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I fully expect this to keep getting advanced further. There has been no protest whatsoever within China and even many people of Chinese origin living in US with

I fully expect this to keep getting advanced further. There has been no protest whatsoever within China and even many people of Chinese origin living in US with US citizenship seem to think this is necessary and good for the people. I have been told that "outsiders" won't "understand" this. The bottom line is that if people are not rebelling against current measures of social credit, government only has incentive to keep going. Sooner or later government would require things like TV sets with front camera. So when a person watches TV, camera watches that person. There have been huge progress made in emotional inference which can allow government to measure emotional responses to what person is viewing. Imagine there is a news of rebellian getting crushed and if you are consistently showing supportive emotions, you can get black listed for further investigation. Cities can get microphones at restaurants and other places to analyse what conversations are happening and find hot spots where "trouble makers" hang out. Previously we had only vast sensor networks. Now we can turn each sensor in to autonomous spy that works loyally without salaries and demands nothing but cheap electricity. Computers allows for scale when humans are being replaced. If you want million spies scattered all around, its possible fairly cheaply now. I would also expect lots of other countries to adopt variant of these tech, typically under the notion of improving safety and security for general public.

Razengan 8y ago
> I fully expect this to keep getting advanced further. If they aren’t going to scale it back then I hope they go all the way with it. I hope they try to automate it and feed everything about everyone to a centralized AI. I hope they give it more and more control including the ability to direct military drones. I hope it then turns on them. Because the “smart stupid” people that implement well-intentioned malice like mass surveillance can’t usually see far ahead (see reports of data harvesting companies getting hacked.) If this is the path we’re going to go down then might as well speed up evolution and usher in a new class of intelligent life on this planet.
- b_b 8y ago
  Seems a bit harsh to wish the suffering that this will cause on literally billions of people to prove a point, when we can intervene now instead.
  - Razengan 8y ago
    Intervene how? The governments and corporations of the "Free World" will only pander to China, for “access to their market”, and individuals can't do much against a regime that would happily mow its own citizens down with tanks and then erase all memory of the event within a single generation. [0] Maybe independent developers could put a notice against Chinese authoritarianism in their apps and services when they're accessed from a Chinese IP, to raise awareness among their public. [0] http://www.bing.com/images/search?q=Tiananmen+Square+1989 http://www.bing.com/images/search?q=Tiananmen+Square+1989
    - musage 8y ago
      In your case, not egging it on would be a start even. There is no bottom to this abyss. There is no limit to the number of victims, the upper ceiling for that is 100%, or a gazillion people. There is no limit to their innocence, and no limit to the cruelty inflicted on them. There is no time limit, either. You say this because for you as an individual, it's easier rationalizing that non-resistance will somehow lead to a good outcome. But if everybody did that, it will become a trillion times worse for everybody, "forever", than ANYTHING you could do today. Setting yourself on fire in protest would achieve more, and hurt you less, than the outcome of global, perfect totalitarianism -- which is an ever shrinking noose of sociopathy, not stability. Until you understand this you will not understand that your personal feelings are of secondary concern when basically the world is at stake. Not the planetoid, human society, the space where human personalities would have developed. "A boot stamping on a human face, forever." Don't whitewash that in your own mind.. it involves blood, it involves children screaming in terror for what is done to their parents, it involves sobbing elderly crushed underfoot, "and so on". If you were face to face with just ONE such an act, could you really just shrug it off? If you could not help, it would still sit with you, you know that. If you were lucky, you would seek for ways to turn it into a constructive force. What we are lacking is a perspective for what is at stake, and for the vast opportunities we have. As long as we use our minds more to make excuses than develop principles and stand behind them, we have no say in what is possible. Start with thoughts, then words. Don't be another voice calling people to fall into a sleep that would end in a potentially never ending, ever worsening nightmare.
- mistermann 8y ago
  Usually. Like democracy and freedom is superior, usually.
- kalesho 8y ago
  The funny thing is, their big data police system is called Skynet. > Eyecool, he said, is also handing over two million facial images each day to a burgeoning big-data police system called Skynet.
- nojvek 8y ago
  The way we treat animals, and the fact that most animals are going extinct because of unrelated human activity I.e humans don’t want it, but it’s a side effect of global warming. I’m a 100% sure, really advanced AI will be like that. Millions will suffer as a side effect for the gain of few.
  - bamboozled 8y ago
    I came here to say something similar, what we’ve done with factory farming is probably a glimpse into the future of what we plan on doing to each other. Why would it be any different ?
EGreg 8y ago
First you make it easier to control the masses THEN you make any kind of rules you want Prevent any rebellion with AI Install implants to people to further cement your control later. You won’t even need to do facial recognition. There are essentially two options here: 1) A ruling class enforcing totally arbitrary rules on a society of “pets” 2) An AI that eventually makes the ruling class completely irrelevant My main concern is that this AI will not be sensitive to what humans need or want and will cause a lot of mismatch that they won’t be able to get out of anymore. Revolution won’t be an option. You’re just stuck in a jail being controlled by a dumb AI that just prevents any way out of the jail. There may be no more progress or advancement as this AI would not have any abilities or interest in any of that. Just a zoo of humans essentially. We are already turning the entire planet into farms and monocultures. And a zoo for ourselves is next. No matter what you do someone will invent autonomous X that will then set the standard for all human behavior. It will be so efficient as to notice when you did a tiny thing wrong and the penalties would be extracted via perfectly mapped system of rewards. It will know anyone who tried to help you out as well. It’s just too “sweet”.
obelix_ 8y ago
You have to examine your own assumptions too - 1. You assume stopping "revolution" is the goal. It is not. All you have to do is look at what outcomes "revolutions" in an info saturated/low attention span/consumption culture based society have produced in the last 20 years. 2. In 2013 the Washington post did an estimate on how much was being spent on the surveillance society in the US. Everyone reacted in disbelief. Do you know by how much that budget has increased in the last 5 years? Are these people just brain-dead to be spending this kind of cash? Ofcourse not. The US has made its share of mistakes over valuing freedom and squandering potential. China is overvaluing control and will make its share of mistakes too. We have to learn from both sets of mistakes to arrive at the right balance of where society should go in high noise info saturation environments. These are very new environment that society hasnt been in before and the right path ahead is not as obvious as people think.
- brobdingnagians 8y ago
  Who watches the watchers? Government bureaucrats are human too, and why are they somehow superior to the rest of us in making decisions? If you have a bee-watcher, you must then have a bee-watcher-watcher, an so forth. If everyone makes their own decisions, we call that freedom, and it means we don't have some fallible bureaucrat deciding what is best for me (which I very much doubt they will do well).
  - Asooka 8y ago
    > fallible bureaucrat deciding what is best for me They aren't deciding what's best for you, they're deciding what's best for themselves.
- musage 8y ago
  > You assume stopping "revolution" is the goal. It is not. All you have to do is look at what outcomes "revolutions" in an info saturated/low attention span/consumption culture based society have produced in the last 20 years. And from that follows that the Chinese leadership wouldn't mind a revolution (that they didn't concoct themselves to tighten their grip, that is)? That doesn't follow at all. > China is overvaluing control You're overestimating your own attention span. Either they "value control" (what a disgusting euphemism) or they wouldn't mind a revolution.
sidmani 8y ago
> TV sets with front camera https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telescreen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telescreen
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- King-Aaron 8y ago
  > TV sets with front camera https://www.samsung.com/us/es9000-75-inch-slim-3d-led-smart-tv/ https://www.samsung.com/us/es9000-75-inch-slim-3d-led-smart-...
seanmcdirmid 8y ago
I’m pretty sure there have been protests about this in China. They might not have been heard very well, they were probably more likely to be in the form of online subversive statements, but please don’t think that all Chinese just accept this, many do not. A large scale protest is unlikely, but you’d be surprised what some rebellious CAFA students can do via art.
- extralego 8y ago
  Artivism is a fallacy of romance and a mark of decadence. I sympathize and appreciate the sentiment but we must let it die. Aesthetics compliment power but never redirect it. Let’s not fool ourselves.
  - superflyguy 8y ago
    Ah yes, the "art terrorist". Someone who has spent too much time sniffing paint cans and not enough time studying history.
    - Fnoord 8y ago
      Communication (and media) is important during a revolution (Examples: [1]). Or, more recently, look at the Arab spring where GSM and Bluetooth were important. The importance of radio and TV. Art is a form of communication, and with proper coverage the message is spread (ie. Bansky). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolutions_of_1989 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolutions_of_1989
      - superflyguy 8y ago
        Bit of a stretch. You can argue that art is communication, but you can have communication without art and that's how I'd describe use of tech in the Arab Spring. I'm sure some people think Banksy is changing the world but we've had Brexit and Trump on his watch. Perhaps I'm being unduly harsh though, and we're just a few pretentious faux-warhol wall daubings from freedom.
rqs 8y ago
> Chinese origin living in US with US citizenship seem to think this is necessary and good for the people Of course, they don't have to live with all that so they don't actually care. Next time you could ask them whether or not they're willing to renounce their U.S. citizenship and become Chinese citizen again so they can be monitored 24/7 for their own "insider" "good", then you will start to get true answers from them. Back to the topic though, as a Chinese, I don't actually at the opposite of video surveillance in public, it made many places more safer and thus prosper. However, surveillance cannot went too far, and certainly cannot be use to shame people. It's about respect of one's dignity, a bottom line that a government should never cross. Plus, given the poor accuracy that system outputs, what if the system made a wrong detection and displayed information of an innocent? Chinese government probably don't care about it though.
- jpatokal 8y ago
  It actually doesn't matter if they renounce their Chinese citizenship or not, the Chinese government has demonstrated that they consider anybody born in China to still be Chinese: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jan/22/swedish-bookseller-allegedly-snatched-by-chinese-agents-from-train-gui-minhai https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jan/22/swedish-bookse...
  - v1vek 8y ago
    Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past. - 1984 (George Orwell)
iKSv2 8y ago
" The bottom line is that if people are not rebelling against current measures of social credit, government only has incentive to keep going." One problem with this is that since NEWS and almost all media is State-owned in China, there might be protests and we might be unaware, also the protesters are straightaway sentenced plus now even their family members get "negative points" if I am not mistaken. There's a reason why Chinese people living outside also dont say negatively.
v1vek 8y ago
War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength
some_account 8y ago
Why are we acting like we don't have this in Great Britain or America?

Razengan 8y ago

> I fully expect this to keep getting advanced further. If they aren’t going to scale it back then I hope they go all the way with it. I hope they try to automate it and feed everything about everyone to a centralized AI. I hope they give it more and more control including the ability to direct military drones. I hope it then turns on them. Because the “smart stupid” people that implement well-intentioned malice like mass surveillance can’t usually see far ahead (see reports of data harvesting companies getting hacked.) If this is the path we’re going to go down then might as well speed up evolution and usher in a new class of intelligent life on this planet.

b_b 8y ago
Seems a bit harsh to wish the suffering that this will cause on literally billions of people to prove a point, when we can intervene now instead.
- Razengan 8y ago
  Intervene how? The governments and corporations of the "Free World" will only pander to China, for “access to their market”, and individuals can't do much against a regime that would happily mow its own citizens down with tanks and then erase all memory of the event within a single generation. [0] Maybe independent developers could put a notice against Chinese authoritarianism in their apps and services when they're accessed from a Chinese IP, to raise awareness among their public. [0] http://www.bing.com/images/search?q=Tiananmen+Square+1989 http://www.bing.com/images/search?q=Tiananmen+Square+1989
  - musage 8y ago
    In your case, not egging it on would be a start even. There is no bottom to this abyss. There is no limit to the number of victims, the upper ceiling for that is 100%, or a gazillion people. There is no limit to their innocence, and no limit to the cruelty inflicted on them. There is no time limit, either. You say this because for you as an individual, it's easier rationalizing that non-resistance will somehow lead to a good outcome. But if everybody did that, it will become a trillion times worse for everybody, "forever", than ANYTHING you could do today. Setting yourself on fire in protest would achieve more, and hurt you less, than the outcome of global, perfect totalitarianism -- which is an ever shrinking noose of sociopathy, not stability. Until you understand this you will not understand that your personal feelings are of secondary concern when basically the world is at stake. Not the planetoid, human society, the space where human personalities would have developed. "A boot stamping on a human face, forever." Don't whitewash that in your own mind.. it involves blood, it involves children screaming in terror for what is done to their parents, it involves sobbing elderly crushed underfoot, "and so on". If you were face to face with just ONE such an act, could you really just shrug it off? If you could not help, it would still sit with you, you know that. If you were lucky, you would seek for ways to turn it into a constructive force. What we are lacking is a perspective for what is at stake, and for the vast opportunities we have. As long as we use our minds more to make excuses than develop principles and stand behind them, we have no say in what is possible. Start with thoughts, then words. Don't be another voice calling people to fall into a sleep that would end in a potentially never ending, ever worsening nightmare.
mistermann 8y ago
Usually. Like democracy and freedom is superior, usually.
kalesho 8y ago
The funny thing is, their big data police system is called Skynet. > Eyecool, he said, is also handing over two million facial images each day to a burgeoning big-data police system called Skynet.
nojvek 8y ago
The way we treat animals, and the fact that most animals are going extinct because of unrelated human activity I.e humans don’t want it, but it’s a side effect of global warming. I’m a 100% sure, really advanced AI will be like that. Millions will suffer as a side effect for the gain of few.
- bamboozled 8y ago
  I came here to say something similar, what we’ve done with factory farming is probably a glimpse into the future of what we plan on doing to each other. Why would it be any different ?

EGreg 8y ago

First you make it easier to control the masses THEN you make any kind of rules you want Prevent any rebellion with AI Install implants to people to further cement your control later. You won’t even need to do facial recognition. There are essentially two options here: 1) A ruling class enforcing totally arbitrary rules on a society of “pets” 2) An AI that eventually makes the ruling class completely irrelevant My main concern is that this AI will not be sensitive to what humans need or want and will cause a lot of mismatch that they won’t be able to get out of anymore. Revolution won’t be an option. You’re just stuck in a jail being controlled by a dumb AI that just prevents any way out of the jail. There may be no more progress or advancement as this AI would not have any abilities or interest in any of that. Just a zoo of humans essentially. We are already turning the entire planet into farms and monocultures. And a zoo for ourselves is next. No matter what you do someone will invent autonomous X that will then set the standard for all human behavior. It will be so efficient as to notice when you did a tiny thing wrong and the penalties would be extracted via perfectly mapped system of rewards. It will know anyone who tried to help you out as well. It’s just too “sweet”.

obelix_ 8y ago

You have to examine your own assumptions too - 1. You assume stopping "revolution" is the goal. It is not. All you have to do is look at what outcomes "revolutions" in an info saturated/low attention span/consumption culture based society have produced in the last 20 years. 2. In 2013 the Washington post did an estimate on how much was being spent on the surveillance society in the US. Everyone reacted in disbelief. Do you know by how much that budget has increased in the last 5 years? Are these people just brain-dead to be spending this kind of cash? Ofcourse not. The US has made its share of mistakes over valuing freedom and squandering potential. China is overvaluing control and will make its share of mistakes too. We have to learn from both sets of mistakes to arrive at the right balance of where society should go in high noise info saturation environments. These are very new environment that society hasnt been in before and the right path ahead is not as obvious as people think.

brobdingnagians 8y ago
Who watches the watchers? Government bureaucrats are human too, and why are they somehow superior to the rest of us in making decisions? If you have a bee-watcher, you must then have a bee-watcher-watcher, an so forth. If everyone makes their own decisions, we call that freedom, and it means we don't have some fallible bureaucrat deciding what is best for me (which I very much doubt they will do well).
- Asooka 8y ago
  > fallible bureaucrat deciding what is best for me They aren't deciding what's best for you, they're deciding what's best for themselves.
musage 8y ago
> You assume stopping "revolution" is the goal. It is not. All you have to do is look at what outcomes "revolutions" in an info saturated/low attention span/consumption culture based society have produced in the last 20 years. And from that follows that the Chinese leadership wouldn't mind a revolution (that they didn't concoct themselves to tighten their grip, that is)? That doesn't follow at all. > China is overvaluing control You're overestimating your own attention span. Either they "value control" (what a disgusting euphemism) or they wouldn't mind a revolution.

sidmani 8y ago

> TV sets with front camera https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telescreen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telescreen

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
King-Aaron 8y ago
> TV sets with front camera https://www.samsung.com/us/es9000-75-inch-slim-3d-led-smart-tv/ https://www.samsung.com/us/es9000-75-inch-slim-3d-led-smart-...

seanmcdirmid 8y ago

I’m pretty sure there have been protests about this in China. They might not have been heard very well, they were probably more likely to be in the form of online subversive statements, but please don’t think that all Chinese just accept this, many do not. A large scale protest is unlikely, but you’d be surprised what some rebellious CAFA students can do via art.

extralego 8y ago
Artivism is a fallacy of romance and a mark of decadence. I sympathize and appreciate the sentiment but we must let it die. Aesthetics compliment power but never redirect it. Let’s not fool ourselves.
- superflyguy 8y ago
  Ah yes, the "art terrorist". Someone who has spent too much time sniffing paint cans and not enough time studying history.
  - Fnoord 8y ago
    Communication (and media) is important during a revolution (Examples: [1]). Or, more recently, look at the Arab spring where GSM and Bluetooth were important. The importance of radio and TV. Art is a form of communication, and with proper coverage the message is spread (ie. Bansky). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolutions_of_1989 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolutions_of_1989
    - superflyguy 8y ago
      Bit of a stretch. You can argue that art is communication, but you can have communication without art and that's how I'd describe use of tech in the Arab Spring. I'm sure some people think Banksy is changing the world but we've had Brexit and Trump on his watch. Perhaps I'm being unduly harsh though, and we're just a few pretentious faux-warhol wall daubings from freedom.

rqs 8y ago

> Chinese origin living in US with US citizenship seem to think this is necessary and good for the people Of course, they don't have to live with all that so they don't actually care. Next time you could ask them whether or not they're willing to renounce their U.S. citizenship and become Chinese citizen again so they can be monitored 24/7 for their own "insider" "good", then you will start to get true answers from them. Back to the topic though, as a Chinese, I don't actually at the opposite of video surveillance in public, it made many places more safer and thus prosper. However, surveillance cannot went too far, and certainly cannot be use to shame people. It's about respect of one's dignity, a bottom line that a government should never cross. Plus, given the poor accuracy that system outputs, what if the system made a wrong detection and displayed information of an innocent? Chinese government probably don't care about it though.

jpatokal 8y ago
It actually doesn't matter if they renounce their Chinese citizenship or not, the Chinese government has demonstrated that they consider anybody born in China to still be Chinese: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jan/22/swedish-bookseller-allegedly-snatched-by-chinese-agents-from-train-gui-minhai https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jan/22/swedish-bookse...
- v1vek 8y ago
  Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past. - 1984 (George Orwell)

iKSv2 8y ago

" The bottom line is that if people are not rebelling against current measures of social credit, government only has incentive to keep going." One problem with this is that since NEWS and almost all media is State-owned in China, there might be protests and we might be unaware, also the protesters are straightaway sentenced plus now even their family members get "negative points" if I am not mistaken. There's a reason why Chinese people living outside also dont say negatively.

v1vek 8y ago

War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength

some_account 8y ago

Why are we acting like we don't have this in Great Britain or America?