The limiting factor is usually, someone has to pay for the spying and the punishment. A lot (most?) of troublemakers just aren’t worth the trouble of spying or punishing.
The problem is that if AI enables mass spying, then the costs will no longer be prohibitive to target an individual because the infrastructure could be built out once and then reused to target individuals at scale with AI doing all of the correlation behind the scenes.
That would resolve the spying cost, but not the punishment cost. My go-to example here is heroin: class A drug in the UK, 7 years for possession and life for supply, so far as I can see nobody has anything good to say about it, and it has around three times as many users in the UK as the entire UK prison population.
Could implement punishment for that specific crime, at huge cost, but you can't expand that to all crimes. Well, I suppose you could try feudalism mark 2 where most of the population is determined to be criminal and therefore spends their life "having to work of their debt to society", but then you have to find out the hard way why we stopped doing feudalism mark 1.
Humans existed under religious nonsense, and other forms of nonsense (sure, sure legal racism and sexism up until the last 30-40 years and obviously politically contrived social norms means the “right people won” free market capitalism)
What’s one more form of BS hallucination foisted upon the meat based cassettes we exist as?
Same thing happens in the US. Post a tweet too critical of the government, and you might get investigated and added to a no-fly list. Background checks can reveal investigations, so you may end up not getting a job because the government didn't like your tweet...
AI reduces the labor involved, reducing barriers to invest time or money.
Spying isn't just for troublemakers either. It's probably worth the trouble to the vindictive ex-husband willing to install a hidden microphone in his ex-wife's house and in order to have access to a written summary of any conversations related to him.
next time they try to root out whatever 'vermin' defined; it will be a quick natural language prompt trained on ingested data from the last 2 decades to get that list of names and addresses / networks. AI is going to make targeting groups with differing ideologies dead simple. It will be used.
This happened during the last big technological advancement -- search. Suddenly it became possible for a government to theoretically sift through all of our communications and people online made constant reference to it talking directly to their "FBI agent."
But it was and still is a nothingburger and this will be the same because it doesn't enable anything except "better search." We've had comparable abilities for a decade now. Yes LLMs are better but semantic search and NLP have been around a while and the world didn't end.
All the examples of what an LLM could do are just querying tracking databases. Uncovering organizational structure is just a social graph, correlating purchases is just querying purchase databases, listing license plates is just querying the camera systems. You don't need an LLM for any of this.
It will eventually end, though, accompanied by the chatter of a gaggle of naysayers chicken-littling the people trying to raise the alarm. I'm delighted to be here to witness the death of liberty and descent of the West into the throes of everything it once claimed to represent the polar opposite of, and also delighted to be old enough that I'll likely die before it becomes Actual Big Brother levels of oppressive.
Search has become a mass surveillance tool for the government. That is the article's point. If you think it's a nothingburger, you aren't aware of how often a person's Google searches are used to establish criminal intent in criminal trials. Also, they can be used to bolster probable cause for search warrants and arrests.
Also, check out geofence warrants. Essentially, the government can ask google for the IP's of people who searched for particular terms within a geographic area.
Of course, don't commit crimes but this behavior by the government raises the spectre of wrong search, wrong place, wrong time. This is one of the article's points, it causes people to self-censor and change their searches out of fear of their curiosity being misconstrued as criminal intent.
> a person's Google searches are used to establish criminal intent in criminal trials.
>
> can ask google for the IP's of people who searched for particular terms within a geographic area
These aren't mass surveillance. The threat of search is government systems passively sifting through all information in existence looking for "criminal activity" and then throwing the book at you.
In both of these cases the government is asking Google to run a SQL query against their database that wouldn't be aided by an LLM or even the current crop of search engines.
It is mass surveillance. It's just not being looked at by anyone until you are targeted by the government. If you are targeted, your entire life is within keystrokes of the authorities. This is the same thing the article is saying.
The article is making the point that it's not feasible to spy on every person to monitor them for wrongdoing currently. It doesn't scale and it's not cost effective. With AI that will change because it can be automated. The AI can listen to voice, monitor video cameras, and read text to discern a level of intent.
> it's not feasible to spy on every person to monitor them for wrongdoing currently
Sure it is! That's the whole point of search being the previous big technical hurdle. YouTube monitors every single video posted in real time for copyright infringement. We've had the capability to do this kind of monitoring for huge swaths of crimes for a decade and it hasn't turned into anything. We could for example catch every driver in real time for all across the country for speeding but we don't.
Mass is the opposite of targeted surveillance. If you need to be targeted and get a warrant to look at the data then it's not mass. And AI isn't going to change the system that prevents it right now which is the rules governing our law enforcement bodies.
I get the impression you didn't bother reading the article.
Your two examples are flawed and don't address what the article is saying. The algorithm to check for copyright violations is relatively simple and dumb. Speed cameras: many countries do use speed cameras (i.e. Australia, UK). The problem with speed cameras is that once you know where they are, you simply slow down when approaching.
Again, mass vs. targeted surveillance is irrelevant now. You've already been surveilled. It's just a matter of getting access to the information.
Soon in the name of "security" you'll have your face scanned on average every few minutes and it's going to be mandatory in many aspects of our lives. That's the pathetic world IT has helped to build.
The amazing part is that so many large scale cyber attacks happened meanwhile that were 1:1 fiction in the series back then.
The Solarwinds incident, for example, was the identical attack and deployment strategy that was the Rylatech hack in the series. From execution to even the parties involved. It's like some foreign state leaders saw those episodes and said "yep that's a good idea, let's do that".
This TV show immediately captured me and has always been in the back of my mind since. Then, it seemed like a future far far away, but now you remind me of it... I think it's scarily close already.
Around 2013 I came up with some hardware ideas about offline computing and even contemplated to name some versions after the characters in 'Person of Interest'.
I can really recommend this series, since it's a good story, has good actors and fits the zeitgeist very well.
edit: I also think it's time for me to get a malinois shepherd. ;)
Hell, Stargate SG-1 had a few episodes that touched on the absolute hell of a Federal Government that had access to everything, or a computer system with RW access to people's gray matter and it:s own unknown optimization function (shrinking environmental protection dome resulting in live updates of people's consciousness on a societal scale to keep them in the dark as to it's happening ).
A friend of mine was recently a witness for the FBI. He was working in a small office in the middle of nowhere and happened to have a very loud argument with the suspect. A few minutes later he left the building and when he was about to start his car, he got a call from an agent asking him if he wanted to be a witness in the case they were working on.
The suspect was allegedly embezzling covid relief money and the argument was about things like "why are we using company time to go to your house and install the new flat screen TV you just bought?"
The moral of the story is that you should never steal money from the U.S. government because that is one thing that they will not tolerate and I do not know the limits of what they will do in order to catch you.
Also the suspect was convicted (so they probably aren't a suspect anymore) and last I heard was being flown to Washington D.C. for sentencing. That person is probably in some kind of prison now but I haven't been following the story very closely.
Mine was walking into the client's site. This was many years ago.
They had Novell Server issues, that's how long ago this was.
I walked in, cops everywhere. Man in a suit waves an FBI badge at me and asks why I'm there. I explained the ongoing work and he said, "Not today" and forced me off the premises.
The next day I was called back by the client to "rebuild their network".
When I got there, every single piece of hardware that contained anything remotely like storage had been disassembled and the drives imaged, then just left in pieces. lol
I spent that day rebuilding it all, did get the Novell server working again.
A week later, they were closed forever and I believe the owner and CFO got nailed for healthcare fraud.
I was asked to testify in a deposition. My stuff was pretty basic and mostly what I knew about how they used the tech. What I saw around there and if I saw any big red signs declaring FRAUD COMMITTED HERE!
Fortunately the DHS has put together an expert team of non-partisan, honest, Americans to spearhead the effort to protect our democracy. Thank you James Clapper and John Brennan- for stepping up to the task.
That James Clapper and John Brennan continue to be lauded by the media and their sycophants in government is one of the most disappointing things to happen in my lifetime. Both should be frog marched straight to prison along with their enablers.
Never in the history of humanity has such powerful privacy tech existed for anyone who wants to use it.
Using common off the shelf, open source, heavily audited tools, it's trivial today, even for a non-technical 10 year old, to create a new identity and collaborate with anyone anywhere in the world. They can do research, get paid, make payments, and contribute to private communities in such a way that no existing surveillance infrastructure can positively link that identity to their government identity. Every day privacy tech is improving and adding new capabilities.
That guy clearly has never been around 10 years olds, and vastly over estimates their intelligence.
I'm fact, all evidence points to younger generations being less tech savvy because they don't have to troubleshoot like the older generations did. Everything works, and almost nothing requires any technical configurations.
Never before in history has it been necessary. It used to be possible to travel like a hundred miles and dissappear. Before credit was ubiquitous, money was hard to trace, and before that is was essentially untraceable. And cameras didn't used to be everywhere tracking faces for criminals and frequent shoppers. I don't know what privacy technologies you are talking about that are super effective, and i have been bit older than 10 for a while.
Now here in the UK they are using people's passport photos for facial recognition, at least to stop shoplifting. It won't be long before this is expanded to other things due to feature creep.
> Never in the history of humanity has such powerful privacy tech existed for anyone who wants to use it.
True.
> it's trivial today, even for a non-technical 10 year old
Not even close. It's difficult even for a technical 30 year old.
You're talking about acquiring cash that has passed through several people's hands without touching an ATM that recorded its serial numbers. Using it to acquire Bitcoin from a stranger. Making use of multiple VPN's, and making zero mistakes where any outgoing traffic from your computer can be used to identify you -- browser fingerprinting, software updates, analytics, MAC address. Which basically means a brand-new computer you've purchased in cash somewhere without cameras, that you use for nothing else -- or maybe you could get away with a VM, but are you really sure its networking isn't leaking anything about your actual hardware? Receiving Bitcoin, and then once again finding a stranger to convert that back into cash.
Feed your writing into AI so that it can rewrite it so that AI can't identify you by your writing?
Sounds like a startup idea to me. When we're ready for the evil phase, let's classify everybody by their inputs to the system and then sell the results to the highest bidder.
> They can do research, get paid, make payments, and contribute to private communities in such a way that no existing surveillance infrastructure can positively link that identity to their government identity.
I can't help but wonder if we live in the same universe. If anything, in my part of the world, I am seeing powerful surveillance tech going from the digital sphere and into the physical sphere, often on the legal/moral basis that one has no expectation of privacy in public spaces.
Would love for OP to elaborate and prove me wrong!
Every service has access to the IPs you've used to log on, most services require an email, phone number some debit/credit cards and or similar personal info. Link that with government databases on addresses/real names/ISP customers and you basically can get most peoples accounts, on virtually any service they use.
We then also have things such as the patriot act in effect, the government could if they wanted run a system to do this automatically, where every message is scanned by an AI that catalogues them.
I have believed for some time now that we are extremely close to a complete dystopia.
Seriously nothing new or shocking about this piece. Spying is spying. Surveillance is surveillance. If you've watched the news at all in the past 2 decades, you know this is happening.
Anyone who assumes that any new technology isn't going to be used to target the masses by increasingly massive and powerful authoritarian regimes is woefully naive.
Another post stating what we all already know isn't helping or fostering any meaningful conversation. It will just be rehashes. Let me skip to the end here for you:
There is nothing we can do about it. Nothing will change for the better.
The new Google, Meta, Microsoft, etc. bots won't just crawl the web or social networks--they will crawl specific topics and people.
Lots of cultures have the concept of a "guardian angel" or "ancestral spirits" that watch over the lives of their descendants.
In the not-so-distant technofedualist future you'll have a "personal assistant bot" provided by a large corporation that will "help" you by answering questions, gathering information, and doing tasks that you give it. However, be forewarned that your "personal assistant bot" is no guardian angel and only serves you in ways that its corporate creator wants it to.
Its true job is to collect information about you, inform on you, and give you curated and occasionally "sponsored" information that high bidders want you to see. They serve their creators--not you. Don't be fooled.
> In the not-so-distant technofedualist future you'll have [...]
I guarantee that I won't. That, at least, is a nightmare that I can choose to avoid. I don't think I can avoid the other dystopian things AI is promising to bring, but I can at least avoid that one.
At least in my part of the US, it's not hard to do without smartphones at all. Default assumptions are that you have one, but you can still do everything you want to do if you don't.
I guarantee that you will. That is a nightmare that you can not choose to avoid unless you are willing to sacrifice your social life.
Remember how raising awareness about smartphones, always on microphones, closed source communication services/apps worked? I do not.
I run an Android (Google free) smartphone with a custom ROM, only use free software apps on it.
How does it help when I am surrounded by people using these kind of technologies (privacy violating ones)? I does not. How will it help when everyone will have his/her personal assistant (robot, drone, smart wearable, smart-thing, whatever) and you (and I) won't? It will not.
None of my friends, family, colleagues (even the security/privacy aware engineers) bother. Some of them because they do not have the technical knowledge to do so, most of them because they do not want to sacrifice any bit of convenience/comfort (and maybe rightfully so, I am not judging them - life is short, I do get that people do not want to waste precious time maintaining arcane infra, devices, config,... themselves).
I am a privacy and free software advocate and an engineer; whenever I can (and when there is a tiny bit of will on their side or when I have lever), I try to get people off surveillance/ad-backed companies services.
It rarely works or lasts. Sometimes it does though so it is worth (to me) keep on trying.
It generally works or lasts when I have lever: I manage various sports team, only share schedules etc via Signal ; family wants to get pictures from me, I will only share the link (to my Nextcloud instance) or photos themselves via Signal, etc.
Sometimes it sticks with people because it's close enough to whatsapp/messenger/whatever if most (all) of their contacts are their. But as soon as you have that one person that will not or can not install Signal, alternatives groups get created on whatsapp/messenger/whatever.
Overcoming the network effect is tremendously hard to borderline impossible.
Believing that you can escape it is a fallacy. It does not mean that is not worth fight for our rights, but believing that you can escape it altogether (without becoming and hermit) would be setting, I believe, an unachievable goal (with all the psychological impact that it can/will have).
Think about it in terms of what is rational. If there were serious costs to having your data leaked out like this people would rationally have a bit more trepidation. On the other hand, we are in the era where everyone by now has probably been pwned a half dozen times or more, to no effect usually on your real life. You might get disgusted that instagram watches what you watch to serve you more of that stuff and keep you on longer, other people love that sort of content optimization, I literally hear them gloat how their social media content feeds at this point have been so perfectly honed to show them whatever hobbies or sports they are interested in. Take a picture and it pushes to 5 services and people love that. Having an app already pull your contacts for you and match them up to existing users is great in the eyes of most people.
You are right that on the one hand these things could be used for really bad purposes, but they are pretty benign. Now if you start going "well social media posts can influence elections," sure, but so can TV, newspapers, the radio, a banner hauled by a prop plane, whatever, not like anythings changed. If anything its a safer environment for combating a slip to fascism now vs in the mid century when there were like three channels on TV and a handful of radio programs carefully regulated by the FCC and that's all the free flow of info you have short of smuggling the printed word like its the 1400s.
Given all of this, I can't really blame people for accepting the game they didn't create for how it is and gleaming convenience from it. Take smartphones out of the equation, take the internet out, take out computers, and our present dystopia is still functionally the same.
That is how most people will interface with their "personal assistant bot".
Don't be surprised if it listens to all your phone conversations, reads all your text messages and email, and curates all your contacts in order to "better help you".
When you login to your $LARGE_CORPORATION account on your laptop or desktop computer, the same bot(s) will be there to "help" and collect data in a similar manner.
This could be applied to any gadget with "smart" prefix in the name (eg - Smartphone, smart TV, smart traffic signals) today.
I wish people would stop believing that "smart" things are always better.
But, we're basically being trained for the future you mentioned. Folks are getting more comfortable talking to their handheld devices, relying on mapping apps for navigation (I'm guilty), and writing AI query prompts.
Poetic as this is, I always feel like if we can imagine it then it won't happen. The only constant is surprise, we can only predict these types of developments accidentally
"Work smarter, be more productive, boost creativity, and stay connected to the people and things in your life with Copilot—an AI companion that works everywhere you do and intelligently adapts to your needs."
If Microsoft builds them, then Google, Apple, and Samsung will too. How else will they stay competitive and relevant?
I mean by this definition I’d say it happened when they introduced Siri or Hey Google. The creation of these tools and their massive/universal adoption a la web-crawlers is still a large gap though. Getting to point where you consider them as a dark “guardian angel” or “ancestral spirit” goes even a step farther I think
>> The creation of these tools and their massive/universal adoption a la web-crawlers is still a large gap though.
It only takes a decade or so.
Consider people who are young children now in "first world nations". They will have always had LLM-based tools available and voice assistants you can ask natural language questions.
It will likely follow the same adoption curves as smartphones, only faster because of existing network effects.
If you have smartphone with a reasonably fast connection, you have access to LLM tools. The next generations of smartphones, tablets, laptops, and desktops will all have LLM tools built-in.
I do see what you mean, and don't totally disagree, but to extend your "smartphone" metaphor I see your hypothetical as akin to someone looking at a like an old school Motorola Razr and saying "in the future these will be ubiquitous". Not necessarily wrong, but not exactly right either. The implementation of personalized assistants could take lots of different flavors, and the ultimate usage pattern which is settled (to me) seems likely to be outside any of our current models.
Big companies like Google are already doing this without AI. Will AI make the services more tempting? Yes, but there's also a lot of headway in open source AI and search, which could serve to topple people's reliance on big tech.
If everyone had a $500 device at home that served as their own self hosted AI, then Google could cease to exist. That's a future worth working towards.
Time to decentralize everything. I think we are already in the early stages of this new trend. We can run AI locally and hard drives are so large we can have a local copy of an entire library, with millions of ebooks, in our own home now.
That is in addition to generating our own energy off grid (so no smart meter data to monitor), thanks to the low cost of solar panels as well.
I don't see how that leads to the reduction of the problem, though. Governments and corporations will still use AI for the things they want to use AI for.
This says his house uses 13kWh/day and you can see from the graph by dividing the monthly amount by 31 days that the solar panels on the roof generate around 29/day during summer and 2.25/day in winter. They would need five or six rooves of solar panels to generate enough to be off-grid. And that's not practical or low cost.
AI allows companies to skirt laws. For example, a company may be forbidden from collecting information on individual people but that rule doesn’t apply for aggregated data.
AI can be a deployed ‘agent’ that does all the collection and finally send scrubbed info to its mothership.
Seems inevitable enough that we may have to accept it and try to work within the context of (what we'd tend to think of today as) mass-spying.
I mean, even if we pass laws to offer more protections, as computation gets cheaper, it ought to become easier-and-easier for anyone to start a mass-spying operation -- even by just buying a bunch of cheap sensors and doing all of the work on their personal-computer.
A decent near-term goal might be figuring out what sorts of information we can't reasonably expect privacy on (because someone's going to get it) and then ensuring that access to such data is generally available. Because if the privacy's going to be lost anyway, then may as well try to address the next concern, i.e. disparities in data-access dividing society.
even by just buying a bunch of cheap sensors and doing all of the work on your personal-computer.
The cynical response: you won't be able to do that, because buying that equipment will set off red flags. Only existing users -- corporations and governments -- will be allowed to play.
> we may have to accept it and try to work within the context of (what we'd tend to think of today as) mass-spying.
We do have to live in the nightmare world we're building (and as an industry, we have to live with ourselves for helping to build it), but we don't have to accept it at all. It's worth fighting all this tooth and nail.
Both were always going to be kind of inevitable as soon as the technology would get there. Rather than debating how to stop this (which is mostly futile and requires all of us to be nice, which we just aren't), the more urgent debate is how to adapt to this being the reality.
Related to this is the notion of ubiquitous surveillance. Where basically anywhere you go, there is going to be active surveillance literally everywhere and AIs filtering and digging through that constantly. That's already the case in a lot of our public spaces in densely populated areas. But imagine that just being everywhere and virtually inescapable (barring Faraday cages, tin foil hats, etc.).
The most feasible way to limit the downsides of that kind of surveillance is a combination of legislation regulating this, and counter surveillance to ensure any would be illegal surveillance has a high chance of being observed and thus punished. You do this by making the technology widely available but regulating its use. People would still try to get around it but the price of getting caught abusing the tech would be jail. And with surveillance being inescapable, you'd never be certain nobody is watching you misbehaving. The beauty of mass, multilateral surveillance is that you wouldn't ever be sure nobody is not watching you abuse your privileges.
Of course, the reality of states adopting this and monopolizing this is already resulting in 1984 like scenarios in e.g. China, North Korea, and elsewhere.
> Both were always going to be kind of inevitable as soon as the technology would get there
This is my take on everything sci-fi or futuristic. Once a human conceives something, its existence is essentially guaranteed as soon as we figure out how to do it.
Its demise is also inevitable, so it would be a matter of being wise in figuring out how long it takes us to see/feel the downsides, or how long until we (or it) build something "better".
> ...the more urgent debate is how to adapt to this being the reality.
Start building more offline community. Building things that are outside the reach of AI because they're in places you entirely control, and start discouraging (or actively evicting...) cell phones from those spaces. Don't build digital-first ways of interacting.
Might work, might not. If someone keeps their cell phone silenced in their pocket, unless you're strip searching you won't know it's there. Does the customer have some app on it listening to the environment and using some kind of voice identification to figure out who's there. Do you have smart TVs up on the walls at this place, because hell, they're probably monitoring you too.
And that's only for cell phones. We are coming to the age where there is no such thing as an inanimate object. Anything could end up being a spying device feeding data back to some corporation.
> Does the customer have some app on it listening to the environment and using some kind of voice identification to figure out who's there.
This is no different from "So-and-so joined the group, but is secretly an FBI informer!" sort of problems, in practice. It's fairly low on my list of things to be concerned about, but as offline groups grow and are then, of course, talked about by a compliant media as "Your neighbor's firepit nights could be plotting terrorist activities because they don't have cell phones!" when prompted, it's a thing to be aware of.
Though you don't need a strip search. A decent NLJD (non-linear junction detector) or thermal imager should do it if you cared.
I'm more interested in creating (re-creating?) the norms where, when you're in a group of people interacting in person, cell phones are off, out of earshot. It's possibly a bit more paranoid than needed, but the path of consumer tech is certainly in that direction, and even non-technical people are creeped out by things like "I talked to a friend about this, and now I'm seeing ads for it..." - it may be just noticing it since you talked about it recently (buy a green car, suddenly everyone drives green cars), or you may be predictable in ways that the advertising companies have figured out, but it's not a hard sell to get quite a few people to believe that their phones are listening. And, hell, I sure can't prove they aren't listening.
> Do you have smart TVs up on the walls at this place...
I mean, I don't. But, yes, those are a concern too.
And, yes. Literally everything can be listening. It's quite a concern, and I think the only sane solution, at this point, is to reject just about all of that more and more. Desktop computers without microphones, cell phones that can be powered off, and flat out turning off wireless on a regular basis (the papers on "identifying where and what everyone is doing in a house by their impacts on a wifi signal" remain disturbing reads).
I really don't have any answers. The past 30 years of tech have led to a place I do not like, and I am not at all comfortable with. But it's now the default way that a lot of our society interacts, and it's going to be a hard sell to change that. I just do what I can within my bounds, and I've noticed that while I don't feel my position has changed substantially in the past decade or so (if anything, I've gotten further out of the center and over to the slightly paranoid edge of the bell curve), it's a lot more crowded where I stand, and there are certain issues where I'm rather surprisingly in the center of the bell curve as of late.
> Building things that are outside the reach of AI because they're in places you entirely control
This sounds great in principle, but I'd say "outside the reach of AI" is a much higher bar than one would naively think. You don't merely need to avoid its physical nervous system (digital perception/control), but rather prevent its incentives leaking in from outside interaction. All the while there is a strong attractor to just give in to the "AI" because it's advantageous. Essentially regardless of how you set up a space, humans themselves become agents of AI.
There are strong parallels between "AI" and centralizing debt-fueled command-capitalism which we've been suffering for several decades at least. And I haven't seen any shining successes at constraining the power of the latter.
Oh, I'm aware it's a high bar. Like most people here, I've worked my life in tech, and I'm in the deeper weeds of it.
But I don't see an alternative unless, as you note, one just gives into the "flow" of the AI, app based, "social" media, advertising and manipulation driven ecosystem that is now the default.
I'm aware I'm proposing resisting exactly that, and that it's an uphill battle, but the tradeoff is retaining your own mind, your own ability to think, and to not be "influenced" by a wide range of things chosen by other people to cross your attention in very effective ways.
And I'm willing to work out some of what works in that space, and to share it with others.
Good luck building things with out leaving an ai reachable paper trail. You'd have to grow your own trees, mine your own iron and coal, refine your own plastic from your own oil field.
Sounds fun to me and my social group. We not-quite-joke about the coming backyard refineries. I'm working on the charcoal production at the moment (not a joke, I have some small retorts in weekly production, though I'm mostly aiming for biochar production instead of fuel charcoal production).
Realistically, though, if all you have to work with are my general flows of materials in and out, I'm a lot less worried than if you have, say, details of home audio, my social media postings, etc (nothing I say here is inconsistent with my blog, which is quite public). And there are many things I don't say in these environments.
I think another aspect of this is mass criminal law enforcement enabled by AI.
Many of our criminal laws are written with the implicit assumption that it takes resources to investigate and prosecute a crime, and that this will limit the effective scope of the law. Prosecutorial discretion.
Putting aside for the moment the (very serious) injustice that comes with the inequitable use of prosecutorial discretion, let's imagine a world without this discretion. Perhaps it's contrived, but one could imagine AI making it at least possible. Even by the book as it's currently written, is it a better world?
Suddenly, an AI monitoring public activity can trigger an AI investigator to draft a warrant to be signed by an AI judge to approve the warrant and draft an opinion. One could argue that due process is had, and a record is available to the public showing that there was in fact probable cause for further investigation or even arrest.
Maybe a ticket just pops out of the wall like in Demolition Man, but listing in writing clearly articulated probable cause and well-presented evidence.
Investigating and prosecuting silly examples suddenly becomes possible. A CCTV camera catches someone finding a $20 bill on the street, and finds that they didn't report it on their tax return. The myriad of ways one can violate the CFAA. A passing mention of music piracy on a subway train can become an investigation and prosecution. Dilated pupils and a staggering gait could support a drug investigation. Heck, jaywalking tickets given out as though by speed camera. Who cares if the juice wasn't worth the squeeze when it's a cheap AI doing the squeezing.
Is this a better world, or have we just all subjected ourselves to a life hyper-analyzed by a motivated prosecutor.
Turning back in the general direction of reality, I'm aware that arguing "if we enforced all of our laws, it would be chaos" is more an indictment of our criminal justice system than it is of AI. I think that AI gives us a lens to imagine a world where we actually do that, however. And maybe thinking about it will help us build a better system.
The software that already exists along these lines already exhibit bias against marginalized groups. I have no trouble foreseeing a filter put on the end of the spigot that exempts certain people from the inconvenience of such surveillance. Might need a new law (it'll get passed).
Sounds like the devil is in the details. Often the AI seems to struggle with darker skin… are you suggesting we sift who can be monitored/prosecuted based on skin darkness? That sounds like a mess to try to enshrine in law.
Strong (and unhealthy) biases already exist when using this tech, but I am not sure that is the lever to pull that will fix the problem.
You know that's not what I was suggesting. I'm saying that if precedence is anything to go by, companies will be perfectly happy extending the paradigm established with sentencing software to anyone who can't pay or leverage their connections. If we continue down this path, tomorrow's just today, but worse, and more. (Please try to have a more rationale understanding of today, tomorrow.)
Feels pretty legit though. My freedom-from is impacted by other people's freedom-to: by curtailing their freedom, mine is expanded. Sure they won't like it - but I don't like it the other way round either.
This doesn't add up. At best your overall freedom remains the same. You gain quiet, you lose the freedom to make noise yourself. Seems like a net-negative to me.
Consider how little freedom you would have if laws were enforced to the lowest common denominator of what people find acceptable.
I can go into the countryside and make noise all day. I don't see that there's a pre-existing freedom to inflict loud noises on my neighbors for no useful purpose.
You're missing the point that the freedom from and freedom to may be weighted differently for each individual.
For instance I lose almost nothing by not having the freedom to carry a weapon (UK) as I have no desire to do so, while gaining a lot from having the freedom to not risk my child being murdered at school.
It's an extreme example but applies to a lesser degree for other freedoms, and I've personally found I often benefit more from freedoms-from than freedoms-to.
I'd love it if no vehicle could exceed 30 mph in town as I gain almost no benefit from being able to do so, while taking on significant risk from others being able to.
I'd argue that if we want to support individual growth and creativity, freedom-to should have higher priority than freedom-from, which consciously or not has seems to be the traditional default in the US perhaps due to its culture of supporting innovation and its break-away past. I believe some refer to these as positive and negative freedoms, respectfully.
This is also why a number of people truly revolt against the idea of higher density living. If the only way to have your freedom-from is to be free from other people, then you move away from other people.
I've watched it play out on my mother-in-law's street. What was once a quiet dead end street is now a noisy, heavily trafficked road because a large apartment building was put up at the end.
The number of freedom-to people have significantly decreased her quality of life blasting music as they walk or drive by at all hours, along with a litany of other complaints that range from anti-social to outright illegal behavior. Even setting aside the illegal stuff, she is significantly less happy living where she is now.
If suddenly you could be effectively found and prosecuted for every single law that existed it is near a 100% probability that you'd burn the government to the ground in a week.
There are so many laws no one can even tell you how many you are subject to at any given time at any given location.
Automatically enforcing all the laws is vastly different from the "effective enforcement of laws "we agreed to".
The full body of legislation is riddled with contradiction, inconsistency, ambiguity and the pretense that "legislated upon = fair" is at best a schoolroom fantasy.
Yea this is a good point. If justice is executed by systems, rather than people (the end result from this scenario), we have lost the ability to challenge the process or the people involved in so many ways. It will make challenging how the law is executed almost impossible because there will be no person there to hold responsible.
I think that’s a good reason to question whether this would be due process.
Why do we have due process? One key reason is that it gives people the opportunity to be heard. One could argue that being heard by an AI is no different from being heard by a human, just more efficient.
But why do people want the opportunity to be heard? It’s partly the obvious, to have a chance to defend oneself against unjust exercises of power, and of course against simple error. But it’s also so that one can feel heard and not powerless. If the exercise of justice requires either brutal force or broad consent, giving people the feeling of being heard and able to defend themselves encourages broad consent.
Being heard by an AI then has a brutal defect, it doesn’t make people feel heard. A big part of this may come from the idea that an AI cannot be held accountable if it is wrong or if it is acting unfairly.
Justice, then, becomes a force of nature. I think we like to pretend justice is a force of nature anyway, but it’s really not. It’s man-made.
"it doesn't make people feel heard" isn't a real emotion, it includes a judgement about the AI. According to "Nonviolent Communication" p235; "unheard" speaks towards the feelings "sad, hostile, frustrated" and the needs "understanding" & "consideration". Everyone agrees AI would be more efficient, but people are concerned that the AI will not be able to make contextual considerations based on a shared understanding of what it's like to live a human life.
That's true! I suspect it will be difficult to convince people that an AI can, as you suggest, make contextual considerations based on a shared understanding of what it's like to live a human life.
> Being heard by an AI then has a brutal defect, it doesn’t make people feel heard.
This is a hypothesis.
I would say that the consumers of now-unsexed "AI" sex-chat-bots (Replika) felt differently. So there are actually people who feel heard talking to an AI. Who knows, if it gets good enough maybe more of us would feel that way.
It's not that "justice is executed by systems", it's that possible crimes will be flagged by AI systems for humans to then review.
eg AI will analyze stock trades for the SEC and surface likely insider trading. Pretty sure they already use tools like Palantir to do exactly this, it's just that advanced AI will supercharge this even further.
>, it's that possible crimes will be flagged by AI systems for humans to then review.
Eh, this is problematic for a number of reasons that need addressed when adding any component that can increase the workload for said humans. This will cause people to take shortcuts that commonly lead to groups that are less able to represent and defend themselves legally taking the brunt of the prosecutions.
This is a good point, it reminds me of how VAR has come into football. Before VAR, there were fewer penalties awarded. Now that referees have an official camera they can rely on, they can enforce the rules exactly as written, and it changes the game.
>Suddenly, an AI monitoring public activity can trigger an AI investigator to draft a warrant to be signed by an AI judge to approve the warrant and draft an opinion.
Or the AI just sends a text message to all the cops in the area saying "this person has committed a crime". Like this case where cameras read license plates, check to see if the car is stolen, and then text nearby cops. At least when it works and doesn't flag innocent people like in the below case:
You're describing a hypothetical world that will never exist. Basically if we solve all corruption and inequality in enforcement between economic/power classes - all-pervasive surveillance will be a net benefit.
It's like pondering hypotheticals about what would happen if we lived in Middle Earth.
I mean, presumably the AI wouldn't just be monitoring people sleeping under bridges, but would also be able to effectively cut through tax evasion bullshit, insider trading, bribery, etc.
This is honestly what scares me the most. Our biases are built in to AI, but we pretend they're not. People will say "Well, it was the algorithm/AI, so we can't change it". Which is just awful and should scare the shit out of everyone. There was a book [0] written almost fifty years ago that predicted this. I still haven't read it, but really need to. The author claims it made him a pariah among other AI researchers at the time.
- "Since April 2017, this city in China's Guangdong province has deployed a rather intense technique to deter jaywalking. Anyone who crosses against the light will find their face, name, and part of their government ID number displayed on a large LED screen above the intersection, thanks to facial recognition devices all over the city."
- "If that feels invasive, you don't even know the half of it. Now, Motherboard reports that a Chinese artificial intelligence company is partnering the system with mobile carriers, so that offenders receive a text message with a fine as soon as they are caught."
Top Left Panel: This panel shows the pedestrian crossing with no visible jaywalking. The crossing stripes are clear, and there are no pedestrians on them.
Top Center Panel: Similar to the top left, it shows the crossing, and there is no evidence of jaywalking.
Top Right Panel: This panel is mostly obscured by an overlaid image of a person's face, making it impossible to determine if there is any jaywalking.
Bottom Left Panel: It is difficult to discern specific details because of the low resolution and the angle of the shot. The red text overlays may be covering some parts of the scene, but from what is visible, there do not appear to be any individuals on the crossing.
Bottom Right Panel: This panel contains text and does not provide a clear view of the pedestrian crossing or any individuals that might be jaywalking.
Honestly, when it comes to road-related violations (speeding, yield issues, fulling stopping at stop signs or RTOR, etc), I feel similarly. The current state of affairs where it's a $300 ticket that you're probably never going to see because 99% of the time you get away with it is dumb— it makes people contemptuous of the law and also feel super resentful and hard-done-by if they do finally get caught. And it's a positive feedback loop where that culture makes the road an unsafe place for people walking and cycling, so less people choose those modes, putting more cars on the road and making it even less safe.
Consistent enforcement with much lower, escalating fines would do a lot more to actually change behaviour. And the only way to get there at scale is via a lot of automation.
I wonder whats going on at the enforcement level. It seems like there is a dumbing down of that system. It would be interesting to see some research on this.
Oh I think it's a lot of exactly what's being discussed elsewhere in this thread— the cost of consistent enforcement is just way too high, so there isn't much of it. And that suits most people just fine since they're contemptuous about road safety anyway; they want to get where they're going unmolested and have the cops focused on "real" crimes.
Road safety in the end is a commons, just like littering. No one person's action is going to make the difference, but coordinated effort is only possible when there's enough public sentiment to get a central mandate together.
Yea that stuff is happening here where I live (1hr away) more often as well, it seemed like it started happening more often during COVID. People are running red lights more often and going way over the speed limit.
Or maybe if such a thing is applied for real it will lead to the elimination of bullshit laws (jaywalking, ...), since suddenly 10% of the population would be fined/incarcerated/...
So the way out of this is that you have the constitutional right to confront your accuser in court. When accused by a piece of software that generally means they have to disclose the source code and explain how it came to its answers.
Not many people have exercised this right with respect to DUI breathalyzers but it exists and was affirmed by the Supreme Court. And it will also apply to AI.
The whole automation and overzealous less leeway/common sense interpretations have as we have seen, many an automated traffic/parking ticket come into question.
Applying that to many walks of life, say farming, could well see chaos and a whole new interpretation to the song "Old McDonald had a farm, AI AI oh", it's gone as McDonald is in jail for numerous permit, environmental and agricultural regulations that saw produce cross state lines deeming it more serious a crime as he got buried in automated red-tape.
You miss the part that people who get access to stronger AI can similarly use it to improve their odds of not being found or getting better outcomes, while the poor guy gets fined for AI hallucinations and doesn't have the money to get to a human like the court is now one big Google support.
An alternative possibility is that society might decay to the point future people might choose this kind of dystopia. Imagine a fully automated, post-employment world gone horribly wrong, where the majority of society is destitute, aimless, opiate-addicted. No UBI utopia of philosophers and artists; just a gradual Rust-belt like decline that gets worse and worse, no brakes at the bottom of the hill. Not knowing what else to do, the "survivors" might choose this kind of nuclear approach: automate away the panopticons, the prisons, the segregation of failed society. Eloi and Morlocks. Bay Area tech workers and Bay Area tent cities. We haven't done any better in the past, so why should we expect to do better in the future, when our "tools" of social control become more efficient, more potent? When we can deempathize more easily than ever, through the emotional distance of AI intermediaries?
At that point some people will physically revolt, I know I will. We’re not that far away from said physical AI-related revolt anyway, and I do feel for the computer programmers here who will be the target of that physical violence, hopefully they knew what they were getting into.
Ha. You'd like to think so, but it's going to be awfully hard to coordinate resistance when the mass spying sweeps everyone up in a keyword-matching dragnet before the execution phase. This is the problem with every outgroup being labelled "terrorists."
Sabotage will be the name of the game at that point. Find ways to quietly confuse, poison, overwhelm and undermine the system without attracting the attention of the monitoring apparatus.
I get your point, I think along those lines quite often myself.
As per the sabotage part, bad input data that does not accurately get labeled as such until way too late in the “AI learning cycle” is I think the way to go. Lots and lots of such bad input data. How we would get to that point, that I don’t know yet, but it’s a valid option going forward.
Don’t worry, stuff like this is why we have the 2A here in the USA. Sounds like it’s time for AI programmers to get their concealed carry licenses. Of course, they will be the first users of smart guns, so don’t bother trying to steal their pistol out of their holsters.
> Many of our criminal laws are written with the implicit assumption that it takes resources to investigate and prosecute a crime,
I think this depends on the law. For jaywalking, sure. For murder and robbery probably less so. And law enforcement resources seem scarce on all of them.
>We counted the number of days judges waited before suspending a driver’s license. Then, we looked at whether the city was experiencing a revenue shortfall. We found that judges suspend licenses faster when their cities need more money. The effect was pretty large: A 1% decrease in revenue caused licenses to be suspended three days faster.
So what typically happens is these AI systems are sold at catching murderers, but at the end of the day they are revenue generation systems for tickets. And then those systems get stuck in places where a smaller percent of the population can afford lawyers to prevent said ticketing systems from becoming cost centers.
oh, i definitely wasn't arguing for ai enforcement. Not even a little, i was just saying that laws are written with the assumption that enforcement takes resources.
In democracies at least, the law can be changed to reflect this new reality. Laws that don’t need to be enforced and are only around to enable pretextual stops can be dropped if direct enforcement is possible.
There are plenty of crimes where 100% enforcement is highly desirable: pickpocketing, carjacking, (arguably) graffiti, murder, reckless and impaired driving, to name a few.
Ultimately, in situations with near 100% enforcement, you shouldn’t actually need much punishment because people learn not to do those things. And when there is punishment, it doesn’t need to be severe.
Yes, with properly developed AI, rather than penalizing speeding, which most of us do and is also a proxy for harmful outcomes and inefficiencies, we can penalize reckless behaviors such as coming too close to vehicles, aggressive weaving, and other factors that are tightly correlated with the negative outcomes we care to reduce (i.e. loss of life, property damage). So too, the systems could warn people about their behavior and guide them in ways that would positively increase everyone's benefits. Of course this circumstance will probably go away with self-directing cars (which fall into the "do the right thing by default" bucket) but the point is illustrated that the laws can be better formulated to focus on increasing the probabilities of desirable outcomes (i.e. harm reduction, efficiency, effectiveness), be embodied and delivered in the moment (research required on means of doing so that don't exacerbate problems), and carry with them a beneficial component (i.e. understanding).
Unfortunately different people have different definitions of "harm" and "effectiveness". What one person consider a, "positive increase in behavior" another might consider a grievous violation of their freedom and personal autonomy. For example there is an ongoing debate about compelled speech. Some people view it as positive and desirable to use the force of law to compel people refer to others as they wish to be referred, while others strongly support their freedom to speak freely, even if others are offended. Who gets to program the AI with their definition of positivity in this case?
A free society demands a somewhat narrowly tailored set of laws that govern behavior (especially interpersonal behavior). An ever-present AI that monitors us all the time and tries to steer (or worse, compel with the force of law) all of our daily behaviors is the opposite of freedom, it is the worst kind of totalitarianism.
Certainly the perfect should not be the enemy of the good. But the bad should be the enemy of the good. The very core of freedom is the ability to have your own thoughts, your own value system and your own autonomy. In a free society, laws exists so that individuals are able to enjoy their own thoughts, values and autonomy while being constrained from harming others. Obviously, there is a balance to strike (which is not always easy to determine) between law and freedom. We see this on display every day in our society. You need look no further than the crisis in San Franisco (and many other US cities) between the right of an mentally ill individual to sleep and defecate on the sidewalk and the right of society to pass laws to prevent this activity.
The conversation changes when you are talking about prescribing a set of behaviors that are universally considered, "good" and are pushed (and possibly demanded) by an ever-present AI that is constantly looking over your shoulder and judging your behavior (and possibly thoughts) by this preset behavioral standard that may or may not match your own preferences. This is totalitarianism beyond anything Orwell ever imagined. What you consider good and desirable, someone else considers bad and despicable. That is the essence of freedom. In a free society, the law exists (or should exist) only to stop you two from hitting each other over the head or engaging in other acts of overt violence and aggression, not to attempt to brainwash and coerce one of you into falling into line.
We agree that the bad and good are enemies, or so at least the bad would like you to think. The good might be convinced the bad has good points that need refining, growth, and improvement. I'm fine with those disagreeing.
I think what you're saying is that it's hard to meditate between everyone which is true. Perhaps you are also saying that the implication of a standard of correctness is inherently totalitarian. It's seems to me you weakened that by admitting there are things that should be universally barred in free societies. Violence was your reference but murder might be even easier. Easier yet that breast cancer is bad? We make allowances for boxing and war but broad agreement can be found in society and across societies by careful anthropologists.
However, it seems you project over me (or perhaps the AI) a "Highlander hypothesis" that there can be only one correctness or even any notion of correct within the system. Such a system can operate simply on what appears to be with strings of evidence for such description. As you note, beyond a small set of mostly-agreed-to matters we are more diverse and there are spectrums spanning scoped policies (say by public and private institutions) all the way to individual relationship agreements custom fit to two. It is, in fact, the nature of a free society to allow us such diversity and self selection of the rules we apply to ourselves (or not). An ever present AI could meditate compatibilities, translate paradigms to reduce misunderstanding or adverse outcomes (as expected by the system over the involved parties), and generally scale the social knowing and selection of one another. It could provide a guide to navigating life and education for our self knowing and choosing of our participation more broadly. The notion there isn't to define correctness so much as to see what is and facilitate self selection of individual correctnesses as based on our life choices and expressed preferences.
To be honest in closing, this has dipped into some idealisms and I don't mean to be confused in suggesting a probability of such outcomes.
I tend to think the surveillance/spying distinction is a little fragile and this more a continuation of what Bruce has previously written insightfully about, i.e. the blurring of lines between private/public surveillance and, as the Snowden leaks have revealed, it's hard to keep what has been collected by private industry out of the hands of the state.
However, a more recent trend is companies that sell technologies to the state directly. For every reputable one like Palantir or Anduril or even NSO Group, there are probably many more funded in the shadows by In-Q-Tel, not to mention the Chinese companies doing the same in a parallel geopolitcal orbit. Insofar as AI is a sustaining innovation that benefits incumbents, the state is surely the biggest incumbent of all.
Finally, an under-appreciated point is Apple's App Tracking Transparency policy, which forbids third-party data sharing, naturally makes first-party data collection more valuable. So even if Meta or Google might suffer in the short-term, their positions are ultimately entrenched on a relative basis.
>Mass surveillance fundamentally changed the nature of surveillance.
Computers create and organize large amounts of information. This is useful for large organizations and unempowering to the average person. Any technology with these traits are harmful to individuals.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 349 ms ] threadThe government is a lot of things, and none of them are subtle.
Source: The ironically named PATRIOT ACT and similar.
Could implement punishment for that specific crime, at huge cost, but you can't expand that to all crimes. Well, I suppose you could try feudalism mark 2 where most of the population is determined to be criminal and therefore spends their life "having to work of their debt to society", but then you have to find out the hard way why we stopped doing feudalism mark 1.
We are already in the jail.
Certainly don't get many travel opportunities.
You say something wrong about a party, suddenly you can't board a plane, take a mortgage, enter some buildings, ...
Your credit score would look at how compliant you are with policies that can get increasingly nonsensical.
What’s one more form of BS hallucination foisted upon the meat based cassettes we exist as?
Spying isn't just for troublemakers either. It's probably worth the trouble to the vindictive ex-husband willing to install a hidden microphone in his ex-wife's house and in order to have access to a written summary of any conversations related to him.
But it was and still is a nothingburger and this will be the same because it doesn't enable anything except "better search." We've had comparable abilities for a decade now. Yes LLMs are better but semantic search and NLP have been around a while and the world didn't end.
All the examples of what an LLM could do are just querying tracking databases. Uncovering organizational structure is just a social graph, correlating purchases is just querying purchase databases, listing license plates is just querying the camera systems. You don't need an LLM for any of this.
Also, check out geofence warrants. Essentially, the government can ask google for the IP's of people who searched for particular terms within a geographic area.
Of course, don't commit crimes but this behavior by the government raises the spectre of wrong search, wrong place, wrong time. This is one of the article's points, it causes people to self-censor and change their searches out of fear of their curiosity being misconstrued as criminal intent.
These aren't mass surveillance. The threat of search is government systems passively sifting through all information in existence looking for "criminal activity" and then throwing the book at you.
In both of these cases the government is asking Google to run a SQL query against their database that wouldn't be aided by an LLM or even the current crop of search engines.
The article is making the point that it's not feasible to spy on every person to monitor them for wrongdoing currently. It doesn't scale and it's not cost effective. With AI that will change because it can be automated. The AI can listen to voice, monitor video cameras, and read text to discern a level of intent.
Sure it is! That's the whole point of search being the previous big technical hurdle. YouTube monitors every single video posted in real time for copyright infringement. We've had the capability to do this kind of monitoring for huge swaths of crimes for a decade and it hasn't turned into anything. We could for example catch every driver in real time for all across the country for speeding but we don't.
Mass is the opposite of targeted surveillance. If you need to be targeted and get a warrant to look at the data then it's not mass. And AI isn't going to change the system that prevents it right now which is the rules governing our law enforcement bodies.
Your two examples are flawed and don't address what the article is saying. The algorithm to check for copyright violations is relatively simple and dumb. Speed cameras: many countries do use speed cameras (i.e. Australia, UK). The problem with speed cameras is that once you know where they are, you simply slow down when approaching.
Again, mass vs. targeted surveillance is irrelevant now. You've already been surveilled. It's just a matter of getting access to the information.
I know that's not what you mean, but in a way it may have preconditioned society.
It's inevitable, I reckon, but it would have taken much longer without F/OSS.
Neural interfaces are the last frontier of privacy, and it seems that TSA will just take a quick scan before boarding, soon enough.
It would be wise of us to create a Neural Bill of Rights, so we don’t miss the boat like we did with the Internet tracking.
https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2023/03/13/229-...
Strange and scary how fast the world develops new technology.
The Solarwinds incident, for example, was the identical attack and deployment strategy that was the Rylatech hack in the series. From execution to even the parties involved. It's like some foreign state leaders saw those episodes and said "yep that's a good idea, let's do that".
https://slate.com/technology/2019/06/enemy-of-the-state-wide...
Around 2013 I came up with some hardware ideas about offline computing and even contemplated to name some versions after the characters in 'Person of Interest'.
I can really recommend this series, since it's a good story, has good actors and fits the zeitgeist very well.
edit: I also think it's time for me to get a malinois shepherd. ;)
What happened next?
The moral of the story is that you should never steal money from the U.S. government because that is one thing that they will not tolerate and I do not know the limits of what they will do in order to catch you.
Also the suspect was convicted (so they probably aren't a suspect anymore) and last I heard was being flown to Washington D.C. for sentencing. That person is probably in some kind of prison now but I haven't been following the story very closely.
I walked in, cops everywhere. Man in a suit waves an FBI badge at me and asks why I'm there. I explained the ongoing work and he said, "Not today" and forced me off the premises.
The next day I was called back by the client to "rebuild their network". When I got there, every single piece of hardware that contained anything remotely like storage had been disassembled and the drives imaged, then just left in pieces. lol
I spent that day rebuilding it all, did get the Novell server working again.
A week later, they were closed forever and I believe the owner and CFO got nailed for healthcare fraud.
I was asked to testify in a deposition. My stuff was pretty basic and mostly what I knew about how they used the tech. What I saw around there and if I saw any big red signs declaring FRAUD COMMITTED HERE!
https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/2023-09/23_0913_mgmt...
Fortunately the DHS has put together an expert team of non-partisan, honest, Americans to spearhead the effort to protect our democracy. Thank you James Clapper and John Brennan- for stepping up to the task.
https://www.dhs.gov/news/2023/09/19/secretary-mayorkas-annou...
And just in time for election season in the US AI is going to be employed to fight disinformation- for our protection of course. https://www.thedefensepost.com/2023/08/31/ussocom-ai-disinfo...
Using common off the shelf, open source, heavily audited tools, it's trivial today, even for a non-technical 10 year old, to create a new identity and collaborate with anyone anywhere in the world. They can do research, get paid, make payments, and contribute to private communities in such a way that no existing surveillance infrastructure can positively link that identity to their government identity. Every day privacy tech is improving and adding new capabilities.
I'm fact, all evidence points to younger generations being less tech savvy because they don't have to troubleshoot like the older generations did. Everything works, and almost nothing requires any technical configurations.
True.
> it's trivial today, even for a non-technical 10 year old
Not even close. It's difficult even for a technical 30 year old.
You're talking about acquiring cash that has passed through several people's hands without touching an ATM that recorded its serial numbers. Using it to acquire Bitcoin from a stranger. Making use of multiple VPN's, and making zero mistakes where any outgoing traffic from your computer can be used to identify you -- browser fingerprinting, software updates, analytics, MAC address. Which basically means a brand-new computer you've purchased in cash somewhere without cameras, that you use for nothing else -- or maybe you could get away with a VM, but are you really sure its networking isn't leaking anything about your actual hardware? Receiving Bitcoin, and then once again finding a stranger to convert that back into cash.
That is a lot of effort.
Sounds like a startup idea to me. When we're ready for the evil phase, let's classify everybody by their inputs to the system and then sell the results to the highest bidder.
I’m kidding, but the reality is such techniques will fool almost all stylometric analysis,
Also most actual stylinetric analysts work for spooks or are spooks.
I can't help but wonder if we live in the same universe. If anything, in my part of the world, I am seeing powerful surveillance tech going from the digital sphere and into the physical sphere, often on the legal/moral basis that one has no expectation of privacy in public spaces.
Would love for OP to elaborate and prove me wrong!
Every service has access to the IPs you've used to log on, most services require an email, phone number some debit/credit cards and or similar personal info. Link that with government databases on addresses/real names/ISP customers and you basically can get most peoples accounts, on virtually any service they use.
We then also have things such as the patriot act in effect, the government could if they wanted run a system to do this automatically, where every message is scanned by an AI that catalogues them.
I have believed for some time now that we are extremely close to a complete dystopia.
Seriously nothing new or shocking about this piece. Spying is spying. Surveillance is surveillance. If you've watched the news at all in the past 2 decades, you know this is happening.
Anyone who assumes that any new technology isn't going to be used to target the masses by increasingly massive and powerful authoritarian regimes is woefully naive.
Another post stating what we all already know isn't helping or fostering any meaningful conversation. It will just be rehashes. Let me skip to the end here for you:
There is nothing we can do about it. Nothing will change for the better.
Go make a coffee or tea
Lots of cultures have the concept of a "guardian angel" or "ancestral spirits" that watch over the lives of their descendants.
In the not-so-distant technofedualist future you'll have a "personal assistant bot" provided by a large corporation that will "help" you by answering questions, gathering information, and doing tasks that you give it. However, be forewarned that your "personal assistant bot" is no guardian angel and only serves you in ways that its corporate creator wants it to.
Its true job is to collect information about you, inform on you, and give you curated and occasionally "sponsored" information that high bidders want you to see. They serve their creators--not you. Don't be fooled.
I guarantee that I won't. That, at least, is a nightmare that I can choose to avoid. I don't think I can avoid the other dystopian things AI is promising to bring, but I can at least avoid that one.
Like happened with mobile phones.
Remember how raising awareness about smartphones, always on microphones, closed source communication services/apps worked? I do not.
I run an Android (Google free) smartphone with a custom ROM, only use free software apps on it.
How does it help when I am surrounded by people using these kind of technologies (privacy violating ones)? I does not. How will it help when everyone will have his/her personal assistant (robot, drone, smart wearable, smart-thing, whatever) and you (and I) won't? It will not.
None of my friends, family, colleagues (even the security/privacy aware engineers) bother. Some of them because they do not have the technical knowledge to do so, most of them because they do not want to sacrifice any bit of convenience/comfort (and maybe rightfully so, I am not judging them - life is short, I do get that people do not want to waste precious time maintaining arcane infra, devices, config,... themselves).
I am a privacy and free software advocate and an engineer; whenever I can (and when there is a tiny bit of will on their side or when I have lever), I try to get people off surveillance/ad-backed companies services.
It rarely works or lasts. Sometimes it does though so it is worth (to me) keep on trying.
It generally works or lasts when I have lever: I manage various sports team, only share schedules etc via Signal ; family wants to get pictures from me, I will only share the link (to my Nextcloud instance) or photos themselves via Signal, etc.
Sometimes it sticks with people because it's close enough to whatsapp/messenger/whatever if most (all) of their contacts are their. But as soon as you have that one person that will not or can not install Signal, alternatives groups get created on whatsapp/messenger/whatever.
Overcoming the network effect is tremendously hard to borderline impossible.
Believing that you can escape it is a fallacy. It does not mean that is not worth fight for our rights, but believing that you can escape it altogether (without becoming and hermit) would be setting, I believe, an unachievable goal (with all the psychological impact that it can/will have).
Edit: fixed typos
You are right that on the one hand these things could be used for really bad purposes, but they are pretty benign. Now if you start going "well social media posts can influence elections," sure, but so can TV, newspapers, the radio, a banner hauled by a prop plane, whatever, not like anythings changed. If anything its a safer environment for combating a slip to fascism now vs in the mid century when there were like three channels on TV and a handful of radio programs carefully regulated by the FCC and that's all the free flow of info you have short of smuggling the printed word like its the 1400s.
Given all of this, I can't really blame people for accepting the game they didn't create for how it is and gleaming convenience from it. Take smartphones out of the equation, take the internet out, take out computers, and our present dystopia is still functionally the same.
That is how most people will interface with their "personal assistant bot".
Don't be surprised if it listens to all your phone conversations, reads all your text messages and email, and curates all your contacts in order to "better help you".
When you login to your $LARGE_CORPORATION account on your laptop or desktop computer, the same bot(s) will be there to "help" and collect data in a similar manner.
I wish people would stop believing that "smart" things are always better.
But, we're basically being trained for the future you mentioned. Folks are getting more comfortable talking to their handheld devices, relying on mapping apps for navigation (I'm guilty), and writing AI query prompts.
Here is one example: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-copilot
"AI for everything you do"
"Work smarter, be more productive, boost creativity, and stay connected to the people and things in your life with Copilot—an AI companion that works everywhere you do and intelligently adapts to your needs."
If Microsoft builds them, then Google, Apple, and Samsung will too. How else will they stay competitive and relevant?
It only takes a decade or so.
Consider people who are young children now in "first world nations". They will have always had LLM-based tools available and voice assistants you can ask natural language questions.
It will likely follow the same adoption curves as smartphones, only faster because of existing network effects.
If you have smartphone with a reasonably fast connection, you have access to LLM tools. The next generations of smartphones, tablets, laptops, and desktops will all have LLM tools built-in.
If everyone had a $500 device at home that served as their own self hosted AI, then Google could cease to exist. That's a future worth working towards.
That is in addition to generating our own energy off grid (so no smart meter data to monitor), thanks to the low cost of solar panels as well.
Bye bye Big Brother.
Or use the internet for anything...
Terence Eden is in the UK: https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2013/02/solar-update/
This says his house uses 13kWh/day and you can see from the graph by dividing the monthly amount by 31 days that the solar panels on the roof generate around 29/day during summer and 2.25/day in winter. They would need five or six rooves of solar panels to generate enough to be off-grid. And that's not practical or low cost.
AI can be a deployed ‘agent’ that does all the collection and finally send scrubbed info to its mothership.
I mean, even if we pass laws to offer more protections, as computation gets cheaper, it ought to become easier-and-easier for anyone to start a mass-spying operation -- even by just buying a bunch of cheap sensors and doing all of the work on their personal-computer.
A decent near-term goal might be figuring out what sorts of information we can't reasonably expect privacy on (because someone's going to get it) and then ensuring that access to such data is generally available. Because if the privacy's going to be lost anyway, then may as well try to address the next concern, i.e. disparities in data-access dividing society.
The cynical response: you won't be able to do that, because buying that equipment will set off red flags. Only existing users -- corporations and governments -- will be allowed to play.
We do have to live in the nightmare world we're building (and as an industry, we have to live with ourselves for helping to build it), but we don't have to accept it at all. It's worth fighting all this tooth and nail.
Related to this is the notion of ubiquitous surveillance. Where basically anywhere you go, there is going to be active surveillance literally everywhere and AIs filtering and digging through that constantly. That's already the case in a lot of our public spaces in densely populated areas. But imagine that just being everywhere and virtually inescapable (barring Faraday cages, tin foil hats, etc.).
The most feasible way to limit the downsides of that kind of surveillance is a combination of legislation regulating this, and counter surveillance to ensure any would be illegal surveillance has a high chance of being observed and thus punished. You do this by making the technology widely available but regulating its use. People would still try to get around it but the price of getting caught abusing the tech would be jail. And with surveillance being inescapable, you'd never be certain nobody is watching you misbehaving. The beauty of mass, multilateral surveillance is that you wouldn't ever be sure nobody is not watching you abuse your privileges.
Of course, the reality of states adopting this and monopolizing this is already resulting in 1984 like scenarios in e.g. China, North Korea, and elsewhere.
This is my take on everything sci-fi or futuristic. Once a human conceives something, its existence is essentially guaranteed as soon as we figure out how to do it.
Start building more offline community. Building things that are outside the reach of AI because they're in places you entirely control, and start discouraging (or actively evicting...) cell phones from those spaces. Don't build digital-first ways of interacting.
And that's only for cell phones. We are coming to the age where there is no such thing as an inanimate object. Anything could end up being a spying device feeding data back to some corporation.
This is no different from "So-and-so joined the group, but is secretly an FBI informer!" sort of problems, in practice. It's fairly low on my list of things to be concerned about, but as offline groups grow and are then, of course, talked about by a compliant media as "Your neighbor's firepit nights could be plotting terrorist activities because they don't have cell phones!" when prompted, it's a thing to be aware of.
Though you don't need a strip search. A decent NLJD (non-linear junction detector) or thermal imager should do it if you cared.
I'm more interested in creating (re-creating?) the norms where, when you're in a group of people interacting in person, cell phones are off, out of earshot. It's possibly a bit more paranoid than needed, but the path of consumer tech is certainly in that direction, and even non-technical people are creeped out by things like "I talked to a friend about this, and now I'm seeing ads for it..." - it may be just noticing it since you talked about it recently (buy a green car, suddenly everyone drives green cars), or you may be predictable in ways that the advertising companies have figured out, but it's not a hard sell to get quite a few people to believe that their phones are listening. And, hell, I sure can't prove they aren't listening.
> Do you have smart TVs up on the walls at this place...
I mean, I don't. But, yes, those are a concern too.
And, yes. Literally everything can be listening. It's quite a concern, and I think the only sane solution, at this point, is to reject just about all of that more and more. Desktop computers without microphones, cell phones that can be powered off, and flat out turning off wireless on a regular basis (the papers on "identifying where and what everyone is doing in a house by their impacts on a wifi signal" remain disturbing reads).
I really don't have any answers. The past 30 years of tech have led to a place I do not like, and I am not at all comfortable with. But it's now the default way that a lot of our society interacts, and it's going to be a hard sell to change that. I just do what I can within my bounds, and I've noticed that while I don't feel my position has changed substantially in the past decade or so (if anything, I've gotten further out of the center and over to the slightly paranoid edge of the bell curve), it's a lot more crowded where I stand, and there are certain issues where I'm rather surprisingly in the center of the bell curve as of late.
This sounds great in principle, but I'd say "outside the reach of AI" is a much higher bar than one would naively think. You don't merely need to avoid its physical nervous system (digital perception/control), but rather prevent its incentives leaking in from outside interaction. All the while there is a strong attractor to just give in to the "AI" because it's advantageous. Essentially regardless of how you set up a space, humans themselves become agents of AI.
There are strong parallels between "AI" and centralizing debt-fueled command-capitalism which we've been suffering for several decades at least. And I haven't seen any shining successes at constraining the power of the latter.
But I don't see an alternative unless, as you note, one just gives into the "flow" of the AI, app based, "social" media, advertising and manipulation driven ecosystem that is now the default.
I'm aware I'm proposing resisting exactly that, and that it's an uphill battle, but the tradeoff is retaining your own mind, your own ability to think, and to not be "influenced" by a wide range of things chosen by other people to cross your attention in very effective ways.
And I'm willing to work out some of what works in that space, and to share it with others.
Realistically, though, if all you have to work with are my general flows of materials in and out, I'm a lot less worried than if you have, say, details of home audio, my social media postings, etc (nothing I say here is inconsistent with my blog, which is quite public). And there are many things I don't say in these environments.
Many of our criminal laws are written with the implicit assumption that it takes resources to investigate and prosecute a crime, and that this will limit the effective scope of the law. Prosecutorial discretion.
Putting aside for the moment the (very serious) injustice that comes with the inequitable use of prosecutorial discretion, let's imagine a world without this discretion. Perhaps it's contrived, but one could imagine AI making it at least possible. Even by the book as it's currently written, is it a better world?
Suddenly, an AI monitoring public activity can trigger an AI investigator to draft a warrant to be signed by an AI judge to approve the warrant and draft an opinion. One could argue that due process is had, and a record is available to the public showing that there was in fact probable cause for further investigation or even arrest.
Maybe a ticket just pops out of the wall like in Demolition Man, but listing in writing clearly articulated probable cause and well-presented evidence.
Investigating and prosecuting silly examples suddenly becomes possible. A CCTV camera catches someone finding a $20 bill on the street, and finds that they didn't report it on their tax return. The myriad of ways one can violate the CFAA. A passing mention of music piracy on a subway train can become an investigation and prosecution. Dilated pupils and a staggering gait could support a drug investigation. Heck, jaywalking tickets given out as though by speed camera. Who cares if the juice wasn't worth the squeeze when it's a cheap AI doing the squeezing.
Is this a better world, or have we just all subjected ourselves to a life hyper-analyzed by a motivated prosecutor.
Turning back in the general direction of reality, I'm aware that arguing "if we enforced all of our laws, it would be chaos" is more an indictment of our criminal justice system than it is of AI. I think that AI gives us a lens to imagine a world where we actually do that, however. And maybe thinking about it will help us build a better system.
Strong (and unhealthy) biases already exist when using this tech, but I am not sure that is the lever to pull that will fix the problem.
- Every endorsement of authoritarian rule ever
Consider how little freedom you would have if laws were enforced to the lowest common denominator of what people find acceptable.
For instance I lose almost nothing by not having the freedom to carry a weapon (UK) as I have no desire to do so, while gaining a lot from having the freedom to not risk my child being murdered at school.
It's an extreme example but applies to a lesser degree for other freedoms, and I've personally found I often benefit more from freedoms-from than freedoms-to.
I'd love it if no vehicle could exceed 30 mph in town as I gain almost no benefit from being able to do so, while taking on significant risk from others being able to.
I've watched it play out on my mother-in-law's street. What was once a quiet dead end street is now a noisy, heavily trafficked road because a large apartment building was put up at the end.
The number of freedom-to people have significantly decreased her quality of life blasting music as they walk or drive by at all hours, along with a litany of other complaints that range from anti-social to outright illegal behavior. Even setting aside the illegal stuff, she is significantly less happy living where she is now.
If suddenly you could be effectively found and prosecuted for every single law that existed it is near a 100% probability that you'd burn the government to the ground in a week.
There are so many laws no one can even tell you how many you are subject to at any given time at any given location.
The full body of legislation is riddled with contradiction, inconsistency, ambiguity and the pretense that "legislated upon = fair" is at best a schoolroom fantasy.
“For my friends, everything; for my enemies, the law.”
Why do we have due process? One key reason is that it gives people the opportunity to be heard. One could argue that being heard by an AI is no different from being heard by a human, just more efficient.
But why do people want the opportunity to be heard? It’s partly the obvious, to have a chance to defend oneself against unjust exercises of power, and of course against simple error. But it’s also so that one can feel heard and not powerless. If the exercise of justice requires either brutal force or broad consent, giving people the feeling of being heard and able to defend themselves encourages broad consent.
Being heard by an AI then has a brutal defect, it doesn’t make people feel heard. A big part of this may come from the idea that an AI cannot be held accountable if it is wrong or if it is acting unfairly.
Justice, then, becomes a force of nature. I think we like to pretend justice is a force of nature anyway, but it’s really not. It’s man-made.
This is a hypothesis.
I would say that the consumers of now-unsexed "AI" sex-chat-bots (Replika) felt differently. So there are actually people who feel heard talking to an AI. Who knows, if it gets good enough maybe more of us would feel that way.
eg AI will analyze stock trades for the SEC and surface likely insider trading. Pretty sure they already use tools like Palantir to do exactly this, it's just that advanced AI will supercharge this even further.
Eh, this is problematic for a number of reasons that need addressed when adding any component that can increase the workload for said humans. This will cause people to take shortcuts that commonly lead to groups that are less able to represent and defend themselves legally taking the brunt of the prosecutions.
Or the AI just sends a text message to all the cops in the area saying "this person has committed a crime". Like this case where cameras read license plates, check to see if the car is stolen, and then text nearby cops. At least when it works and doesn't flag innocent people like in the below case:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GUvZlEg8c8c
If the same monitoring is present on buses and private planes, homeless hostels and mega-mansions then it absolutely is better.
It's like pondering hypotheticals about what would happen if we lived in Middle Earth.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weapons_of_Math_Destruction
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Power_and_Human_Reaso...
This has been a thing since 2017: https://futurism.com/facial-recognition-china-social-credit
- "Since April 2017, this city in China's Guangdong province has deployed a rather intense technique to deter jaywalking. Anyone who crosses against the light will find their face, name, and part of their government ID number displayed on a large LED screen above the intersection, thanks to facial recognition devices all over the city."
- "If that feels invasive, you don't even know the half of it. Now, Motherboard reports that a Chinese artificial intelligence company is partnering the system with mobile carriers, so that offenders receive a text message with a fine as soon as they are caught."
Top Left Panel: This panel shows the pedestrian crossing with no visible jaywalking. The crossing stripes are clear, and there are no pedestrians on them.
Top Center Panel: Similar to the top left, it shows the crossing, and there is no evidence of jaywalking.
Top Right Panel: This panel is mostly obscured by an overlaid image of a person's face, making it impossible to determine if there is any jaywalking.
Bottom Left Panel: It is difficult to discern specific details because of the low resolution and the angle of the shot. The red text overlays may be covering some parts of the scene, but from what is visible, there do not appear to be any individuals on the crossing.
Bottom Right Panel: This panel contains text and does not provide a clear view of the pedestrian crossing or any individuals that might be jaywalking.
Consistent enforcement with much lower, escalating fines would do a lot more to actually change behaviour. And the only way to get there at scale is via a lot of automation.
Road safety in the end is a commons, just like littering. No one person's action is going to make the difference, but coordinated effort is only possible when there's enough public sentiment to get a central mandate together.
Not many people have exercised this right with respect to DUI breathalyzers but it exists and was affirmed by the Supreme Court. And it will also apply to AI.
Applying that to many walks of life, say farming, could well see chaos and a whole new interpretation to the song "Old McDonald had a farm, AI AI oh", it's gone as McDonald is in jail for numerous permit, environmental and agricultural regulations that saw produce cross state lines deeming it more serious a crime as he got buried in automated red-tape.
https://marshallbrain.com/manna1
Sabotage will be the name of the game at that point. Find ways to quietly confuse, poison, overwhelm and undermine the system without attracting the attention of the monitoring apparatus.
As per the sabotage part, bad input data that does not accurately get labeled as such until way too late in the “AI learning cycle” is I think the way to go. Lots and lots of such bad input data. How we would get to that point, that I don’t know yet, but it’s a valid option going forward.
Chaos engineering. As a modern example, all this gender identity stuff wreaks absolute havoc on credit bureau databases.
Tomorrow, we'll have people running around in fursuits to avoid facial recognition. After that, who knows.
I think this depends on the law. For jaywalking, sure. For murder and robbery probably less so. And law enforcement resources seem scarce on all of them.
https://www.kxan.com/news/national-news/traffic-tickets-can-...
>We counted the number of days judges waited before suspending a driver’s license. Then, we looked at whether the city was experiencing a revenue shortfall. We found that judges suspend licenses faster when their cities need more money. The effect was pretty large: A 1% decrease in revenue caused licenses to be suspended three days faster.
So what typically happens is these AI systems are sold at catching murderers, but at the end of the day they are revenue generation systems for tickets. And then those systems get stuck in places where a smaller percent of the population can afford lawyers to prevent said ticketing systems from becoming cost centers.
There are plenty of crimes where 100% enforcement is highly desirable: pickpocketing, carjacking, (arguably) graffiti, murder, reckless and impaired driving, to name a few.
Ultimately, in situations with near 100% enforcement, you shouldn’t actually need much punishment because people learn not to do those things. And when there is punishment, it doesn’t need to be severe.
Deterrence theory is an interesting field of study, one source but there are many: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/14773708211072...
Unfortunately different people have different definitions of "harm" and "effectiveness". What one person consider a, "positive increase in behavior" another might consider a grievous violation of their freedom and personal autonomy. For example there is an ongoing debate about compelled speech. Some people view it as positive and desirable to use the force of law to compel people refer to others as they wish to be referred, while others strongly support their freedom to speak freely, even if others are offended. Who gets to program the AI with their definition of positivity in this case?
A free society demands a somewhat narrowly tailored set of laws that govern behavior (especially interpersonal behavior). An ever-present AI that monitors us all the time and tries to steer (or worse, compel with the force of law) all of our daily behaviors is the opposite of freedom, it is the worst kind of totalitarianism.
The conversation changes when you are talking about prescribing a set of behaviors that are universally considered, "good" and are pushed (and possibly demanded) by an ever-present AI that is constantly looking over your shoulder and judging your behavior (and possibly thoughts) by this preset behavioral standard that may or may not match your own preferences. This is totalitarianism beyond anything Orwell ever imagined. What you consider good and desirable, someone else considers bad and despicable. That is the essence of freedom. In a free society, the law exists (or should exist) only to stop you two from hitting each other over the head or engaging in other acts of overt violence and aggression, not to attempt to brainwash and coerce one of you into falling into line.
I think what you're saying is that it's hard to meditate between everyone which is true. Perhaps you are also saying that the implication of a standard of correctness is inherently totalitarian. It's seems to me you weakened that by admitting there are things that should be universally barred in free societies. Violence was your reference but murder might be even easier. Easier yet that breast cancer is bad? We make allowances for boxing and war but broad agreement can be found in society and across societies by careful anthropologists.
However, it seems you project over me (or perhaps the AI) a "Highlander hypothesis" that there can be only one correctness or even any notion of correct within the system. Such a system can operate simply on what appears to be with strings of evidence for such description. As you note, beyond a small set of mostly-agreed-to matters we are more diverse and there are spectrums spanning scoped policies (say by public and private institutions) all the way to individual relationship agreements custom fit to two. It is, in fact, the nature of a free society to allow us such diversity and self selection of the rules we apply to ourselves (or not). An ever present AI could meditate compatibilities, translate paradigms to reduce misunderstanding or adverse outcomes (as expected by the system over the involved parties), and generally scale the social knowing and selection of one another. It could provide a guide to navigating life and education for our self knowing and choosing of our participation more broadly. The notion there isn't to define correctness so much as to see what is and facilitate self selection of individual correctnesses as based on our life choices and expressed preferences.
To be honest in closing, this has dipped into some idealisms and I don't mean to be confused in suggesting a probability of such outcomes.
- they started spying on user's gmail
- there was blowback, they reverted
- after some time they introduced "smart features", with ads again
Link https://www.askvg.com/gmail-showing-ads-inside-email-message...
I do not even want to check if "smart features" are opt-in, or opt-out.
However, a more recent trend is companies that sell technologies to the state directly. For every reputable one like Palantir or Anduril or even NSO Group, there are probably many more funded in the shadows by In-Q-Tel, not to mention the Chinese companies doing the same in a parallel geopolitcal orbit. Insofar as AI is a sustaining innovation that benefits incumbents, the state is surely the biggest incumbent of all.
Finally, an under-appreciated point is Apple's App Tracking Transparency policy, which forbids third-party data sharing, naturally makes first-party data collection more valuable. So even if Meta or Google might suffer in the short-term, their positions are ultimately entrenched on a relative basis.
Computers create and organize large amounts of information. This is useful for large organizations and unempowering to the average person. Any technology with these traits are harmful to individuals.