4 ms·

I'm always so surprised by this community. In discussions about self driving cars and AI, everyone says "the tech isn't there yet", "it's weak because of X scen

by jbob2000 8y ago

I'm always so surprised by this community. In discussions about self driving cars and AI, everyone says "the tech isn't there yet", "it's weak because of X scenario", etc. But talk about cameras and surveillance? The tech is everywhere and can do everything with perfect accuracy and will come for you and your babies if you even sneeze wrong!. Come on. Having worked with security camera systems (I used to install them) let me tell you something: the cameras are shit, the quality they produce is shit, clients are cheap as fuck and don't want to repair them, they break constantly, the software is terrible to use... I could go on. We are a very long way away from the dystopia you are describing. People will gladly unintentionally fuck this up long before it becomes what you're fearing it will be.

mentat 8y ago
People said facial recognition was absolutely impossible a decade ago. Now we can remap one face to another in real time. The tech is there.
- jessaustin 8y ago
  The second thing you mention seems largely unrelated to the first. Deepfakes (especially live deepfakes) require extensive learning on extensive data sets. Sure, you could do facial recognition that way, but useful facial recognition would learn from a single still photo.
eponeponepon 8y ago
An authoritarian government that has declared as a matter of policy that the system on which it has spent billions is flawless doesn't need to worry that it isn't flawless. You'll say that wasn't you entering the subversive bookshop - but sorry, citizen, the system is infallible, so why are you lying to us?
- joe_the_user 8y ago
  Yeah, the consensus "here" is that deep learning, self-driving cars, all that, is "half-there". Presently, deep learning works, has a fairly high accuracy rate, in some percentage of cases. Sure, you can implement it right now in all sorts of places. The question is what the costs of the small but significant failure rate is going to be and who will pay that cost?. If some nobody pays the cost, well, a high failure rate may be fine with the institution that implements this. With cars, the idea of a 0.1% chance of dying each time you step into a vehicle is terrifying - that's much higher than you get now, humans are actually amazingly good at driving. IE, fortunately, the system probably won't stomach the costs of bad self-driving cars. But with the justice system spotting potential criminals, yeah, pulling in some innocents isn't going to bother a system with N degrees of repression. Most people in the justice system have no choice but to plea bargain now. Most people in the justice system are also guilty but the innocent-but-not-wealthy minority is generally SOL. And that is in our ostensible democracy, that's known by most sophisticated observers of the system, and only handful make an effort to change it. So a half-assed evidence gatherer of whatever sort will make lots of people happy, put lot of guilty and innocent people in jail and hardly needs great reliability. Indeed, with AI parole-granting systems, we're already there.
shadowxs76 8y ago
Jbob I truly, absolutely hope you're right on every level. It would be wonderful and if we can put this sort of monstrous society off for decades before ubiquitous surveillance truly becomes ubiquitous. Or maybe until we find some way of practically/legislatively quashing it, and all the better. What worries though is that it DOESNT have to be perfect like some people here are fearing. It simply has to be good enough so that most people never truly know when its following them rigidly and when not. We can probably safely assume that X percentage of the surveillance operating in a "total" surveillance society isn't working properly or being fucked up through human error but in such a scenario we can never be sure which percentage that is or when such a thing is the case, and that will be enough to dampen a lot of healthy civil disobedience, protest and spontaneous action by people (and im not even talking about actual criminals here). It's like an ultra-modern version of what the 20th century totalitarian states counted on: The gestapo, KGB or NKVD type police agencies of these countries knew they couldn't watch everyone all the time, and everyone knew they weren't being watched all the time (they also knew that a lot of incompetence and corruption ruined control frequently) but they could never be sure when they were safe or not and that kept a lid on individual freedom quite effectively.

mentat 8y ago

People said facial recognition was absolutely impossible a decade ago. Now we can remap one face to another in real time. The tech is there.

jessaustin 8y ago
The second thing you mention seems largely unrelated to the first. Deepfakes (especially live deepfakes) require extensive learning on extensive data sets. Sure, you could do facial recognition that way, but useful facial recognition would learn from a single still photo.

eponeponepon 8y ago

An authoritarian government that has declared as a matter of policy that the system on which it has spent billions is flawless doesn't need to worry that it isn't flawless. You'll say that wasn't you entering the subversive bookshop - but sorry, citizen, the system is infallible, so why are you lying to us?

joe_the_user 8y ago
Yeah, the consensus "here" is that deep learning, self-driving cars, all that, is "half-there". Presently, deep learning works, has a fairly high accuracy rate, in some percentage of cases. Sure, you can implement it right now in all sorts of places. The question is what the costs of the small but significant failure rate is going to be and who will pay that cost?. If some nobody pays the cost, well, a high failure rate may be fine with the institution that implements this. With cars, the idea of a 0.1% chance of dying each time you step into a vehicle is terrifying - that's much higher than you get now, humans are actually amazingly good at driving. IE, fortunately, the system probably won't stomach the costs of bad self-driving cars. But with the justice system spotting potential criminals, yeah, pulling in some innocents isn't going to bother a system with N degrees of repression. Most people in the justice system have no choice but to plea bargain now. Most people in the justice system are also guilty but the innocent-but-not-wealthy minority is generally SOL. And that is in our ostensible democracy, that's known by most sophisticated observers of the system, and only handful make an effort to change it. So a half-assed evidence gatherer of whatever sort will make lots of people happy, put lot of guilty and innocent people in jail and hardly needs great reliability. Indeed, with AI parole-granting systems, we're already there.

shadowxs76 8y ago

Jbob I truly, absolutely hope you're right on every level. It would be wonderful and if we can put this sort of monstrous society off for decades before ubiquitous surveillance truly becomes ubiquitous. Or maybe until we find some way of practically/legislatively quashing it, and all the better. What worries though is that it DOESNT have to be perfect like some people here are fearing. It simply has to be good enough so that most people never truly know when its following them rigidly and when not. We can probably safely assume that X percentage of the surveillance operating in a "total" surveillance society isn't working properly or being fucked up through human error but in such a scenario we can never be sure which percentage that is or when such a thing is the case, and that will be enough to dampen a lot of healthy civil disobedience, protest and spontaneous action by people (and im not even talking about actual criminals here). It's like an ultra-modern version of what the 20th century totalitarian states counted on: The gestapo, KGB or NKVD type police agencies of these countries knew they couldn't watch everyone all the time, and everyone knew they weren't being watched all the time (they also knew that a lot of incompetence and corruption ruined control frequently) but they could never be sure when they were safe or not and that kept a lid on individual freedom quite effectively.