term God it kind of loses it's juice.
God in this sense would be "thing that can do things nobody understands." In that sense, yes. Artificial General Intelligence (or maybe even Narrow AI) which can do things that humans can't understand for our benefit would look like "God" to most people.
Nobody can point to a reasonable causal chain of action for previously described "Gods." In the situation I'm advocating for, we would be able to do that - though likely still to a lesser degree than full interpretability.
If the self-driver becomes better than the best human drivers, there's limited gains in real safety if a 15-year-old with his learner's permit/drunkard/suicidal/homicidal/distracted person can still grab the wheel and steer it into a wall manually.
We may find that there are some opportunities that only become feasible if we remove the human factor. I could see a road network with much higher speeds for advanced self-driving vehicles, especially if you rely on the vehicles being able to communicate directly with each other and signaling mechanisms to keep traffic more orderly than a typical freeway.
There may also be some interesting business angles in it-- I fully expect that the feature after "we removed the steering wheel" is "we put a lie-flat bed, workstation or minibar where it lived."
I think there is a battle between two competing AI philosophies. One philosophy thinks AI should be central: all devices need to talk to the overmind for learning. The other philosophy thinks AI should be local: the device should learn on its own, kind of like a biological agent. I think the 'biological agent' form of AI is interesting when it comes to privacy of information. Only you and the device have the data.
The future of AI should be interesting with these two philosophies in mind.
The big question is whether we can build systems that communicate, but don't create vast disparities of information between overminds and everybody else. At this point the handful of information slurping mega-corporations have a huge information advantage compared with the average person. If nothing changes, this is the end of the humanistic world order based on the primacy of the individual brain.
I suspect is usually a mixture. For example Google Translate runs locally if you download a language pair, yet the training is not local. Google Gboard Swipe runs locally: in airplane mode I just added a new word to the dictionary and swipe recognised it, also contact names. However Google sends swipe information to a central location to improve the service...
Who hasn't delete Steam from their computer for a few weeks, thrown out junk food or set up a good workspace in order to promote a behavior in ourselves we want to cultivate, to be more like the person we want to be?
The important thing is that in those situations our environment remained under our control and conscious, and we need to ensure our personal and digital environment remain under our control, and its goals are transparent - and I am not sure companies like Google do or will always agree.
You have a motivation toward self improvement, you make a change to your environment, monitor it, and see what happens. You want to increase your physical fitness, awareness, education, life position, finances, etc. and you make corresponding changes where you and yours are the primary beneficiaries.
Google has a motivation to deliver value to their shareholders. They want to deliver more, so they take advantage of their privileged position in our lives and change our environment for us without asking, monitor it, and see what happens. They have far more capability for analysis and, considering the scale, far more financial motivation to make tiny adjustments that we would pass over in our own optimizations.
Is it necessarily evil or bad for us? No, it doesn't have to be, but I have very little faith in Google to make any choices that even border on altruistic when it's far more profitable to exploit us. Let's remember that fundamentally they are an advertising company, and that drives most of the money in the business; advertising isn't just ads as we know them, but fundamentally the business of changing your mind, suggesting things, and influencing your behaviour to make you exchange some money for some service or good.
When you have a privileged position of influence, and you're willing to sell it to literally anyone who signs up, there is clearly a lot of potential for abuse.
I think there's a case to be made here that Google's motivations can mirror those of the users and that it's in Google's best long term interest for that to be the case.
It seems obvious to me that a company that can be aligned with their customer's desires will have the most longevity, which may mean forgoing temporary, short term revenue gains.
I'm not so naiive to think that it currently is the state of things, or that it's simple for this to be the case - quite the opposite. Rather, my point is that there is no law of economics that guarantees users and corporations must be in conflict or that corporations will always do better financially by exploiting users to the users' detriment (or that a competitor that does that will beat one that doesn't).
But isn't there?
I think the core point of Meditations on Moloch[0] was that there kind of is, that in the limit, competitive environments will always sacrifice every value other than the one over which they're competing, and that an "AI god" would probably be the only thing that's strong enough to break these chains.
--
[0] - http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
However those don't conflict with my point that there is nothing preventing a firm and the sum of their users from having strictly aligned goals in the context of their relationship.
Competition simply means that there could be other firms who may be able to align their goals with users goals more tightly, and run the other firm out of business. Much more to be probed here, like consistency, short and long term goals and desire/goal uncertainty on the part of the user and firm. None of those seem to be intractable issues.
Unless your organization uses Google Apps, or standardizes company cell phones on Android, or uses Google Cloud for hosting things...
I want to see employees have more negotiating power, but you’re being ridiculous. Yes, there’s a whole segment of employees who are exploited by their employers because they are financially vulnerable and may not be able to easily get another job. I’ve worked some of those jobs. They’re mostly not the types of jobs where there’s a lot of concern because their boss makes them use Google Apps.
And going down this road, there’s a huge variety of things you can say your boss “forces” you to do, where it becomes meaningless.
My boss “forces” me to use this brand of office furniture. My boss “forces” me to be here during business hours. My boss “forces” me to do work, for crying out loud! The inhumanity!
You seem to think that if anyone has any ability to cause you inconvenience or even harm if you don’t do their bidding, they’re forced you.
Of course, the risks are different when you're trusting a device from a large corporation to take on a role that a human would do.
I wouldn't buy one, but some people will decide it's worth it, and I don't think they are losing their freedom by giving orders to a machine.
The device doing its job can have my information, but sending it back to the mothership, even if it's for the purposes of improving the service for such devices in general, then it's the equivalent of a real assistant babbling about my private stuff to their colleagues, which is immoral and a fireable offence.
Google at least makes this explicit with "Ok, Google".
'You've effectively hired KGB/CIA to work in your house, the human assistant is just the interface'.
Banks are more regulated than Internet companies, though, so maybe there is something to be done there.
You've hired a tiny, tiny string of server activations, through which your voice gets interpreted and turned into query to be run, with some amount of side effects that may affect your device directly. Just because some people cannot see through the abstraction of a company name, doesn't mean we should let it be the accepted view.
I like to think (and
the sooner the better!)
of a cybernetic meadow
where mammals and computers
live together in mutually
programming harmony
like pure water
touching clear sky.
I like to think
(right now, please!)
of a cybernetic forest
filled with pines and electronics
where deer stroll peacefully
past computers
as if they were flowers
with spinning blossoms.
I like to think
(it has to be!)
of a cybernetic ecology
where we are free of our labors
and joined back to nature,
returned to our mammal
brothers and sisters,
and all watched over
by machines of loving grace.
by Richard Brautigan (1967)
>But the Panopticon was also a laboratory; it could be used as a machine to carry out experiments, to alter behaviour, to train or correct individuals. To experiment with medicines and monitor their effects. To try out different punishments on prisoners, according to their crimes and character, and to seek the most effective ones. To teach different techniques simultaneously to the workers, to decide which is the best. To try out pedagogical experiments – and in particular to take up once again the well-debated problem of secluded education, by using orphans ...
It's interesting to note that the argument made in this post is exactly what Deleuze said two decades after Foucault [1], that the mechanisms of "discipline" are moving outside of enclosed spaces because of the ever-longer trails of data that we leave everywhere.
[1] https://www.jstor.org/stable/778828
"Sure, I am too aware of these techniques and mentally strong to ever be influenced by marketing, but what about the rest of humanity? Google will control their minds like a virus and soon destroy the world!"