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There's never going to be a democratization of AI without a democratization of the data. But the data itself comes from privacy violating surveillance so I don'

by guelo 9y ago

There's never going to be a democratization of AI without a democratization of the data. But the data itself comes from privacy violating surveillance so I don't think we really want democratization of data.

siegecraft 9y ago
You could share the pre-trained models that take tons and tons of data and compute time to generate? The models themselves are abstract enough to be considered anonymous, by their very nature.. I think.
- xapata 9y ago
  Take a look at the literature on de-anonymization. It's easier than you might think.
  - swsieber 9y ago
    De-anonymization of data or of trained neural-nets? I've read somewhere that you can sort of 'squash' a trained net down into a simpler version for performance benefits - the caveat being that it can't do any more learning. I would think that'd make it harder to de-anonymize.
    - xapata 9y ago
      If you simplify the function, you throw away accuracy (or maybe gain, if you over-simplified). The less accurate, the harder to de-anonymize. However, you only need 32 bits of information to uniquely identify someone.
      - xapata 9y ago
        s/over-simplified/over-fit/
xapata 9y ago
I'm confident that in 20 years we'll have a very different conception of privacy. Certainly, one of the worst privacy outcomes would be if government had a monopoly on ubiquitous surveillance. Already I don't expect to be anonymous in any public location. Given a public enough lifestyle and enough acquaintances, the likelihood of someone recognizing you anywhere on the globe or in a random pub is non-negligible.
- chadgeidel 9y ago
  I agree that we will have a different conception of privacy. I'm hopeful (but not particularly optimistic) that we can have something like David Brin's "Transparent Society" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Transparent_Society https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Transparent_Society).
  - xapata 9y ago
    I like that term "sousveillance". It's tough to communicate the concept with phrases when folks tend to skim rather than read carefully.
lowglow 9y ago
Completely this. The companies talking about "democratization of AI" means "yeah, come use the models we built" but the data is the real source a democratization of AI should be focusing on. That's where the source of power is.

by guelo 9y ago

siegecraft 9y ago

You could share the pre-trained models that take tons and tons of data and compute time to generate? The models themselves are abstract enough to be considered anonymous, by their very nature.. I think.

xapata 9y ago
Take a look at the literature on de-anonymization. It's easier than you might think.
- swsieber 9y ago
  De-anonymization of data or of trained neural-nets? I've read somewhere that you can sort of 'squash' a trained net down into a simpler version for performance benefits - the caveat being that it can't do any more learning. I would think that'd make it harder to de-anonymize.
  - xapata 9y ago
    If you simplify the function, you throw away accuracy (or maybe gain, if you over-simplified). The less accurate, the harder to de-anonymize. However, you only need 32 bits of information to uniquely identify someone.
    - xapata 9y ago
      s/over-simplified/over-fit/

xapata 9y ago

I'm confident that in 20 years we'll have a very different conception of privacy. Certainly, one of the worst privacy outcomes would be if government had a monopoly on ubiquitous surveillance. Already I don't expect to be anonymous in any public location. Given a public enough lifestyle and enough acquaintances, the likelihood of someone recognizing you anywhere on the globe or in a random pub is non-negligible.

chadgeidel 9y ago
I agree that we will have a different conception of privacy. I'm hopeful (but not particularly optimistic) that we can have something like David Brin's "Transparent Society" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Transparent_Society https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Transparent_Society).
- xapata 9y ago
  I like that term "sousveillance". It's tough to communicate the concept with phrases when folks tend to skim rather than read carefully.

lowglow 9y ago

Completely this. The companies talking about "democratization of AI" means "yeah, come use the models we built" but the data is the real source a democratization of AI should be focusing on. That's where the source of power is.