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Microsoft president: Orwell’s 1984 could happen in 2024
- hliyan 5y agoWas Schmidt not the same person who said "If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place." in 2009?
- chmod775 5y agoOpinions and attitudes can change a lot in ten years.
- redis_mlc 5y agoJust so people have a ready response for Schmidt's thoughtless statement: 1) I don't want potentially naked fotos or conversations of my family online. Do you? 2) Regulations and customs change over time. Something ok 10 years ago can be damning tomorrow. 3) How do you maintain privacy of medical and lawyer conversations when anything can be released without permission? Ironically, I had the same conversation with a lawyer ("I have nothing to hide.") who had teenage daughters. It really didn't sink in until I gave him those examples.
- hooande 5y agoThe ideal case is not sending naked fotos online, if you'd be embarrassed by that kind of thing. and I would never trust any kind of technology to keep medical or legal secrets. I generally assume that anything I submit to a remote server may be compromised and released at some point. You always have to place absolute trust in someone, even Google. It doesn't matter what Eric Schmidt says. You're trusting dozens of companies with your privacy and your secrets every day, whether you realize it or not
- hliyan 5y ago> I would never trust any kind of technology to keep medical or legal secrets Paper too, is in a sense, technology.
- throwawayboise 5y agoIt is, but paper cannot be compromised in large volumes by remote actors.
- klyrs 5y agoSince most techies seem out of touch with how physical data storage used to work... Your medical records may be a ream or two of paper. They don't get stored at your doctor's office, your doctor's office requests the records it needs on a daily basis. Medical couriers exist to handle emergency requests. Your data is stored in a warehouse with perhaps hundreds of employees. The threat model is different, not absent -- everybody from your doctor's receptionist to the warehouse workers have access, and can read or modify your data.
- redis_mlc 5y agoAlexa, Siri, Snapchat, Zoom, malware apps and Ring cameras. If teens - whatever their parents don't use yet. Whoosh.
- unishark 5y agoIt doesn't seem fair to presume Schmidt forgot that people must use the bathroom and sometimes bathe or change clothes and such. To bring in a little good faith, perhaps we should amend Schmidt's statement to include the ending "...using Google's products". Then you are basically supporting what the statement says. One indeed shouldn't use their free cloud-based products for your sensitive communications with unlimited downside if there is a breach. You aren't paying them to take on that liability and they aren't promising the needed level of protection.
- AlexandrB 5y agoIs there any indication that his has changed? Did he apologize for his previous remarks or recant them in any way? If someone tells me they want to undermine my rights, I'm not in the habit of later giving them the benefit of the doubt because "attitudes can change".
- klyrs 5y agoThis story is about Brad Smith. Attitudes can change, but he probably didn't body-swap Schmidt
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- layoutIfNeeded 5y ago[insert that Upton Sinclair quote here]
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- 8note 5y agoSounds kinda homophobic to me. There are plenty of good things you can be doing that you'd want to keep private, or control the release of information for.
- whoooooo123 5y agoEven if this quote was true, it would still miss the point. Privacy isn't the same thing as secrecy. There's a difference between "doing something you wouldn't want anyone to know" and "doing something you wouldn't want anyone to see" "I know what you do in the bathroom, but you still lock the door."
- mc32 5y ago>"The programme explores China’s increasing use of AI to monitor its citizens. >"Critics fear the state's dominance in the area could threaten democracy" As he implies, government will have to regulate the allowed scope of AI and will also have to do without it itself, lest it get enamored with it and do what we fear China will be doing soon to its own citizens. We know companies will not refrain themselves out of the goodness of their own hearts. We know that from the way they mistreat user data and exploit people's psychology for commerce. I don't have high hopes because governments will fear being left out of this race and feel they have to participate in order to not get left out of some imaginary bonanza.
- arminiusreturns 5y agoFor me having been on the inside so to speak in the AI industry, what I fear is systems that so radically shift the balance of user power before the users (or victims) are even aware of the new technology. We need an industry ethics standard of a very terse nature and a whistleblowing nonprofit. Congress's legislative process is too comprimised by k-street for that angle to be very effective.
- natrik 5y ago"Welcome to BBC News, America's most trusted news source". A low quality hodgepodge of words, masquerading as an article promoting the BBC's Panorama's Are you Scared Yet, Human? A few low quality choice of quotes: Speaking to BBC's Panorama, Brad Smith said it will be "difficult to catch up” with the rapidly advancing technology. Eric Schmidt, former Google chief executive who is now chair of the US National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence, has warned that beating China in AI is imperative. Seth Moulton, chair of the US Future of Defence Task Force is urging tech companies to support the Department of Defence. "Because we're in a race, because we are in this competition, that’s really what it comes down to,” he said. “Are you going to help us win this race or are you going to essentially be against us?" Are we sure this Ministry of Truth style doublespeak isn't already here? https://www.politico.com/news/2021/05/26/facebook-ban-covid-man-made-491053 https://www.politico.com/news/2021/05/26/facebook-ban-covid-... https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1396769717805780994 https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1396769717805780994
- AlexandrB 5y ago> Eric Schmidt, former Google chief executive who is now chair of the US National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence, has warned that beating China in AI is imperative. Ah yes, Eric "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place" Schmidt. I'm sure he has my best interests at heart when he advocates for an AI arms race with China.
- soco 5y agoYes, Schmidt will have a personal interest in beating "China in AI", it's just that I personally have a personal interest in both working to impose their AI on me. So, killing the messenger (here BBC) doesn't do much to clean CCP face.
- ampdepolymerase 5y agoWill it run on Azure?
- userbinator 5y agoIs AI really the threat, or is it really the increasingly authoritarian nature of Big Tech itself?
- not_really 5y agoYes
- scrps 5y agoThe latter. AI is like any other technology, it can make the world a better place in the right hands or destroy it when it is in the hands of children like governments and greedy corporations.
- noofen 5y agoI recommend reading Curtis Yarvin's recent writing on this exact topic [1]. [1]: https://graymirror.substack.com/p/there-is-no-ai-risk https://graymirror.substack.com/p/there-is-no-ai-risk
- ctoth 5y agoI find his arguments very difficult to square with this article from 2015[1]. The prologue of [2] also paints a pretty compelling picture of how this might happen. Also > We don’t live in the world of Neuromancer and we never will. 99.9% of everything is mathematically invulnerable to hacking. Seriously made me chuckle. [1]: https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/04/07/no-physical-substrate-no-problem/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/04/07/no-physical-substrate-... [2]: https://www.amazon.com/Life-3-0-Being-Artificial-Intelligence/dp/1101946598 https://www.amazon.com/Life-3-0-Being-Artificial-Intelligenc...
- noofen 5y ago> Seriously made me chuckle. Yea, assuming someone had enough resources to create a powerful AI, they would also have enough resources for a hefty collection of unreleased 0days...
- ratsmack 5y ago
- ralph84 5y agoOf course the established big tech player is lobbying for more regulations to slow down any potential competition.
- yellow_lead 5y agoBig company: Bad things will happen if you don't make regulations for this thing. Tech-inept Congress-people: OK, what should the regulations be for this thing?
- personasdfghjkl 5y agoI think it's important to note here that new technologies that have the potential for oppression can be used not only by authoritarian governments but by liberal-democratic ones as well (see: CIA programs, Snowden leaks, etc) and private companies.
- excalibur 5y agoAuthoritarianism and democracy are not mutually exclusive.
- rrrrrrrrrrrryan 5y agoAuthoritarianism does imply reductions in democratic voting. Democracy and the erosion of human rights are not mutually exclusive, which may be what you meant.
- unishark 5y agoLiberal democracy has that liberal part though, which means rights and freedom and is pretty clearly in opposition to authoritarianism.
- glial 5y agoSure, but there is a strong current trend towards illiberal democracy throughout the world (Brazil, Hungary, Poland, arguably USA).
- fakename11 5y agoThey are more orthogonal than dictatorship and authoritarianism though
- tryonenow 5y ago>“Well, that didn’t come to pass in 1984, but if we’re not careful that could come to pass in 2024.” I refuse to participate in social media because the tech is already here, and at this rate it's only a matter of time before our government or big tech itself nefariously taps into the the massive data ocean that is being collected. It only takes a handful of seemingly innocuous data points to uniquely identify a person, and from location data alone one may infer a host of private identity markers - race, religion, political affiliation, sexual preference...especially with a bit of machine learning magic. Combining this with the political polarization we are increasingly witnessing in the US pushes us onto the precipice of a techno-authoritarian, dystopian nightmare. Imagine how much worse the Soviet Union would have been if the government had access to the breadth and depth of personal information that is merely an access key away from our own government right now. After Snowden we know that even the NSA is vacuuming up enough a massive store of potentially dangerous data. I don't know that there's any practical solution, as I doubt the average person will care enough until it's too late. Our current economy is built on data collection. Mitigation of this threat would effectively require reengineering of society.
- slumdev 5y agoSo, AI is scary because China? How about we focus on Big Tech's attempts to subvert democracy before attempting to export what remains of American democracy?
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- rdiddly 5y agoI don't want to cast the central concern as trivial, because it's real, BUT, c'mon, "beating China in AI is imperative?" Grow up. To "beat" anybody (and for that matter to have any sort of claim to deserving to "win" anything), you would want to "beat China at Not-Being-A-Repressive-Dystopia" wouldn't you? Perhaps including "beating China at Not-Using-AI-To-Be-A-Repressive-Dystopia?"
- stadium 5y agoSurvailance and drone swarm assassins are two areas to be concerned about.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- arpa 5y agoalso AI-assisted protein folding, AI-assisted genetic engineering and what have you.
- sidlls 5y agoTo play a bit of devil’s advocate, “beating China at Not-Being-A-Repressive-Dystopia” requires ensuring China’s influence in the world is minimized or contained. It’s hard to beat them if they take over, in other words. (Note that this also requires defeating the same kinds of forces domestically.)
- kbenson 5y agoBut isn't that begging the question? Couldn't we just as easily say "beating China at not starting the zombie apocalypse" requires ensuring China doesn't invest in weird chemical experimentation with death and voodoo? We're taking as a given that China's end state is a repressive dystopia, just as we would have to take as a given that China would start a zombie apocalypse. The only difference in one is seen as patently absurd by all people, and the other is only seen that way by some.
- swader999 5y agoI can't be the only one thinking we've passed 1984 already?
- bernardom 5y agoIs there a telestrator in your living room that will cause you to go to jail if you mutter something negative about the government?
- undersuit 5y agoAlexa, remind me not to order a telestrator.
- robotresearcher 5y agoI'm sorry. I can't do that, Dave.
- astrange 5y agoThat's what people remember about 1984, but that actually only applied if you were middle class like Winston, since they didn't control his boss nor any of the proles. So the actual message of the book was that living in England sucks, which as far as I can tell is still true.
- swader999 5y agoMy smart tv spies on me. I think it's helping build my social credit profile that will turn on or off opportunities for me at some point. Much more sophisticated than jail.
- throwawaaarrgh 5y agoIt used to be that if you muttered something about bombs and the president on the telephone, you could get two men in black suits at your door. Social media is monitored more than that, though I don't think you get the same response unless you're going through customs. Or are middle eastern.
- ghastmaster 5y ago> Dr Schmidt became an adviser to the Pentagon in 2016, while retaining a position as executive chairman of Alphabet, Google’s parent company. > In the following years, Google started a contract with the Pentagon, allowing it to use some of its image recognition technologies as part of a military project. Coincidence? I think not. Brad Smith should focus on why the US is losing the R&D war. The reason is simple. It is increasingly difficult to do business in the United States. Hiring is more expensive and risky than it is in china. The dollar is being devalued. Brad Smith is an advocate for increased regulation, which is great for a company that can afford it(his company). It's called "Regulatory Capture".
- astrange 5y agoWhat does a "president of Microsoft" do? Is that better than an "executive vice president"? It seems like it means "chief legal officer". https://news.microsoft.com/exec/brad-smith/ https://news.microsoft.com/exec/brad-smith/
- freeone3000 5y agoHe's concurrently the chief legal officer, but his role as president is to negotiate with governments.
- lsy 5y agoIt seems that some tech executives, having more money than any person could spend, often seek what they see as the next level of accomplishment, which is proximity to power and decisions over life and death. That shows up as this sort of militaristic nationalism along lines that conveniently happen to align with their claimed expertise. Of course neither of the executives interviewed in this article really knows that much about "AI", so the predictions in the article are not based on any kind of evidence, so much as they are political statements designed to create and maintain the conditions for making themselves seem essential to the defense industry.
- aeternum 5y ago>so the predictions in the article are not based on any kind of evidence Like the assertions in your comment?
- postpawl 5y agoYou don’t think AI is a “threat to democracy”? I think the threat isn’t just AI being used by governments to control citizens. Advertising companies want to influence behavior too, and their customers are mostly private corporations. They already have a lot of power and advertising is a $100+ Billion dollar industry for a reason.. it works. If you haven’t seen it, I’d encourage you to watch Can’t Get You Out of My Head by Adam Curtis, which talks a lot about the increasing influence corporations have on the masses (by using technology): https://youtu.be/pga0Oi1cZvo https://youtu.be/pga0Oi1cZvo
- judge2020 5y agoAI is as much a threat to democracy as the newspaper is - they eventually become the only means of input and politicians adapt to catering to them so that they can remain on a level playing field in terms of getting their policies and (potentially sensational) messages to people.
- postpawl 5y agoThe issue is that AI is going to make it even more economical to bombard your target with coherent information through an extremely effective means of influence (writing). Have you seen some of the posts recently about AIs getting better at writing?: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27032828 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27032828 It’s much more of a threat than a bogus newspaper. I can imagine a future where the signal is even more drowned out by noise. Think Twitter bots x1000.
- throwitaway1235 5y agoBig Tech representative says "look over there!" (China) while his industry unleashes 1984 domestically. Ridiculous, don't fall for it.
- AndrewBissell 5y agoEastasia is developing AI driven mass surveillance and autonomous weapons systems! The world will meet the fate of 1984 unless we in Oceania build those same systems!
- throwawaaarrgh 5y agoHasn't North Korea been living it for like 50 years?
- dleslie 5y agoA key point of 1984 is that behind the screen is a fellow citizen; and that the entire structure of oppression is operated by otherwise-regular citizens. It's sad that "big brother" has lost the connotation of a citizen-operated panopticon, because I think that concern is far more immediately pressing.
- artichokeheart 5y agoI think more pressure needs to be put on the developers in these big tech enterprises. I think the problem is that it's cash and cachet, not fear and torture, that blind them to real human impacts of what they are doing in their day job.
- briefcomment 5y agoWe need people to start making the hard decision to forgo the convenient option. > "Dr Lan Xue, who advises the Chinese Government, said facial recognition could prove "tremendously helpful" in identifying people in mass gatherings if there is a "major accident"." People need to follow their gut and say no to things like this. It's hard to pick out the reasonable interventions from the ones that are being promoted for surveillance purposes. It's probably best at this point to be conservative with the civil liberties we compromise on. Unfortunately, certainly language has been co-opted, and that's confusing. "Greater good" and "public health" are hard to argue against.
- agnosticmantis 5y agoNo quotes from Peter Palantir Thiel? I’m disappointed.
- NoblePublius 5y agoThe NSA has been recording every phone call and storing every text message for at least three days since 2007 so I have no idea what this guy thinks he’s talking about.
- frashelaw 5y agoExactly, and these people are taking an idea about "1984" from an executive of a tech megacorporation that is just one of the many corporations that dominate and run our economy in their favor, at the expense of everyone else.
- mjevans 5y ago(It's already happening in current times;) China recently made a movie star apologize in public, to say effectively, 'Taiwan is not a country'. I don't care what the name is, but that island just a little bit off the coast of the big country known as China, should be recognized by the UN and member nations as a sovereign nation.
- latch 5y agoIt's been a while since I read the book, but this seems like a stretch. One country imposing implicit/vague economic penalty on a citizen of another country, doesn't seem right relevant to me. When 1984 and "Orwellian" are used as a catch-all for any type of oppression or even any type of propaganda, I think it does a great disservice.
- premium-komodo 5y ago> When 1984 and "Orwellian" are used as a catch-all for any type of oppression or even any type of propaganda, I think it does a great disservice. I agree, but it's not hard to make a stronger case. Organizations like Google, Facebook and Twitter centrally decide Truth, and then penalize anyone who posts anything in conflict with their version. Google censors the videos of people who dare to disagree with e.g. the WHO. Facebook deboosts "vaccine hesitancy"; Twitter sabotages the engagement of people with a diverse set of "wrong" opinions, degrades the various subnetworks by silently deleting followers, annotates tweets with the Official Truth, etc. The same thing is done here on HN, a kind of filtering that assumes its own hypothesis. Someone posts something contrary to the prevailing story? Well, if it conflicts with the WHO, it must be conspiracy theory junk. I don't recognize this site, so I'm going to flag this article. People seem sure they know what the truth is, so they feel comfortable squashing anything that conflicts with their current understanding.
- loopz 5y agoAt some level you always need a way to filter out noise, so quality have to improve to get signal.
- Barrin92 5y agoMy personal version of 1984 is someone smashing random quotes from 1984 into my face, forever. Has nobody seriously read another book in the last few decades? And Microsoft's president even gives us a stereotypically shoddy reading of the book >"You know the fundamental story…was about a government who could see everything that everyone did and hear everything that everyone said all the time." The actually interesting takeaway isn't "government does bad stuff with tech", it's that an atmosphere of reality inversion creates fertile ground for people to accept fiction over truth, even when the lie is obvious. State surveillance doesn't require AI, the Stasi already had the capacity for that 40 years ago.
- kbenson 5y agoSome people get rats, some people get poorly thought out quotes and allusions.
- insert_coin 5y agoDoesn’t require A, but the I is absolutely required, intelligence is what the Stasi did. Automating what we know is a dangerous policy should not be treated as lightly as you’ve put it just because you are bored of people quoting 1984 to you. Have you considered the reason they are quoting it more and more lately might be because real life has been getting closer and closer to it?
- wyxuan 5y agoAgree to an extent, but people are throwing it around in the context of vaccine passports and other state actions that are pretty reasonable. Frankly the tossing around of 1984 has degraded discourse because its used way too much and often ignores nuance in favor of a slippery slope argument.
- loopz 5y agoThere have always been fringe opinions. They too get a much wider audience today.
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- charcircuit 5y agoMore surveillance is a good thing. With more data, the government can make better decisions and be more efficient. I don't think this is anything to be scared about.
- sillysaurusx 5y agoThat same argument would prevent the right to privacy.
- charcircuit 5y agoPrivacy is dead.
- retrac 5y agoAs someone part of a group targeted by my own government until recently for rather ruthless suppression, I can't say I share your confidence in good outcomes.
- charcircuit 5y agoThe outcome would be beneficial to the government. The root of the problem is that the government is targeting you.
- alasdair_ 5y agoI wasn't sure if you were being serious or not so I looked at your post history. Only a few days ago you posted that you didn't want to post more information because you wanted to avoid doxxing yourself. Surely you see the irony here?
- charcircuit 5y agoThere's a difference between doxxing yourself to random people on a place that is searchable and doxxing yourself to the government.
- fragileone 5y ago
- rkagerer 5y agoThis reads like a bit piece meant to scare people into backing government funding for aggressive applications of AI.
- coliveira 5y agoJust a bunch of billionaires promoting digital jingoism for the 21st century. Be prepared for this brain washing during the next decades...
- boomboomsubban 5y agoI can't figure out why 2024? I can't find anything specific about that year in the article. My two guesses are that this is a weird political thing, I can't forget the Bush antitrust settlement, or just that it also ends in four.
- zo1 5y agoBecause it has to have a 4 like 1984. And 2084 is too far away. But 2024 is right around the corner, so it has urgency. Therefore, 2024. Also - isn't there another US presidential election in that year?
- jollybean 5y agoWould supposedly intelligent people stop talking about 'AI' in this way? It's not, that, special, it's mostly just tech Our laws, freedoms, responsibilities, civic attitudes, judiciary, journalistic institutions, governance - all of this is what establishes what we are going to be. Not 'tech'. Tech does provide 'means not before possible' but it's our choice, and it's not really a story of AI.
- fungiblecog 5y agoAI is the new bogeyman but greedy power hungry scumbags are still the real danger
- vmception 5y ago"Wow this could be like 1984", says person living in the scenario described in 1950 their whole life
- mike_hock 5y ago> 1984 could happen in 2024 Then again, it has already happened in the 2000s.
- smt88 5y agoWhere and when?
- jb1991 5y agoI recently installed a Chinese-made washing machine in my house. When I bought it, it came with a $100 cashback offer. After installation, it came time to claim that $100, I went to the website, and to my amazement, I had to give up quite a bit of personal information, certainly more than you would expect for the purposes of a washing machine. This information was submitted via a form directly to a Chinese company. So I’m convinced they used the cashback offer as a façade to gather my personal details, to link my ID up to whatever they’re recording from me in my house through the machine. So now I occasionally say things directly to the machine, with the expectation that the Chinese government is listening.
- sitkack 5y agoPlease don't play Dr Strangelove into it.
- RickJWagner 5y agoOh yeah, it's already on the way. Today, people have to agree with things (or at least not speak out against them) or risk losing job opportunities or being 'cancelled'. Corporate jobs, social media, etc. Only those who have nothing to lose are able to truly speak their mind. In the not too distant past, comedy could be free. Comedians would offend everybody just a little bit. Now, comedians are terrified to speak out. Most of the older generation of comics has said so. Orwell is definitely possible.