4 ms·

I understand what you're saying and I'm not having a go at you but "really, really, really fucking bad second order effects" are what exactly? Telling anyone th

I understand what you're saying and I'm not having a go at you but "really, really, really fucking bad second order effects" are what exactly? Telling anyone that people in 300 years will judge them negatively isn't really going to motivate them to change. I'm personally at the point where there needs to be a set of horror stories written in non-tech language about data people share directly impacting their life. But what are those stories?

blackbrokkoli 6y ago
* Almost all genocides (and extermination wars), especially those in one's country, were heavily dependent on data availability and the technology to crunch it. Most prominent maybe the Holocaust: Doing a census so thorough that the asinine concept of "Quarter-Jews" and what not could be calculated was estimated to take ten years to infinity. Until IBM offered to custom-design their new punch card tech design for the Nazis; they did in three months. The data? Openly accessible church books and forms people filled out, mostly about themselves. You could really have a field day with the data lying around today plus the one people readily give you in exchange for some gimmicks. Arguably, this is already ongoing in various parts of the world. * Terrorism so dangerous that it actually makes a dent in the yearly death count. There is an article about a hacked water plant right now on HN. Just scale that up to, say, all the water plants. For every wacky "hey, we could do this with this data" idea there is somebody else with an equally but way more fucked up "hey, we could do this with this data" idea. * There will be a 2030 study about mass discrimination by AI. Maybe it will be "This hiring AI was used to reject 1.3 billion applications over the last 10 years. Apparently it really dislikes Pakistani men for some reason. Oops" or "There was a weird error in our visa pipeline software. Our condolences to the families of the 43,561 people that were rejected and subsequently killed because their last name contained the letters 'rt'", I don't know. If that sounds absurd to you, go check the HN thread about the alleged murderer, where people argue whether "IP protection law" and "Move Fast and Break Things" are good frameworks to discuss software that literally decides about live and death.

blackbrokkoli 6y ago

* Almost all genocides (and extermination wars), especially those in one's country, were heavily dependent on data availability and the technology to crunch it. Most prominent maybe the Holocaust: Doing a census so thorough that the asinine concept of "Quarter-Jews" and what not could be calculated was estimated to take ten years to infinity. Until IBM offered to custom-design their new punch card tech design for the Nazis; they did in three months. The data? Openly accessible church books and forms people filled out, mostly about themselves. You could really have a field day with the data lying around today plus the one people readily give you in exchange for some gimmicks. Arguably, this is already ongoing in various parts of the world. * Terrorism so dangerous that it actually makes a dent in the yearly death count. There is an article about a hacked water plant right now on HN. Just scale that up to, say, all the water plants. For every wacky "hey, we could do this with this data" idea there is somebody else with an equally but way more fucked up "hey, we could do this with this data" idea. * There will be a 2030 study about mass discrimination by AI. Maybe it will be "This hiring AI was used to reject 1.3 billion applications over the last 10 years. Apparently it really dislikes Pakistani men for some reason. Oops" or "There was a weird error in our visa pipeline software. Our condolences to the families of the 43,561 people that were rejected and subsequently killed because their last name contained the letters 'rt'", I don't know. If that sounds absurd to you, go check the HN thread about the alleged murderer, where people argue whether "IP protection law" and "Move Fast and Break Things" are good frameworks to discuss software that literally decides about live and death.