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> > The primary result is that we should all work to make a humane tyranny (if such a thing is even possible; it sure sounds like an oxymoron, doesn't it?) > I

> > The primary result is that we should all work to make a humane tyranny (if such a thing is even possible; it sure sounds like an oxymoron, doesn't it?) > It's not possible, governments need checks and balances, things get bad really fast when they have absolute power. If it's not possible then I think we're destined for a very nasty future. I don't think a technologically sophisticated government can afford to be non-totalitarian (in the narrow sense I'm using here: making "total" use of available information technology. Cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_Information_Awareness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_Information_Awareness ). I think if it tried it would be undermined by other governments. In re: this point, I find it discouraging that the Communists won in their imperialistic effort to subdue the people of HK. I was hoping that technology would give the masses the edge over the central government but it doesn't seem to have played out that way. > > Yes, your privacy is a social fiction, but in return, we can stop almost all crime. > No we can't, What would prevent it? > and (longer conversation) it wouldn't be desirable to in any case. There is a strong school of thought that we don't want perfect enforcement of all laws, at least not ones based around nonviolent crimes. I don't agree. I feel strongly that laws should be legitimate or repealed. We can't have perfect enforcement, but technological advancement is exponentially reducing the cost of enforcement, eh? Is the answer selective enforcement? That doesn't sound right does it? If there are laws that we believe should be imperfectly enforced then that should be written into the law. For example, if you smoke pot, is it better for that to be legal, or illegal but most of the time cops won't bust you for smoking a joint? > To me, it is hypothetical, because we still had a Capital riot even with increased surveillance. After the riot, it didn't take ubiquitous surveillance to catch those people, they bragged about it in livestreams on social media. We can do better with the capabilities we have. Well, I'll say this: the Capital riot is unprecedented in USA history and I think it will be a while before we can draw reliable conclusions from it. It does seem to me that the problems with the response to it that day did not stem from insufficient information. > It seems intuitively correct to say that the NSA surveillance is improving security, but (surprisingly) I don't see strong evidence that the programs are actually helping to catch terrorists. We're giving additional capabilities to people who aren't leveraging or making good use of the capabilities that they already have. That's kind of my point: rather than trying to sequester the technology (which I believe is impossible) we have to use it well, or we'll fall into some sort of dystopian system. > > I'm not a particularly good person (I do my best) and I like my privacy, but I think I would have to take that bargain. > I wouldn't. To me, it sounds like a nonsensical comparison, it's like asking whether or not I'd switch to eating only bugs to stop a kidnapping. I don't believe that it would help, I don't believe the bargain you're proposing makes sense on an individual level. And as a widescale solution to crime on the macro level, the consequences of constant surveillance for everyone are worse than a kidnapping. It's not a good trade. I wasn't clear. It's not a trade. You're going to be livestreaming anyway, whether you like it or not, so do we also stop the kidnapping? That's the question. I can't find the news article now, but I was reading a few months ago about this exact scenario: A young child in China was kidnapped and the authorities used the system there to locate and rescue the kid within a few hours. We in the West could do that too but if we don't because we value our personal privacy over the occasional kidnapped kid, well, I'm no fan of the CCP but that doesn't seem like a defensible moral position to me. > I do agree with you in one way, which is that regulation of this tech is not a perfect long-term solution. We need to figure out how to enforce regulations, and outside of the regulatory world we need adversarial research into the technology itself as well. Banning facial recognition will not be enough, on its own, to solve the problem -- solving the problem will require a combination of multiple solutions. But it is a problem we should try to solve. Whether that's by normalizing mask wearing, researching how to combat systems like gait detection, making it easier to detect cameras -- we should be thinking about how to give people tools to hide from omnipresent facial recognition. To me that just sounds like closing the barn door after the horse already bolted. The technology is already deployed and more and more gets deployed every day. We should be talking about a universal highest-common-denominator of laws for the planet so that the decreasing cost of asymptotically-prefect enforcement becomes a solution rather than a problem! That makes more sense to me than fighting it because the laws are crap and unevenly enforced.

danShumway 6y ago
> If it's not possible then I think we're destined for a very nasty future. Possibly. But if that's the case, it's very important that we acknowledge that fact now and work to prevent it. We can't just say that governments will suddenly become incorruptible because the alternative is unpleasant. We have to face that unpleasant reality and respond to it. > What would prevent it? The fact that it's not working. Even in totalitarian regimes like China, they're not stopping all crime, they're just crushing political dissidents. And they don't even have perfect enforcement on that. To get to the point in enforcement you're talking about, we would need an even larger jump in surveillance than what we're talking about now. And even in that world -- it's not lack of surveillance that allows police officers to violate people's rights with impunity, it's lack of prosecution. Enforcement of the law isn't just a problem of finding criminals, it's also wrapped up in the system's own brazenness and willingness to apply different standards to different people. Getting rid of privacy won't fix that, and preemptively getting rid of privacy when we have unequal standards of enforcement will make things worse because the corrupt parts of the system will have even more power. > I feel strongly that laws should be legitimate or repealed. This is a good ideal that we should strive for, but not a practical reality. Marijuana would not have become legal if people couldn't have broken the law. Gay rights would not have become a reality if people couldn't have been secretly gay. Perfect enforcement of the law can stagnate social progress, because the law is fallible. Fallible systems need safeguards that make it possible to oppose them -- and extra-legal normalization of certain behaviors is one of those safeguards. There are other ways we could add checks and balances to the law, but I have not seen many proposals from anyone that seem realistic or achievable to me. The reality is that breaking the law is often how we achieve social progress. Again, see Hong Kong and China, or the history of slavery in the US, or any number of social movements. > We in the West could do that too but if we don't because we value our personal privacy over the occasional kidnapped kid, well, I'm no fan of the CCP but that doesn't seem like a defensible moral position to me. I think it's a completely defensible moral position. I think that our privacy is one of the reasons that the US government is not the CCP, and I think that the harm China is doing to its own citizens is pretty objectively greater than the harm that a couple of kidnappers will do. I'm not a fan of kidnappers, but the CCP is building concentration camps. Muslims in China need privacy more than they need protection from kidnappers, it's not a hard trade for me to make. > We should be talking about a universal highest-common-denominator of laws for the planet so that the decreasing cost of asymptotically-prefect enforcement becomes a solution rather than a problem! I think the solution you're proposing is more difficult and less likely to happen then even the most long-shot of my proposals. The odds of all of the nations of the world uniting under a common set of laws, and those being laws being good are astronomically low. It would be easier to invent an invisibility cloak.

danShumway 6y ago

> If it's not possible then I think we're destined for a very nasty future. Possibly. But if that's the case, it's very important that we acknowledge that fact now and work to prevent it. We can't just say that governments will suddenly become incorruptible because the alternative is unpleasant. We have to face that unpleasant reality and respond to it. > What would prevent it? The fact that it's not working. Even in totalitarian regimes like China, they're not stopping all crime, they're just crushing political dissidents. And they don't even have perfect enforcement on that. To get to the point in enforcement you're talking about, we would need an even larger jump in surveillance than what we're talking about now. And even in that world -- it's not lack of surveillance that allows police officers to violate people's rights with impunity, it's lack of prosecution. Enforcement of the law isn't just a problem of finding criminals, it's also wrapped up in the system's own brazenness and willingness to apply different standards to different people. Getting rid of privacy won't fix that, and preemptively getting rid of privacy when we have unequal standards of enforcement will make things worse because the corrupt parts of the system will have even more power. > I feel strongly that laws should be legitimate or repealed. This is a good ideal that we should strive for, but not a practical reality. Marijuana would not have become legal if people couldn't have broken the law. Gay rights would not have become a reality if people couldn't have been secretly gay. Perfect enforcement of the law can stagnate social progress, because the law is fallible. Fallible systems need safeguards that make it possible to oppose them -- and extra-legal normalization of certain behaviors is one of those safeguards. There are other ways we could add checks and balances to the law, but I have not seen many proposals from anyone that seem realistic or achievable to me. The reality is that breaking the law is often how we achieve social progress. Again, see Hong Kong and China, or the history of slavery in the US, or any number of social movements. > We in the West could do that too but if we don't because we value our personal privacy over the occasional kidnapped kid, well, I'm no fan of the CCP but that doesn't seem like a defensible moral position to me. I think it's a completely defensible moral position. I think that our privacy is one of the reasons that the US government is not the CCP, and I think that the harm China is doing to its own citizens is pretty objectively greater than the harm that a couple of kidnappers will do. I'm not a fan of kidnappers, but the CCP is building concentration camps. Muslims in China need privacy more than they need protection from kidnappers, it's not a hard trade for me to make. > We should be talking about a universal highest-common-denominator of laws for the planet so that the decreasing cost of asymptotically-prefect enforcement becomes a solution rather than a problem! I think the solution you're proposing is more difficult and less likely to happen then even the most long-shot of my proposals. The odds of all of the nations of the world uniting under a common set of laws, and those being laws being good are astronomically low. It would be easier to invent an invisibility cloak.