Ironic opening line from a website whose full screen banner is desperately trying to convince me that the tracking cookies they don't strictly need are of any benefit to me.
> Why is it that so many companies that rely on monetizing the data of their users seem to be extremely hot on AI?
There's no science behind it but that never stopped someone from selling software to the police, high tech polygraphs are probably out there. Closest thing I've found in production is more "nervous person recognition" used at airports for triggering secondary screening:
>> the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Science and Technology Directorate (S&T) seeks to improve DHS’s ability to quickly and objectively screen individuals for malintent. FAST combines cutting-edge behavioral and physiological science with deception detection theory and state-of-the-art sensor technologies. [0]
I don't think her hot take is mere self-promotion, but rejection that building "good models" is necessary or helpful to average people, maybe there's some benefits but it increases the power of the state more than the individual (old debate in computing)
A simple research on Scholar with "facial recognition liars" leads to a few niche articles about the topic. So it seems that facial recognition for liars is a thing. After a quick look on the articles you can see those methods are very simple and they are not studied at the state of the arts level. It looks like much more an academic research field rather than an industrial field. So her claims are preventive alarmist.
Although, I would say she is not the most informed person in surveillance task in AI. Another surveillance field in AI is the "person re-identification" task. It aims to determine if two pictures of a person from surveillance cameras depict the same person or not. This is my field of research and you have a tons of papers each year in big AI venues and also big company in the author (alibaba, tencent, mostly big chinese tech companies, I saw one paper with Google once on a related task).
Also, I would like to highlight something. She said we need some people to annotate the datasets. For this surveillance task, actually, we have a bunch of methods that aims to less rely on human annotations : LUPerson and LUPerson-NL datasets and respective methods (CVPR 21 and 22) for example.
Finally, I would like to conclude that I mostly agree with her. A bit of nuance would be to see the interaction with the nature of data and the surveillance capabilities. AI on camera data are obviously surveillance. When it comes more blur it's what "surveillance" is for "code taken from the internet to train Github copilot method"? Or what is the surveillance capability from database of digital arts? Those questions seem to be much more relevant and hard in regard of the use of data for surveillance. AI is just a name of a method that we use to process big data at scale in this context.
> Not sure about this take. You need data at the end of the day, to
build good AI models.
I don't think she is saying that AI is predicated on surveillance as a
source of training data (although that does happen in a few
cases). She seems to be saying that surveillance is the primary use
case for AI.
Actually I don't think that's true, consider manufacturing
robots. However, mass surveillance, a societal scourge and urgent
threat to democracy, does seem to be greatly enhanced by AI, so I
think this is a bit of worry take.
> These days it feels like anyone's public takes are more or less just
a means to promote their own cause.
Wasn't it always true? Trivially all people advocate their beliefs,
with a few marginal exceptions like the guy who reads the weather
report.
> Actually I don't think that's true, consider manufacturing robots.
We're long way from making fully AI-driven robots. But much closer to other uses.
Our current world is very data-centric: companies have been collecting, selling, sharing and stashing metadata with websites, social media and smartphones for the last decade. Now, language models will help them process it.
I have one question: for what cause? Surely, for the good of humanity. That's what the companies exist for, right?
It's not like we need laws to force companies to not screw us over, or in America they need lobbyists to force politicians to force companies to not screw them over. Currently, AI is absolutely unregulated wild lawless west, and it's frightening. And not because of bad actors, but because of the 'pretending to be good' ones.
> Wasn't it always true? Trivially all people advocate their beliefs..
You would be surprised, but people need constant reminders of that. Or they will start treating mega-corporations as privacy-respecting, consumer-oriented, eco-friendly or any other bullshit their PR-team trying to push today or will try tomorrow.
Someone else asked that question in this same thread [0].
It's a good question.
The purposelessness of much technology is a problem Neil Postman
addressed very robustly in "Technopoly" [1]. To date I have not heard
any sane responses to his "Six Questions Regarding Technology" [2].
> not because of bad actors, but because of the 'pretending to be good' ones.
When you don't have any reason at all for doing something, and you're
challenged, one tends to use imagination to dream up a plausible
"good" reason.
> “You know, you walk past a facial recognition camera that’s instrumented with pseudo-scientific emotion recognition, and it produces data about you, right or wrong, that says ‘you are happy, you are sad, you have a bad character, you’re a liar, whatever.’
While I'm not aware of any technology that claims to classify faces as liars the rest of the statement is broadly true. And if you wanted to cross-check a face against a database of known liars, the entire statement is true.
According to https://www.cyberlink.com/faceme/insights/articles/363/smart... "It can be difficult to discern how consumers feel about a retail experience, or about the products they are buying or avoiding. Facial recognition can help with this by assessing and charting emotions: happy, sad, angry, surprised, indifferent, etc."
It also says "By cross-checking everyone who enters the store against a database of identified shoplifters and unruly customers, facial recognition can detect and deter repeat offenders" and "Using facial recognition, retailers can know precisely when an employee arrives, takes breaks, and leaves for the day"
Personally a lot of this technology seems pretty doubtful to me - don't shoplifters wear hats to keep their faces off CCTV? And every 'emotion recognition' system demo I've seen has used faces with emotions so ridiculously exaggerated they look like they belong in a youtube thumbnail.
> It also says "By cross-checking everyone who enters the store against a database of identified shoplifters and unruly customers, facial recognition can detect and deter repeat offenders" and "Using facial recognition, retailers can know precisely when an employee arrives, takes breaks, and leaves for the day"
Companies aren't obligated to disclose the training process.
So, we can't tell. Until, in the matter of months, it is available, accessible and almost impossible to regulate. And every company will start using it to not fall behind.
There's a _long_ list of unlawful things that are technically possible, sometimes trivial even. Only _because_ they are possible in the first place, are there laws against them. This process seems slow compared to a human lifespan, but lots of terrible things people used to do got outlawed eventually.
- once it's widespread - it's a standard (targeted ads, cookie tracking, SEO)
- we'd need a lot of infrastructure to track all the data recorded, where it goes, how it is processed, etc. etc.. And if a big company is caught.. they'll pay fines for being caught and let away to continue the same shady practices, as we have seen with privacy scandals at Facebook.
> ...but lots of terrible things people used to do got outlawed eventually.
That's the third reason - surveillance is evil and bad, but it will never be advertised as that. It will be something good and convenient with a surveillance as a side effect, similar to social media and smart appliances.
Maybe, I am just too pessimistic and you're right with: 'This process seems slow compared to a human lifespan'.
> we'd need a lot of infrastructure to track all the data recorded, where it goes, how it is processed, etc. etc..
You just need to punish the people using the data. If you can then track down where they got the data from, that's a bonus. And if you can track down where those second ones got their data from, that's an extra bonus. But everything after the people using it is optional.
Should it be regulated? If businesses want known shoplifters flagged by their AI camera so they can refuse service, shouldn't they have a right to do it?
I know in America this would be painted as an attack on the Holy Minority and therefore no one will be allowed to discuss it without being branded a blasphemer, so I'm curious what people on here think.
I feel like businesses should have this right, but I worry about slippery slopes. It might start with shoplifters, and 20 years later when 99% of stores are owned by the same 3 megacorps, people could get banned for wrongthink and for shaping the political views of the masses at large. Kinda like what they do now on social media.
> While I'm not aware of any technology that claims to classify faces as liars the rest of the statement is broadly true. And if you wanted to cross-check a face against a database of known liars, the entire statement is true.
Well, I don't think the "bad character" thing is there either. The problem is with these statements is they are lies that contain some truth. Cameras exist. AI to try and detect basic facial expressions exists. Mapping from basic facial expressions to underlying emotions exists. But I doubt many people are trying this, except as a way to justify a marketing budget (we want to push our smile numbers from 8% to 8.2% - give me $5m for my marketing department). And I have never heard of anything connecting "liar" or "bad character" to AI detection.
> And if you wanted to cross-check a face against a database of known liars, the entire statement is true.
Filling in the gaps with technically true statements should not justify the emotional change in you this sort of article seems to be trying to engender. It's pretty much not true, and the bits that might be true and honest - e.g. emotion detection - doesn't work well, and is probably not deployed anywhere.
As for using facial recognition to replace time cards, and replace photos of banned customers - sure? Might work?
I see the reverse “lie that contains some truth” in your argument. Obviously this stuff will be used for all of these purposes as soon as it’s able, and probably a little bit before then.
Okay sure let’s take your “bad character” version: of course this is being done. Someone already linked to a commercially available version of it for shoplifters. Of course this type of technology was used to identify protestors in Hong Kong. It was probably also used to identify Jan 6’ers.
And in fact you yourself already hedged that this probably is happening, “ But I doubt many people are trying this, except as a way to justify a marketing budget.” Aka you believe that at least some people are already attempting this.
Got it so we agree facial recognition will be dramatically amped up; we agree AI-based polygraphing will exist; you don’t think AI-identify-bad-intentions-button exists currently and therefore we are supposed to doubt that AI is a major surveillance hazard.
> so we agree facial recognition will be dramatically amped up
It may be. Not that it will be.
> we agree AI-based polygraphing will exist
We didn't mention lie detecting, but no - I was saying liar detection, which was the thing from the article, also sounds like fear-mongering.
> you don’t think AI-identify-bad-intentions-button exists currently
Yes.
> therefore we are supposed to doubt that AI is a major surveillance hazard
No, that's a category error. "Major" and "hazard" are far too vague to decide upon. Will AI be used in surveillance in some capacity? Of course - it likely has been for decades, depending on how you define AI. But implying that you'll walk into a shop and be classified as a liar based on a video feed is not right. I understand websites need emotion for clicks, but I don't think it's right to do it this way.
> don't shoplifters wear hats to keep their faces off CCTV?
I don't remember the name, but a defense company demonstrated a facial recognition software which identified the face while the person is running in the dark, in very low light (IIRC akin to a poorly lit harbor-like environment). The camera was shooting from the side, so the system saw the face for a couple of frames.
So, a small camera mounted to the entrance turnstile of a supermarket with a fairly lit environment can scan almost everyone going in. Are you wearing a balaclava in the store? It's also suspicious in most cases.
> While I'm not aware of any technology that claims to classify faces as liars
Hadn't there been similar systems for phone conversations, based on voice stress analysis? I totally expect this to move to AI based systems, including audio and visual data, if it hasn't been done already. (Also, if a person has been tagged as "liar" – truthfully or not – in any customer history file, this data will be available, as soon as a face is matched.)
I always assumed that tech didn't work, and was designed to act as a deterrent, and/or to let businesses like insurers give claimants a hard time and thus boost their profit margins.
The point isn't whether those things are correct. They are used as tools of surveillance and oppression.
> These are ultimately surveillance systems that are being marketed to those who have power over us generally: our employers, governments, border control, etc., to make determinations and predictions that will shape our access to resources and opportunities.
And hey, the more arbitrary or even false something is, the more obedience you can demonstrate by going along with it just because computer said no, so that's another "bonus".
> In 2019 it was revealed that the Dutch tax authorities had used a self-learning algorithm to create risk profiles in an effort to spot child care benefits fraud.
> Authorities penalized families over a mere suspicion of fraud based on the system’s risk indicators. Tens of thousands of families — often with lower incomes or belonging to ethnic minorities — were pushed into poverty because of exorbitant debts to the tax agency. Some victims committed suicide. More than a thousand children were taken into foster care.
And technology changes the scale of the buy in of that single human you have to blame. Generally a country has to follow some terrible authoritarian leader before horrific things start to happen, but when software causes the problem, even the most open democracies give up and say "Well the software told me so"
Have you? Humans can use anything as a form of oppression, they don't even need tools, they were oppressing the masses with "traditions" for millennia. I am not saying AI tools don't supercharge these things, but the solution to this problem is not crippling technology, it's to improve society. The printing press was used to both distribute hate speech and progressive manifestoes.
Who proposed "crippling" AI tools? Or "blaming" them?
We're still at the step of raising awareness, and that is achieved by making it clear that the situation and the trends are really fucking bad, no ifs and buts and maybes about it.
This tech as a body pillow stuff is really grating to me. Tech doesn't care about you, tech doesn't know you, tech doesn't need you -- other people (and arguably animals) do, right now.
Seems like we are getting to different conclusion from the same premise. Both agree AI tech isn't the problem, the system we live in it is. So I don't understand why should AI take up so much space in public discourse while we should be talking about how to fix the larger societal issues.
>> Authorities penalized families over a mere suspicion of fraud based on the system’s risk indicators. Tens of thousands of families — often with lower incomes or belonging to ethnic minorities — were pushed into poverty because of exorbitant debts to the tax agency. Some victims committed suicide. More than a thousand children were taken into foster care.
> Let that sink in.
The need for governance is important. In this case, an automated (imperfect) labeling system was the arbiter for classification. That should never happen.
The modern internet is easily used for surveillance, the early versions wouldn't have been very useful for surveillance though.
We could pretty easily strip most of the risks out if we cared to, though we'd lose functionality along with it and more importantly it wouldn't be the massive revenue driver it is today.
Are you returning that judgement as a function of the submission title (which apparently rewrites between «gossip» and attention calling an original note, «AI is a way, I think, to entrench and expand the surveillance business model»), of Coldewey's summary of the interview, of the interview itself ( https://youtu.be/amNriUZNP8w ), of the paper that is the occasion for the interview
I'm just reading a rather well written PhD thesis that disputes this [0]
Certainly, any badly designed communication system is incidentally a
surveillance device. And there are many examples stretching back to
the 1940s.
However, a properly designed communication system is inherently a
counter-surveillance system. It just took us 80 years to figure out
that important functional requirement.
Definitions don't matter. The device I carry in my pocket is "defined" as a "smartphone" despite being a computer that just happens to have an app that simulates an archaic device called a "telephone" installed on it.
It also provides convenient access for law enforcement to monitor all of my social media accounts and communications and metadata and scan my storage for contraband. Preferably with a warrant but of course probably with any number of backdoors installed by design. We all know at this point that warrants don't matter either.
Radio broadcast can certainly be used for surveillance, in that at the very least the location of the broadcast signal can be triangulated and monitored. Which is how law enforcement can also use the "smartphone" in my pocket to track my location in realtime.
Even when it's turned off. Because the definition of the "off" button doesn't matter, either. It isn't an "off button" it's a button that runs an app that simulates "turning the phone off," but might just put it into a low power state or who knows?
Your computer spies on you. The web spies on you. Your appliances spy on you. Your car spies on you. Your lightbulbs spy on you. The locks on your front door spy on you. Unless you're primitive enough not to use modern "smart" technology (which isn't defined as surveillance technology but which always seems to be in the news because it gets used or abused as exactly that.) Everything, everywhere, spies on you all the time. And if it doesn't, wait a few years, someone will find a way to make sure that it does. But none of it will be surveillance "by definition." Convenience, customer obsession, safety, the definitions will be plentiful but none of them will matter.
I don't need a gun to kill people, I can use a knife, but the existence of knives doesn't negate the lethality of guns.
Technology may not be necessary for surveillance but it is nonetheless used for surveillance. That other means besides technology can also be used for surveillance is irrelevant to the utility of technology for surveillance.
These technologies all commodities spying, making it viable when you couldn't send a person to do the spying.
I live in a rural area. The government would never bother to send someone to spy on me here, I can't imagine they suspect me of anything important enough to spend resources on me. But they can spy on me digitally for a very low cost and with little or no humna resources. Even better for them, they can spy on me digitally without cause and dump the data in storage in case they ever want to pull it up later.
And in doing so you've created a data fingerprint that can be surveilled, and then the NSA just roots your phone or data provider or Google or whatever they want, so no, you really can't.
>My mother birthing me made such an impact on the universe that can be surveilled. This is a moot point.
It's only a moot point when you move the goalposts outside of our lightcone.
It is concretely and objectively fact that attempts to avoid surveillance create a profile that can be used to surveil you, because the more you attempt to avoid surveillance, the more you stand out against the noise. Everything leaks.
And your counter argument is that "the material universe exists, and can be observed, therefore your argument is irrelevant?"
If you can't be bothered with a serious reply, just don't reply. It's fine. I don't expect much from Hacker News anymore.
Now you're saying that a potential for surveillance is enough to reduce a thing to a surverillance technology? Not intent, not actual use, just the possibility?
I also agree that it is a bubble, but I feel like it is more of a "dotcom" type of bubble rather than crypto/NFT type of bubble, if it makes any sense.
It makes sense. Investor hopes and the resultant valuations have gotten way ahead of the actual state of the market, but the underlying AI tech is real and useful and being applied everywhere. Crypto/NFT was never anything more than a blatant scam.
However, the dangers here are immense. There was https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xoVJKj8lcNQ where they argued for 2028 being an AI election where the person with most computing power wins. Propaganda produced by humans on small scale killed 300 000 people in the US alone in this pandemic https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2022/05/13/1098071... imagine the next pandemic when it'll be produced on an industrial scale by LLMs. Literally millions will die of it.
This bubble must be extinguished by all force US regulators possess. There's not much time left, it must banned with prejudice.
I agree and it is the current last hope investors are putting their dreams in for the overvalued stock market to keep going up. “But what if AI changes everything?” I don’t really see their point of view and I would love to see how AI would usher in this new era of value being created if anyone wants to share. Wouldn’t it more be used to lay off millions of people and information workers that can be replaced by AI, that now can’t buy things?
The interesting difference here is the emotions involved in the marketing and public perception; crypto was largely about hope, NFTs were greed and a quick buck, AI seems to be a mix of embracing the future and fear of the future.
Almost all the software engineers I know are sceptical of this wave of AI at best, or openly dismissive at worst.
The people I know buying into the hope and/or fear are people with no actual hands on experience, or no technical knowledge beyond the 10,000ft view their engineers describe to them.
Generalising, of course, but this has been my observation as the dust settled from the AI boom late last year.
Same as the dot com boom from my perspective. There is real value to be had, but when everyone gets on the bandwagon the real value is obscured by wild speculation.
I reckon find some boring undervalued AI startup with a reliable revenue stream from the outset then sit on it for a couple of decades.
These are the guys making the actual money. A few mil in VC is fun but will only get you so far; finding a boring, useful niche to sit in and supply a market long-term is so underrated these days.
VR was a technology step that could have had interesting uses for a new experience, pumped up like crazy by VCs that just wanted a new hype train to fill with cheap money.
NFTs, at least most of them, were complete frauds from the beginning and only existed to scam users in what was basically a ponzi scheme.
I think this is putting the horse before the cart.
There is no doubt that the surveillance business model has captured tech. But "AI" - which to me is just the shortest possible way to say "algorithmic processing of digital information" - is just one more category of tools exploited to buttress and expand the dominance of said business model. It just happens that while other innovations (blockchain, quantum computing etc) are not immediately (or ever) usable, AI tools are practical and deployable here and now.
To better understand my point imagine the polar opposite system: a digital universe that fully respects our various professed humanistic values and uses technology only to empower individuals, bind society together etc. We would still need large scale algorithmic support if we are to manage interfacing our biologically defined brain bandwidth with the vast and growing silicon exo-brain.
In other words, lets us not concede that surveillance capitalism owns every possible future of tech.
When there is no Purpose, or no Purpose that Everyone accepts, and yet things are mindlessly scaled up, the scaler makes enemies. And its all pure chaos what happens next.
why is that such a popular opinion. Tech has been financed for decades by individuals, corporates and public sector actors. Even today a large fraction is financed by "healthy" tech services demand.
One of the many dramatic flaws of surveillance capitalism is that it cannot really provide the entire tech stack society needs. It thrives as a parasitic model, predicated on political dysfunction and public ignorance. Society must finance the bulk of the infrastructure and then hand over the keys to the digital kingdom as it were.
What is undeniable is that surveillance is the most lucrative mode. This is not surprising: borderline legal / morally dubious activities are always the most profitable.
People have been conditioned to see software and even online services as something that should be "free." That's what I'm referring to.
It's obviously a bigger issue for B2C than B2B.
If everything has to be "free" then it becomes impossible to create sophisticated software or run any kind of service without finding some scuzzy way to double-dip and sell out your users. There is no viable business model that aligns the producer with the customer.
Yes, that is alas a prevailing mindset in consumer behavior. But it is indeed a case of "conditioning" which requires authorities to offer tacit approval for these freebies. Do you remember, e.g., how India snubbed facebook's "free basics" plan?
> it becomes impossible to create sophisticated software or run any kind of service
This. While monetizing user behavior is very valuable there is a ceiling to it. It can't make up for the huge potential value of all the things one can possibly build.
At some point we might be forced to conclude that surveillance capitalism makes no long-term economic sense. It is either a bubble or actually a political choice to sacrifice a real digital economy in favor of control.
It's the thing it does make more efficient, which was predictable.
And accuracy doesn't matter. If it's 99% and the powerful are whitelisted for human review, that's enough. That's enough to pull a mesh so fine over every human being on the planet, forever, that reaches deeply into them before they can even begin to form a personality.
The jump from individuals listening to individual phone calls as they were happening to what became possible in the decades after that might be smaller than the jump from that to the capability of transcribing anything anyone utters, even in their sleep, automatically, and adding it to a giant corpus of data to fish for suspects or assets or blackmail recipients in, in seconds. With then being able to act on those people as if they were a dataset (set a few flags, which systems or humans downstream heed without question, done).
It's a very grave threat, and I find it interesting that people decades ago who wrote about it called it that, but now that we're in it, we find it very easy to just shrug it off. But it's the same lethal threat to what it means to be human. Privacy is required for thought, without thought there's no humanity worth mentioning, QED.
Imagine an adversary country surveilling all the youth of another, or even just at elite schools, and being able to use that as blackmail as they age into the leadership class. Or maybe we just won’t care any more. We’ve recently had a US president accused of all sorts of unsavory things, but who still retains a massive following, even among Evangelicals. What possible revelation could bring him down?
I think it really depends on the person. If you're Assange, it doesn't matter if you did it. It's easier if you did it, but it doesn't have priority. For your in-group (be that cult followers or large power structures), you can get away with pretty much anything.
Which I think makes it even harder to get people to understand how shit this timeline is, because everybody is dreaming about what it could do for them, not to them. And the people who have reason to believe to never be at the wrong end of these sticks, have no idea how it deforms them, either.
Humanity has proven its skill at dehumanizing humans in all sorts of ways, with all sorts of rhetorical and technological means, so yeah, sure, "AI" (which in practicality means "surveil everyone and get them to like/do what you want them to like and do", the rest are gimmicks and chaff) is "nothing new", but it's still like humans going from "always having had weapons" to "fucking nukes".
I think people do a disservice to their cause when they make semantic arguments like this.
Isn't enough to say that AI can be used for enhanced surveillance by malicious actors? What does it mean to be a "surveillance technology"? Now you have people arguing about whether AI fits the definition of this made up term instead of talking about the potentially nefarious surveillance applications.
I think she is pointing out there is a bit of a vicious cycle.
AI needs data [1], so in the end people compete on the data - this drives more and more surveillance type behaviour - including using AI to collect data [2].
[1] not controversial I hope
[2] eg face recognition, identification by joining the dots from traded data.
It's not necessarily nefarious per se - just the dynamic - and once the data is out there....
"Brian Heater is the Hardware Editor at TechCrunch. He worked for a number of leading tech publications, including Engadget, PCMag, Laptop, and Tech Times, where he served as the Managing Editor. His writing has appeared in Spin, Wired, Playboy, Entertainment Weekly, The Onion, Boing Boing, Publishers Weekly, The Daily Beast and various other publications. He hosts the weekly Boing Boing interview podcast RiYL, has appeared as a regular NPR contributor and shares his Queens apartment with a rabbit named Lucy."
?
This site isn't my first choice for news, but I'm not sure how any of that dismisses from the points made in the article. Maybe someday we'll care about consumer protection laws and starve the growing industry around AI for training data.
I'm not saying it's contradictory to say closed source is surveillance tech and open source is surveillance tech, but it's certainly unintuitive.
For my part, it feels like some tech is designed for specific use cases (eg pinboard, kagi). If you trust those developers they don't need to open source their work.
If you look at it from a systems perspective, ad tech benefits from scale and data, so when a product is built "for everyone" and monetized with ads.... Yeah it's going to be surveillance tech
Bad premise, and therefore nonsense conclusions, because AI can have many uses, aside from surveillance. In this regard, it's not like a gun, which is very specifically an instrument to kill, and has secondary uses like shooting sports, but rather it's a tool, like tongs, which can be used for building, cooking, and also to torture someone.
Advertising companies are jumping at AI for two things: it is hoped that it can give them an edge, and second, because they already have data, which is in fact fundamental for AI.
In many countries guns are used in a nonlethal way. My friend during psychosis stabbed a policeman in the leg with a kitchen knife, and was only shot in the leg as a response.
I don't think any country has a police force with a shoot to wound policy. Your friend was extremely lucky. It's not practical to shoot to wound in most circumstances. The arms and legs move faster than a shooter can react and that's why center of mass is what is trained.
"Om polisen skjuter mot en person ska de sträva efter att bara för tillfället oskadliggöra personen. Skotten ska i första hand riktas mot benen, men om omständigheterna kräver det får polisen skjuta direkt mot överkroppen – till exempel om den hotfulla personen befinner sig nära i avstånd och angreppet går fort."
Google translation:
"If the police shoot at a person, they must aim to render the person harmless only for the time being. The shots must primarily be aimed at the legs, but if the circumstances require it, the police may shoot directly at the upper body - for example, if the threatening person is close in distance and the attack is fast."
That's interesting, it prompted me to read more on this. You definitely don't want to act in a threatening way in USA or Canada where it's shoot to kill and the death rates from police reflect this.
I don't know of many countries explicitly require shoot to wound, but many functionally have this with laws that require minimizing harm.
It's noticeable in the stats of police shootings versus police killings, where countries with these types of laws might see 10 police shootings in a year but 0 or 1 police killings.
Germany does. The situation is less clear cut than what it seems like from the sister comment, but in general, a police officer is legally prohibited from even using a gun unless the situation does not allow for any other means. This can also mean shooting a person to prevent their escape, but even that is only legal in certain circumstances.
Using LETHAL force has even stronger guards on it. Germany itself has no legal grounds for this AT ALL, as far as I know. Some states have a clause in their Police Laws that specifically mention a "Finaler Rettungsschuß" (final saving shot), which is a shot that would kill with "almost certain probability", and it is only allowed if there is no other way for the officer to save themselves or others from significant harm (see quote from law below). The exact legal situation differs between states, but even Bavaria, which has been widely critiqued for its liberal police law, only allows for the final saving shot:
"2) Schußwaffen dürfen gegen Personen nur gebraucht werden, um angriffs- oder fluchtunfähig zu machen. Ein Schuß, der mit an Sicherheit grenzender Wahrscheinlichkeit tödlich wirken wird, ist nur zulässig, wenn er das einzige Mittel zur Abwehr einer gegenwärtigen Gefahr für Leib oder Leben einer Person ist."
> a gun, which is very specifically an instrument to kill
Is it though? Maybe a gun is the most efficient way to send a destructive projectile to a nearby target. Any "killing living things" part is secondary to the primary function.
> which can be used for building, cooking, and also to torture someone.
Okay but that may imply AI is a building technology, & cooking technology... and surveillance technology. That's how disruptive it is, it's coming at us on multiple fronts.
Yes, in retrospect, guns are instruments created to destruct or hurt, rather than kill. Still, the original point stands: guns are created and used for specific problems, and other tools, in which I include AI, are much more general in usage, even with potential to abuse.
I agree with your point about AI being a more general tool. I can also appreciate the point in article, that tech services are pushing AI, rushing to normalize it. Some are concerned how our data is used to facilitate new AI features, given the track record of tech companies to put profit ahead of privacy, or ecosystem lock-in ahead of open flexibility.
Occam's razor: the most profitable business model for Internet companies with very DAUs and Timespent/DAUs in the last 20 years was showing advertisements. Those very profitable companies are always working on cutting edge stuff, whether it's distributed systems, database research, datacenters, mobile hardware and software, or, as it is today, the various tools and methods grouped under the umbrella term AI.
Science and technology are fundamentally about overcoming limitations and enabling previously impossible things. The process is ethically neutral, or oblivious if you will. Once you discover nitration, it will be used to produce both hunger-reducing fertilizers and devastating explosives. One cannot be discovered without the other, because they often involve the same chemical compounds.
If you used said limitations to protect something you value, you have to start looking for a better protection. It's a constant process of adaptation. It cannot and should not be stopped. Instead we should be looking for ways to adapt, preferably ahead of time. Restrictions work to a rather small extent.
Be fully aware that a new scientific or engineering breakthrough will have all the potential to result in more deadly weapons, invasion of your privacy, undermining democracy, exacerbating inequality, putting you personally out of job, and disrupting whatever else you hold dear. It's always high time to think about factors which would eliminate or at least limit such consequences, and these must be positive factors, things people do willingly and profitably, not bans.
It's time to think not how to ban the privacy-invading AI (it will never work), but how to have a smaller footprint that may be used to invade your privacy, and, most importantly, how to run things in such.a way that invading your privacy is not profitable, even though still possible. And, inevitably, learn to live with even less privacy by default.
> The process is ethically neutral, or oblivious if you will.
I like 'oblivious' here, as it seems to me a matter of chance about who will achieve a breakthrough. It does seem to me that once a breakthrough is achieved by someone it will be used to enhance their power over others (counterexamples welcome!) To my mind, this power calls into doubt its ethical neutrality. Yes, it is the people in possession who are making the ethical choices... but they are ethical choices enabled by the technology.
You've left out the "unintended consequences" bit? Soil degradation at scale from fertilizer use? Ocean run off?
It's time to think not how to ban the privacy-invading AI (it will never work), but how to have a smaller footprint that may be used to invade your privacy, and, most importantly, how to run things in such.a way that invading your privacy is not profitable, even though still possible. And, inevitably, learn to live with even less privacy by default.
When 50%+ of the cars driving around your city are Google / Waymo cars which are essentially intelligence gathering tanks with unparalleled surveillance capability, I don't see how anyone is going to be reducing any footprints ? Cashless society? Home assistant robots that "phone home"? Face it, this is not going to be getting better anytime soon. We can try adapt all we like but maybe we should just be walking around with EMP emitting back packs on if we care about our privacy?
Would it be possible to combine machine learning with something like 23andMe and match 100 000 person photos with their DNA. Would we have an AI model which basically can tell how the persons looks like from a strand of hair?
Imagine finding some DNA on a crime scene. Witnesses can say that this person was a bit overweight so you slide some slider to the right a bit and get a pretty good AI generated portrait of a criminal.
I think it's fundamentally possible but the training set needed might be so large that you're better off just actually cataloging the DNA of most humans and pulling up the picture of the closest match.
There are already features you can extract from DNA. 23andMe shows you your traits and confidence level depending on the research.
But you know just bring it to the real thing: With DNA, Video and ML you will be able to track and find that person through face recognition and probability automatically.
When playing with a custom LoRA (dreambooth / SDXL) trained on my brother’s photos of himself something interesting happened, when we used the prompt “as a women” instead of “a man”, the result looked incredibly similar to one of our cousin, so much that my parents asked how come she was now in the pictures generated.
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.
This has no more validity than "the internet is fundamentally a surveillance technology." It's a conflation of a tool's sometimes harmful usage with an inseparable aspect of its nature.
And the idea that AI "requires the surveillance business model" is demonstrably false. Thousands of researchers over the last 7 decades have contributed to the development of the collection of technologies we call AI without that business model.
However this is Meredith Whittaker so we can assume she knows that. So yeah, those are provocative statements made for rhetorical effect to emphasize that power will use technology to do bad things and enshrine and enhance its power.
> This has no more validity than "the internet is fundamentally a surveillance technology." It's a conflation of a tool's sometimes harmful usage with an inseparable aspect of its nature.
I mean at some point the conflation itself is rather fair game, given that such massive swaths of the modern Internet apply it directly. The most predominant search engine sells ads. The most predominant social media sites, all of them, run on paid placement of content (ads). In fact, every social media site with even a little traffic besides perhaps Mastodon does (I honestly don't know I've never used it). Twitter/X is trying to get off advertising as it's revenue source and because of that is worth a 10th of what it was when Elon bought it less than a year ago. Amazon you could make an argument isn't based on ads (entirely) but it's also the largest retail website in the history of man and that's probably the only reason, and also, it's largest cash cow at the moment is AWS which is absolutely shoulders deep in ads, ad services, serving ads, and ad targeting.
Podcasts? Ads. Listicles? Ads. Substacks? Ads. Need a driver file to make an ancient videogame work? You'll find a website that hosts it, alongside some ads. Wanna download some ROMs for SNES games you definitely own? Ads. Pirating some pornography with surprisingly good production value that's riffing on Pirates of the Caribbean? Sounds fun, also, the website you get the torrent link from has ads.
And like, you can get into the semantics of there's no other way to fund a website, they didn't all choose it, some don't use surveillance to serve their ads, and all the rest, and to that I say, you have much more trust in corporations than I do. Salesforce would sell my grandmother into sex slavery if they could make $5 doing so so you'll have to forgive me if I just don't necessarily trust the internet ad machine when it says pinky promise we aren't exploiting your data, especially since every time they have a data leak incident, oops, there's all my data again. Aw shucks aw geez.
User data is practically the only currency on the internet anymore, and user attention in turn is the only resource being mined by social media. Of course it's for advertising. What else would it be for? What else could it be for?
> However this is Meredith Whittaker so we can assume she knows that. So yeah, those are provocative statements made for rhetorical effect to emphasize that power will use technology to do bad things and enshrine and enhance its power.
I mean that seems like something worth emphasizing? Ad tech has had a massive influence over the modern internet space, which is why it's so fucking bad. Basically every terrible decision you lament on a daily basis, every dark pattern, every annoying thing, can in some way or another be traced to ad tech. All that shit about when you talk about needing a new hose near your phone and suddenly you have ads for hoses, that's ad tech. The entire pivot to video fiasco! Facebook wanted to stream video and bullshitted publishers and media orgs with cooked numbers that it was "what people wanted" even though demonstrably no they fucking did not, do not, and never will want that, it's what ad tech wanted and therefore it was sacrosanct, right up until it killed literally hundreds if not thousands of websites. Except even that wasn't enough, because ad tech still wants it, and so we have video platforms left and right because these companies do not work for us, they work for advertisers.
Like no it isn't everything, no single entity could be that bad. I'm just saying if all of ad tech was Thanos-snapped out of existence tomorrow, the Internet would be incredibly different, better in a lot of ways, so I feel the conflation is fair game.
What is it, in general, that makes people feel so motivated to defend AI? Every commenter can't be the CEO of some AI adjacent company.. Beyond that, why care so much? You can still use it even if its imperfect, you can even still use it while recognizing the fraught society it is being introduced into and the consequences of that introduction. And even in that recognition, we can be excited for what this stuff might actually be useful for.
But the discourse in general seems to always resolve into something indistinguishable from kids arguing that the PS3 is superior to the xbox.
Isn't the "hacker" spirit one which itches to utilize and exploit? To be empowered and to be quick to kill your darlings? Why are we so quick to subordinate ourselves here? To appeal to ambiguous authorities? Is it all just some tacit futurism the AI fanboys have fallen in line with? Where has the confidence, the spirit, the sense of breezy mastery gone? There has got to still be interesting people around, those that are too cool for BigCompany Product.
> Isn't the "hacker" spirit one which itches to utilize and exploit? To be empowered and to be quick to kill your darlings?
Isn't that the answer? Someone is saying "entire technology, broadly, is bad" and a bunch of people who love technologies, who want to use this for all sorts of things, are going "what? no".
Who's subordinating? If I were to agree with the article would I be subordinate to techcrunch? No one is "fanboying" we're on a highly technical website with practitioners who, more or less, have a better understanding of the technology than virtually everyone involved in writing this article.
No one is even talking about BigCompany Product. A quick scan of the comments shows no mentions of meta or openai or chatgpt.
> Someone is saying "entire technology, broadly, is bad" and a bunch of people who love technologies, who want to use this for all sorts of things, are going "what? no".
Exactly what I am trying to talk about, that is, this concern over big T Technology, rather than simply caring about one technology or another because of what they do or enable. These constant injections of vague existential stakes, when did this start happening? I am not quite that old, but I know it hasn't always been quite like this.
Is it perhaps what we have landed on as an ideology to deal with economic insecurities in the tech world? Like the wider world is disillusioned with idea that one app or another can fix the world, and now stakeholders like us need to go all in on a more profound kind of technological determinism? Where Technology is a Pure Form that needs protection?
Or is it maybe just a new generation? Younger people did not see the same kind of technological advancements older people have, so "technology " feels somehow more monolithic, self-same to them?
And honestly, it is all more interesting than sad or annoying to me... And its not about AI in general, we saw the same kind of rhetoric with crypto stuff too. Its just a shift in the way are people are talking ultimately, and its very strange.
In general I know you are right about this forum, but it has been harder and harder to sift through lately, but maybe thats just me.
200 comments
[ 5.2 ms ] story [ 449 ms ] thread> Why is it that so many companies that rely on monetizing the data of their users seem to be extremely hot on AI?
Not sure about this take. You need data at the end of the day, to build good AI models.
These days it feels like anyone's public takes are more or less just a means to promote their own cause.
And I say this as a happy and long-time Signal user.
There's no science behind it but that never stopped someone from selling software to the police, high tech polygraphs are probably out there. Closest thing I've found in production is more "nervous person recognition" used at airports for triggering secondary screening:
>> the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Science and Technology Directorate (S&T) seeks to improve DHS’s ability to quickly and objectively screen individuals for malintent. FAST combines cutting-edge behavioral and physiological science with deception detection theory and state-of-the-art sensor technologies. [0]
I don't think her hot take is mere self-promotion, but rejection that building "good models" is necessary or helpful to average people, maybe there's some benefits but it increases the power of the state more than the individual (old debate in computing)
[0] https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/Future%...
Although, I would say she is not the most informed person in surveillance task in AI. Another surveillance field in AI is the "person re-identification" task. It aims to determine if two pictures of a person from surveillance cameras depict the same person or not. This is my field of research and you have a tons of papers each year in big AI venues and also big company in the author (alibaba, tencent, mostly big chinese tech companies, I saw one paper with Google once on a related task).
Also, I would like to highlight something. She said we need some people to annotate the datasets. For this surveillance task, actually, we have a bunch of methods that aims to less rely on human annotations : LUPerson and LUPerson-NL datasets and respective methods (CVPR 21 and 22) for example.
Finally, I would like to conclude that I mostly agree with her. A bit of nuance would be to see the interaction with the nature of data and the surveillance capabilities. AI on camera data are obviously surveillance. When it comes more blur it's what "surveillance" is for "code taken from the internet to train Github copilot method"? Or what is the surveillance capability from database of digital arts? Those questions seem to be much more relevant and hard in regard of the use of data for surveillance. AI is just a name of a method that we use to process big data at scale in this context.
I don't think she is saying that AI is predicated on surveillance as a source of training data (although that does happen in a few cases). She seems to be saying that surveillance is the primary use case for AI.
Actually I don't think that's true, consider manufacturing robots. However, mass surveillance, a societal scourge and urgent threat to democracy, does seem to be greatly enhanced by AI, so I think this is a bit of worry take.
> These days it feels like anyone's public takes are more or less just a means to promote their own cause.
Wasn't it always true? Trivially all people advocate their beliefs, with a few marginal exceptions like the guy who reads the weather report.
We're long way from making fully AI-driven robots. But much closer to other uses.
Our current world is very data-centric: companies have been collecting, selling, sharing and stashing metadata with websites, social media and smartphones for the last decade. Now, language models will help them process it. I have one question: for what cause? Surely, for the good of humanity. That's what the companies exist for, right?
It's not like we need laws to force companies to not screw us over, or in America they need lobbyists to force politicians to force companies to not screw them over. Currently, AI is absolutely unregulated wild lawless west, and it's frightening. And not because of bad actors, but because of the 'pretending to be good' ones.
> Wasn't it always true? Trivially all people advocate their beliefs..
You would be surprised, but people need constant reminders of that. Or they will start treating mega-corporations as privacy-respecting, consumer-oriented, eco-friendly or any other bullshit their PR-team trying to push today or will try tomorrow.
Someone else asked that question in this same thread [0].
It's a good question.
The purposelessness of much technology is a problem Neil Postman addressed very robustly in "Technopoly" [1]. To date I have not heard any sane responses to his "Six Questions Regarding Technology" [2].
> not because of bad actors, but because of the 'pretending to be good' ones.
When you don't have any reason at all for doing something, and you're challenged, one tends to use imagination to dream up a plausible "good" reason.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37656891
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technopoly
[2] https://cyber.harvard.edu/node/95930
> “You know, you walk past a facial recognition camera that’s instrumented with pseudo-scientific emotion recognition, and it produces data about you, right or wrong, that says ‘you are happy, you are sad, you have a bad character, you’re a liar, whatever.’
While I'm not aware of any technology that claims to classify faces as liars the rest of the statement is broadly true. And if you wanted to cross-check a face against a database of known liars, the entire statement is true.
According to https://www.cyberlink.com/faceme/insights/articles/363/smart... "It can be difficult to discern how consumers feel about a retail experience, or about the products they are buying or avoiding. Facial recognition can help with this by assessing and charting emotions: happy, sad, angry, surprised, indifferent, etc."
It also says "By cross-checking everyone who enters the store against a database of identified shoplifters and unruly customers, facial recognition can detect and deter repeat offenders" and "Using facial recognition, retailers can know precisely when an employee arrives, takes breaks, and leaves for the day"
Personally a lot of this technology seems pretty doubtful to me - don't shoplifters wear hats to keep their faces off CCTV? And every 'emotion recognition' system demo I've seen has used faces with emotions so ridiculously exaggerated they look like they belong in a youtube thumbnail.
Ofc you "can" - in principle.
Is any of this currently being done, however?
Companies aren't obligated to disclose the training process. So, we can't tell. Until, in the matter of months, it is available, accessible and almost impossible to regulate. And every company will start using it to not fall behind.
There's a _long_ list of unlawful things that are technically possible, sometimes trivial even. Only _because_ they are possible in the first place, are there laws against them. This process seems slow compared to a human lifespan, but lots of terrible things people used to do got outlawed eventually.
There are three reasons:
- once it's widespread - it's a standard (targeted ads, cookie tracking, SEO)
- we'd need a lot of infrastructure to track all the data recorded, where it goes, how it is processed, etc. etc.. And if a big company is caught.. they'll pay fines for being caught and let away to continue the same shady practices, as we have seen with privacy scandals at Facebook.
> ...but lots of terrible things people used to do got outlawed eventually.
That's the third reason - surveillance is evil and bad, but it will never be advertised as that. It will be something good and convenient with a surveillance as a side effect, similar to social media and smart appliances.
Maybe, I am just too pessimistic and you're right with: 'This process seems slow compared to a human lifespan'.
You just need to punish the people using the data. If you can then track down where they got the data from, that's a bonus. And if you can track down where those second ones got their data from, that's an extra bonus. But everything after the people using it is optional.
I know in America this would be painted as an attack on the Holy Minority and therefore no one will be allowed to discuss it without being branded a blasphemer, so I'm curious what people on here think.
I feel like businesses should have this right, but I worry about slippery slopes. It might start with shoplifters, and 20 years later when 99% of stores are owned by the same 3 megacorps, people could get banned for wrongthink and for shaping the political views of the masses at large. Kinda like what they do now on social media.
https://www.smartcompany.com.au/industries/information-techn...
https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/up-to-70-cameras-watch-y...
Well, I don't think the "bad character" thing is there either. The problem is with these statements is they are lies that contain some truth. Cameras exist. AI to try and detect basic facial expressions exists. Mapping from basic facial expressions to underlying emotions exists. But I doubt many people are trying this, except as a way to justify a marketing budget (we want to push our smile numbers from 8% to 8.2% - give me $5m for my marketing department). And I have never heard of anything connecting "liar" or "bad character" to AI detection.
> And if you wanted to cross-check a face against a database of known liars, the entire statement is true.
Filling in the gaps with technically true statements should not justify the emotional change in you this sort of article seems to be trying to engender. It's pretty much not true, and the bits that might be true and honest - e.g. emotion detection - doesn't work well, and is probably not deployed anywhere.
As for using facial recognition to replace time cards, and replace photos of banned customers - sure? Might work?
That's not the thing I was talking about.
> Probably a little bit before it’s actually capable of doing it reliably.
I think you said that already?
And in fact you yourself already hedged that this probably is happening, “ But I doubt many people are trying this, except as a way to justify a marketing budget.” Aka you believe that at least some people are already attempting this.
This is getting painfully repetitious, but that was about facial recognition, not deciding if someone's a liar or is of bad character via AI.
> Identifying protesters isn't the same as an AI filming you and deciding if you are of bad character.
Same comment.
Am I reading this right now?
It may be. Not that it will be.
> we agree AI-based polygraphing will exist
We didn't mention lie detecting, but no - I was saying liar detection, which was the thing from the article, also sounds like fear-mongering.
> you don’t think AI-identify-bad-intentions-button exists currently
Yes.
> therefore we are supposed to doubt that AI is a major surveillance hazard
No, that's a category error. "Major" and "hazard" are far too vague to decide upon. Will AI be used in surveillance in some capacity? Of course - it likely has been for decades, depending on how you define AI. But implying that you'll walk into a shop and be classified as a liar based on a video feed is not right. I understand websites need emotion for clicks, but I don't think it's right to do it this way.
I don't remember the name, but a defense company demonstrated a facial recognition software which identified the face while the person is running in the dark, in very low light (IIRC akin to a poorly lit harbor-like environment). The camera was shooting from the side, so the system saw the face for a couple of frames.
So, a small camera mounted to the entrance turnstile of a supermarket with a fairly lit environment can scan almost everyone going in. Are you wearing a balaclava in the store? It's also suspicious in most cases.
Hadn't there been similar systems for phone conversations, based on voice stress analysis? I totally expect this to move to AI based systems, including audio and visual data, if it hasn't been done already. (Also, if a person has been tagged as "liar" – truthfully or not – in any customer history file, this data will be available, as soon as a face is matched.)
There are (and have been for many years of development, although I do not know about deployment) methods for identifying people as criminals.
Not a technology, but the "science" has a name: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phrenology?useskin=timeless#Ap...
Therefore…
AI is fundamentally a surveillance technology.
SOURCE:
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2009/09/your-secrets-liv...
> These are ultimately surveillance systems that are being marketed to those who have power over us generally: our employers, governments, border control, etc., to make determinations and predictions that will shape our access to resources and opportunities.
And hey, the more arbitrary or even false something is, the more obedience you can demonstrate by going along with it just because computer said no, so that's another "bonus".
Here's a chilling real-life example:
https://www.politico.eu/article/dutch-scandal-serves-as-a-wa...
> In 2019 it was revealed that the Dutch tax authorities had used a self-learning algorithm to create risk profiles in an effort to spot child care benefits fraud.
> Authorities penalized families over a mere suspicion of fraud based on the system’s risk indicators. Tens of thousands of families — often with lower incomes or belonging to ethnic minorities — were pushed into poverty because of exorbitant debts to the tax agency. Some victims committed suicide. More than a thousand children were taken into foster care.
Let that sink in.
Don't do that part, nothing to do with AI, it's about humans being lazy
We're still at the step of raising awareness, and that is achieved by making it clear that the situation and the trends are really fucking bad, no ifs and buts and maybes about it.
This tech as a body pillow stuff is really grating to me. Tech doesn't care about you, tech doesn't know you, tech doesn't need you -- other people (and arguably animals) do, right now.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_childcare_benefits_scand...
> Let that sink in.
The need for governance is important. In this case, an automated (imperfect) labeling system was the arbiter for classification. That should never happen.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/03/13/905323/ai-lie-de...
How do we protect against the downsides? Do we need a privacy bill of rights? I say yes.
We could pretty easily strip most of the risks out if we cared to, though we'd lose functionality along with it and more importantly it wouldn't be the massive revenue driver it is today.
(it must be Open (For Business): Big Tech, Concentrated Power, and the Political Economy of Open AI - https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4543807 )...?
Whittaker's point is about a certain cone of issues. Her position was previously exposed at least at https://slate.com/technology/2023/05/meredith-whittaker-inte...
Certainly, any badly designed communication system is incidentally a surveillance device. And there are many examples stretching back to the 1940s.
However, a properly designed communication system is inherently a counter-surveillance system. It just took us 80 years to figure out that important functional requirement.
[1] https://research.tue.nl/files/197416841/20220325_Appelbaum_h...
It also provides convenient access for law enforcement to monitor all of my social media accounts and communications and metadata and scan my storage for contraband. Preferably with a warrant but of course probably with any number of backdoors installed by design. We all know at this point that warrants don't matter either.
Radio broadcast can certainly be used for surveillance, in that at the very least the location of the broadcast signal can be triangulated and monitored. Which is how law enforcement can also use the "smartphone" in my pocket to track my location in realtime.
Even when it's turned off. Because the definition of the "off" button doesn't matter, either. It isn't an "off button" it's a button that runs an app that simulates "turning the phone off," but might just put it into a low power state or who knows?
Your computer spies on you. The web spies on you. Your appliances spy on you. Your car spies on you. Your lightbulbs spy on you. The locks on your front door spy on you. Unless you're primitive enough not to use modern "smart" technology (which isn't defined as surveillance technology but which always seems to be in the news because it gets used or abused as exactly that.) Everything, everywhere, spies on you all the time. And if it doesn't, wait a few years, someone will find a way to make sure that it does. But none of it will be surveillance "by definition." Convenience, customer obsession, safety, the definitions will be plentiful but none of them will matter.
but you don't need tech for that, a spy can spy on you
Technology may not be necessary for surveillance but it is nonetheless used for surveillance. That other means besides technology can also be used for surveillance is irrelevant to the utility of technology for surveillance.
I live in a rural area. The government would never bother to send someone to spy on me here, I can't imagine they suspect me of anything important enough to spend resources on me. But they can spy on me digitally for a very low cost and with little or no humna resources. Even better for them, they can spy on me digitally without cause and dump the data in storage in case they ever want to pull it up later.
My mother birthing me made such an impact on the universe that can be surveilled. This is a moot point.
It's only a moot point when you move the goalposts outside of our lightcone.
It is concretely and objectively fact that attempts to avoid surveillance create a profile that can be used to surveil you, because the more you attempt to avoid surveillance, the more you stand out against the noise. Everything leaks.
And your counter argument is that "the material universe exists, and can be observed, therefore your argument is irrelevant?"
If you can't be bothered with a serious reply, just don't reply. It's fine. I don't expect much from Hacker News anymore.
This bubble must be extinguished by all force US regulators possess. There's not much time left, it must banned with prejudice.
I agree and it is the current last hope investors are putting their dreams in for the overvalued stock market to keep going up. “But what if AI changes everything?” I don’t really see their point of view and I would love to see how AI would usher in this new era of value being created if anyone wants to share. Wouldn’t it more be used to lay off millions of people and information workers that can be replaced by AI, that now can’t buy things?
The users of Midjourney aren't there for future riches, they use it either for daily entertainment or for work.
Almost all the software engineers I know are sceptical of this wave of AI at best, or openly dismissive at worst.
The people I know buying into the hope and/or fear are people with no actual hands on experience, or no technical knowledge beyond the 10,000ft view their engineers describe to them.
Generalising, of course, but this has been my observation as the dust settled from the AI boom late last year.
I reckon find some boring undervalued AI startup with a reliable revenue stream from the outset then sit on it for a couple of decades.
VR was a technology step that could have had interesting uses for a new experience, pumped up like crazy by VCs that just wanted a new hype train to fill with cheap money.
NFTs, at least most of them, were complete frauds from the beginning and only existed to scam users in what was basically a ponzi scheme.
Open (For Business): Big Tech, Concentrated Power, and the Political Economy of Open AI - https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4543807
I suggest to read (at least) the abstract (too long to be copied here) to get some more proper idea of the debated area.
I think this is putting the horse before the cart.
There is no doubt that the surveillance business model has captured tech. But "AI" - which to me is just the shortest possible way to say "algorithmic processing of digital information" - is just one more category of tools exploited to buttress and expand the dominance of said business model. It just happens that while other innovations (blockchain, quantum computing etc) are not immediately (or ever) usable, AI tools are practical and deployable here and now.
To better understand my point imagine the polar opposite system: a digital universe that fully respects our various professed humanistic values and uses technology only to empower individuals, bind society together etc. We would still need large scale algorithmic support if we are to manage interfacing our biologically defined brain bandwidth with the vast and growing silicon exo-brain.
In other words, lets us not concede that surveillance capitalism owns every possible future of tech.
When there is no Purpose, or no Purpose that Everyone accepts, and yet things are mindlessly scaled up, the scaler makes enemies. And its all pure chaos what happens next.
Whereas we recognise the pathological parents for what they are, we still think ubiquity is adorable.
It does as long as it's the only way to finance tech, which seems to be the case.
One of the many dramatic flaws of surveillance capitalism is that it cannot really provide the entire tech stack society needs. It thrives as a parasitic model, predicated on political dysfunction and public ignorance. Society must finance the bulk of the infrastructure and then hand over the keys to the digital kingdom as it were.
What is undeniable is that surveillance is the most lucrative mode. This is not surprising: borderline legal / morally dubious activities are always the most profitable.
It's obviously a bigger issue for B2C than B2B.
If everything has to be "free" then it becomes impossible to create sophisticated software or run any kind of service without finding some scuzzy way to double-dip and sell out your users. There is no viable business model that aligns the producer with the customer.
> it becomes impossible to create sophisticated software or run any kind of service
This. While monetizing user behavior is very valuable there is a ceiling to it. It can't make up for the huge potential value of all the things one can possibly build.
At some point we might be forced to conclude that surveillance capitalism makes no long-term economic sense. It is either a bubble or actually a political choice to sacrifice a real digital economy in favor of control.
And accuracy doesn't matter. If it's 99% and the powerful are whitelisted for human review, that's enough. That's enough to pull a mesh so fine over every human being on the planet, forever, that reaches deeply into them before they can even begin to form a personality.
The jump from individuals listening to individual phone calls as they were happening to what became possible in the decades after that might be smaller than the jump from that to the capability of transcribing anything anyone utters, even in their sleep, automatically, and adding it to a giant corpus of data to fish for suspects or assets or blackmail recipients in, in seconds. With then being able to act on those people as if they were a dataset (set a few flags, which systems or humans downstream heed without question, done).
It's a very grave threat, and I find it interesting that people decades ago who wrote about it called it that, but now that we're in it, we find it very easy to just shrug it off. But it's the same lethal threat to what it means to be human. Privacy is required for thought, without thought there's no humanity worth mentioning, QED.
Which I think makes it even harder to get people to understand how shit this timeline is, because everybody is dreaming about what it could do for them, not to them. And the people who have reason to believe to never be at the wrong end of these sticks, have no idea how it deforms them, either.
Humanity has proven its skill at dehumanizing humans in all sorts of ways, with all sorts of rhetorical and technological means, so yeah, sure, "AI" (which in practicality means "surveil everyone and get them to like/do what you want them to like and do", the rest are gimmicks and chaff) is "nothing new", but it's still like humans going from "always having had weapons" to "fucking nukes".
Isn't enough to say that AI can be used for enhanced surveillance by malicious actors? What does it mean to be a "surveillance technology"? Now you have people arguing about whether AI fits the definition of this made up term instead of talking about the potentially nefarious surveillance applications.
AI needs data [1], so in the end people compete on the data - this drives more and more surveillance type behaviour - including using AI to collect data [2].
[1] not controversial I hope [2] eg face recognition, identification by joining the dots from traded data.
It's not necessarily nefarious per se - just the dynamic - and once the data is out there....
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This site isn't my first choice for news, but I'm not sure how any of that dismisses from the points made in the article. Maybe someday we'll care about consumer protection laws and starve the growing industry around AI for training data.
Closed source software is surveillance technology.
Internet of Things is surveillance technology.
Blockchain / crypto is surveillance technology.
Virtual Reality is surveillance technology.
AI is surveillance technology.
Very disappointed that it took you guys this long to realize that, but it is too late to stop all of it entirely.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31617042
Passing the buck to someone else will always have surveillance effects.
For my part, it feels like some tech is designed for specific use cases (eg pinboard, kagi). If you trust those developers they don't need to open source their work.
If you look at it from a systems perspective, ad tech benefits from scale and data, so when a product is built "for everyone" and monetized with ads.... Yeah it's going to be surveillance tech
Advertising companies are jumping at AI for two things: it is hoped that it can give them an edge, and second, because they already have data, which is in fact fundamental for AI.
https://polisen.se/om-polisen/polisens-arbete/polisens-befog...
Relevant part:
"Om polisen skjuter mot en person ska de sträva efter att bara för tillfället oskadliggöra personen. Skotten ska i första hand riktas mot benen, men om omständigheterna kräver det får polisen skjuta direkt mot överkroppen – till exempel om den hotfulla personen befinner sig nära i avstånd och angreppet går fort."
Google translation:
"If the police shoot at a person, they must aim to render the person harmless only for the time being. The shots must primarily be aimed at the legs, but if the circumstances require it, the police may shoot directly at the upper body - for example, if the threatening person is close in distance and the attack is fast."
EDIT: some data from https://polisen.se/om-polisen/polisens-arbete/polisens-befog... -- out of 1.13 million police interventions in 2022, shots were fired at a person or vehicle 21 times. Out of those, 2 had lethal outcomes.
It's noticeable in the stats of police shootings versus police killings, where countries with these types of laws might see 10 police shootings in a year but 0 or 1 police killings.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police_firearm_use_by_countr...
Using LETHAL force has even stronger guards on it. Germany itself has no legal grounds for this AT ALL, as far as I know. Some states have a clause in their Police Laws that specifically mention a "Finaler Rettungsschuß" (final saving shot), which is a shot that would kill with "almost certain probability", and it is only allowed if there is no other way for the officer to save themselves or others from significant harm (see quote from law below). The exact legal situation differs between states, but even Bavaria, which has been widely critiqued for its liberal police law, only allows for the final saving shot:
"2) Schußwaffen dürfen gegen Personen nur gebraucht werden, um angriffs- oder fluchtunfähig zu machen. Ein Schuß, der mit an Sicherheit grenzender Wahrscheinlichkeit tödlich wirken wird, ist nur zulässig, wenn er das einzige Mittel zur Abwehr einer gegenwärtigen Gefahr für Leib oder Leben einer Person ist."
See https://www.gesetze-bayern.de/Content/Document/BayPAG-83
EDIT: The amount of deaths by police in Germany reflect this. In 2019, 62 shots have been fired by police officers on people. 15 were lethal, 30 people were injured. https://www.cilip.de/2021/02/02/polizeiliche-todesschuesse-2...
Is it though? Maybe a gun is the most efficient way to send a destructive projectile to a nearby target. Any "killing living things" part is secondary to the primary function.
> which can be used for building, cooking, and also to torture someone.
Okay but that may imply AI is a building technology, & cooking technology... and surveillance technology. That's how disruptive it is, it's coming at us on multiple fronts.
If you used said limitations to protect something you value, you have to start looking for a better protection. It's a constant process of adaptation. It cannot and should not be stopped. Instead we should be looking for ways to adapt, preferably ahead of time. Restrictions work to a rather small extent.
Be fully aware that a new scientific or engineering breakthrough will have all the potential to result in more deadly weapons, invasion of your privacy, undermining democracy, exacerbating inequality, putting you personally out of job, and disrupting whatever else you hold dear. It's always high time to think about factors which would eliminate or at least limit such consequences, and these must be positive factors, things people do willingly and profitably, not bans.
It's time to think not how to ban the privacy-invading AI (it will never work), but how to have a smaller footprint that may be used to invade your privacy, and, most importantly, how to run things in such.a way that invading your privacy is not profitable, even though still possible. And, inevitably, learn to live with even less privacy by default.
I like 'oblivious' here, as it seems to me a matter of chance about who will achieve a breakthrough. It does seem to me that once a breakthrough is achieved by someone it will be used to enhance their power over others (counterexamples welcome!) To my mind, this power calls into doubt its ethical neutrality. Yes, it is the people in possession who are making the ethical choices... but they are ethical choices enabled by the technology.
It's time to think not how to ban the privacy-invading AI (it will never work), but how to have a smaller footprint that may be used to invade your privacy, and, most importantly, how to run things in such.a way that invading your privacy is not profitable, even though still possible. And, inevitably, learn to live with even less privacy by default.
When 50%+ of the cars driving around your city are Google / Waymo cars which are essentially intelligence gathering tanks with unparalleled surveillance capability, I don't see how anyone is going to be reducing any footprints ? Cashless society? Home assistant robots that "phone home"? Face it, this is not going to be getting better anytime soon. We can try adapt all we like but maybe we should just be walking around with EMP emitting back packs on if we care about our privacy?
Would it be possible to combine machine learning with something like 23andMe and match 100 000 person photos with their DNA. Would we have an AI model which basically can tell how the persons looks like from a strand of hair?
Imagine finding some DNA on a crime scene. Witnesses can say that this person was a bit overweight so you slide some slider to the right a bit and get a pretty good AI generated portrait of a criminal.
How cool and scary that would be.
But you know just bring it to the real thing: With DNA, Video and ML you will be able to track and find that person through face recognition and probability automatically.
Hail skynet
https://www.fsigenetics.com/article/S1872-4973(23)00045-5/fu...
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>DNA Facial Mapping
https://www.policechiefmagazine.org/dna-facial-mapping/
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>How Australian police will use DNA sequencing to predict what suspects look like [2021]
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2021/dec/08/how-a...
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>The Role of Hair in DNA Testing
https://www.hairphysician.com/the-role-of-hair-in-dna/
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.
And the idea that AI "requires the surveillance business model" is demonstrably false. Thousands of researchers over the last 7 decades have contributed to the development of the collection of technologies we call AI without that business model.
However this is Meredith Whittaker so we can assume she knows that. So yeah, those are provocative statements made for rhetorical effect to emphasize that power will use technology to do bad things and enshrine and enhance its power.
I mean at some point the conflation itself is rather fair game, given that such massive swaths of the modern Internet apply it directly. The most predominant search engine sells ads. The most predominant social media sites, all of them, run on paid placement of content (ads). In fact, every social media site with even a little traffic besides perhaps Mastodon does (I honestly don't know I've never used it). Twitter/X is trying to get off advertising as it's revenue source and because of that is worth a 10th of what it was when Elon bought it less than a year ago. Amazon you could make an argument isn't based on ads (entirely) but it's also the largest retail website in the history of man and that's probably the only reason, and also, it's largest cash cow at the moment is AWS which is absolutely shoulders deep in ads, ad services, serving ads, and ad targeting.
Podcasts? Ads. Listicles? Ads. Substacks? Ads. Need a driver file to make an ancient videogame work? You'll find a website that hosts it, alongside some ads. Wanna download some ROMs for SNES games you definitely own? Ads. Pirating some pornography with surprisingly good production value that's riffing on Pirates of the Caribbean? Sounds fun, also, the website you get the torrent link from has ads.
And like, you can get into the semantics of there's no other way to fund a website, they didn't all choose it, some don't use surveillance to serve their ads, and all the rest, and to that I say, you have much more trust in corporations than I do. Salesforce would sell my grandmother into sex slavery if they could make $5 doing so so you'll have to forgive me if I just don't necessarily trust the internet ad machine when it says pinky promise we aren't exploiting your data, especially since every time they have a data leak incident, oops, there's all my data again. Aw shucks aw geez.
User data is practically the only currency on the internet anymore, and user attention in turn is the only resource being mined by social media. Of course it's for advertising. What else would it be for? What else could it be for?
> However this is Meredith Whittaker so we can assume she knows that. So yeah, those are provocative statements made for rhetorical effect to emphasize that power will use technology to do bad things and enshrine and enhance its power.
I mean that seems like something worth emphasizing? Ad tech has had a massive influence over the modern internet space, which is why it's so fucking bad. Basically every terrible decision you lament on a daily basis, every dark pattern, every annoying thing, can in some way or another be traced to ad tech. All that shit about when you talk about needing a new hose near your phone and suddenly you have ads for hoses, that's ad tech. The entire pivot to video fiasco! Facebook wanted to stream video and bullshitted publishers and media orgs with cooked numbers that it was "what people wanted" even though demonstrably no they fucking did not, do not, and never will want that, it's what ad tech wanted and therefore it was sacrosanct, right up until it killed literally hundreds if not thousands of websites. Except even that wasn't enough, because ad tech still wants it, and so we have video platforms left and right because these companies do not work for us, they work for advertisers.
Like no it isn't everything, no single entity could be that bad. I'm just saying if all of ad tech was Thanos-snapped out of existence tomorrow, the Internet would be incredibly different, better in a lot of ways, so I feel the conflation is fair game.
But the discourse in general seems to always resolve into something indistinguishable from kids arguing that the PS3 is superior to the xbox.
Isn't the "hacker" spirit one which itches to utilize and exploit? To be empowered and to be quick to kill your darlings? Why are we so quick to subordinate ourselves here? To appeal to ambiguous authorities? Is it all just some tacit futurism the AI fanboys have fallen in line with? Where has the confidence, the spirit, the sense of breezy mastery gone? There has got to still be interesting people around, those that are too cool for BigCompany Product.
Isn't that the answer? Someone is saying "entire technology, broadly, is bad" and a bunch of people who love technologies, who want to use this for all sorts of things, are going "what? no".
Who's subordinating? If I were to agree with the article would I be subordinate to techcrunch? No one is "fanboying" we're on a highly technical website with practitioners who, more or less, have a better understanding of the technology than virtually everyone involved in writing this article.
No one is even talking about BigCompany Product. A quick scan of the comments shows no mentions of meta or openai or chatgpt.
Exactly what I am trying to talk about, that is, this concern over big T Technology, rather than simply caring about one technology or another because of what they do or enable. These constant injections of vague existential stakes, when did this start happening? I am not quite that old, but I know it hasn't always been quite like this.
Is it perhaps what we have landed on as an ideology to deal with economic insecurities in the tech world? Like the wider world is disillusioned with idea that one app or another can fix the world, and now stakeholders like us need to go all in on a more profound kind of technological determinism? Where Technology is a Pure Form that needs protection?
Or is it maybe just a new generation? Younger people did not see the same kind of technological advancements older people have, so "technology " feels somehow more monolithic, self-same to them?
And honestly, it is all more interesting than sad or annoying to me... And its not about AI in general, we saw the same kind of rhetoric with crypto stuff too. Its just a shift in the way are people are talking ultimately, and its very strange.
In general I know you are right about this forum, but it has been harder and harder to sift through lately, but maybe thats just me.