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It's crazy watching the world turn into a dystopia and being powerless to stop it. It not just about this company. If they fail another will replace it. Society

It's crazy watching the world turn into a dystopia and being powerless to stop it. It not just about this company. If they fail another will replace it. Society seems to be on a convergent path with dystopian scifi. This, Chicago police automated policing program (detects crime before it happenes and actually hurt innocent people), racially biased facial recognition. I read an article today about some DNA software being used to convict someone to death row. His legal team couldn't view the source code to challenge its probabalistic accuracy. It doesn't seem like there is even a place to start. A first step could be making a website that documents and tracks all these things then forming a pac. But how long will the take before and if it starts effecting change

shadowgovt 5y ago
Dystopian sci-fi (cyberpunk in particular) did a pretty good job of looking at emergent technology and human nature and extrapolating.
- slakrems 5y ago
  Can’t wait for the live streamed rapes! /s
wolverine876 5y ago
> It's crazy watching the world turn into a dystopia and being powerless to stop it. We feel powerless - I feel it too at times - but we're not. Who would have thought the world could change this much? We can change it also for the better. The social world we envision is very deeply ingrained in humans, probably through evolution. We are social creatures, not sociopathic. I think a start is standing up for our human values (honesty, respect, fairness, justice, compassion, humanitarianism, reason, knowledge, etc. etc.- doing the right thing). The Internet has been seen as a different place, an experimental place, where those values don't matter or don't apply - we could try something different; it has been like a virutal game world where we can act out being someone different. The experiment is over. It turns out the values do matter (of course, there's reasons they survive human history) - and they matter more than in the physical world, due to the power of communication on the Internet. It's time to stop accepting what we wouldn't accept at a dinner table or in a professional social situation (or choose your analogy). The Internet is part of IRL, no different than a restaurant. HN, for example, has much improved; I hope it will go further and adopt that concept.
- redis_mlc 5y ago
  > HN, for example, has much improved No, HN has turned into a Marxist echo chamber in the past couple of years. Marxism is corrosive to honesty, respect, fairness, justice, compassion, humanitarianism, reason, knowledge - it resulted in Russian gulags and CCP live organ harvesting.
throwawaaarrgh 5y ago
Dystopian novels aren't very sci-fi. Many of their authors just researched what was already going on in their own time and formed a new narrative around them. The only thing different today is how people allow themselves to be taken advantage of. They used to give up their freedom for security. Now they give up their privacy for entertainment. But even mega-corps being the new oligarchy isn't new. The railroads, oil companies, and newspapers were controlling government and public perception a century ago. The internet is the new railroad, and tech is the new oil and newspaper. It's never going to change. Society is doped up on Uber Eats and Instagram Live and The Nightly 30 Minutes of Fear and Hate. People don't want to think about how their society is fucked, they want to think about who's going to win The Bachelor, or why The Other (Political Party, Nation, Ethnicity) is evil and must be destroyed. People much smarter than me have been pointing this out for a century, too.
- getcrunk 5y ago
  Yea your right! My ethics in tech professor taught us that tech doesn't bring new issues just new presentations. U can abstract this all down to power/greed/tendencies of human nature (comfort, ease)
- deckard1 5y ago
  Every time someone pops up with one of those "Google destroyed my business and won't respond" type problems I'm always reminded of the movie Brazil. Just read the automated messages Google sends out sometime and the callousness of how they can ruin lives by sheer algorithmic accident. I call this phenomenon: Getting Fucked By Scale. It's the idea that a scaled algorithm (take, for example, YouTube automated copyright filters) have some percentage of false positives. Maybe that percent is only 0.05%. At a scale of millions and billions of people, that's a lot of people getting fucked. And today, any one of us could end up as Sam Lowry. A fly gets stuck in the Google machine and your life is suddenly going sideways.
  - idrios 5y ago
    Brazil really is a great depiction of our current dystopia. The fly in the machine leading to Archibald Buttle's wrongful execution is a great analogy for the people whose lives are thrown sideways when the Google algorithm bans their account. But another scene that really sticks with me is the one where Sam Lowry has the desk in his room, but some person in the room next to him keeps stealing it from him. The fact that 1 desk is shared by 2 rooms is this nonsensical optimization that really just inconveniences him, but highlights how powerless everyone in this world is. For a real world example, there was a time when I was trying to block Facebook and other sites on my phone by editing my phone's hosts file, but couldn't find a way to do it that didn't involve rooting my phone. While trying to find how to do it, I found some people who wanted to do the same thing but all were met with the response "it's locked down to protect you, why would you want to block a website?" It's a very helpless feeling to not have control over something you own. The worst part is, most people I know see issues like this situation with Citizen's and think we need more centralization of power in order to prevent it.
xvector 5y ago
> and being powerless to stop it. You are only powerless so long as you decide to stay within the comfortable confines of the law. The crowd of Hacker News alone certainly has enough ability to cause serious problems for Citizen, whether through activism within their own megacorporations or independent ability.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- Nextgrid 5y ago
  You don't even have to break the law. Hacker News and the software engineering industry has a decent influence in the world, as we can't (yet) be automated away and it takes years to become proficient. If we as an industry collectively agree that X is bad and refuse to work on it, X will be significantly disrupted, as their only option might to be offering more money (to get someone to defect and renege on the promise) than they can afford or that makes sense with their economics. Creepy adtech could die tomorrow if people refuse to work on it. The same applies to this Citizen crap.
  - kelnos 5y ago
    I just don't see that as feasible. I consider the entire concept of Palantir to be disgusting, but there are clearly enough software developers who think that enabling state surveillance makes people safer. All it takes is a few thousand such people (a small fraction of a percent), and it doesn't matter what "the industry" agrees not to work on. I feel like you might have the misconception that "tech people" are some homogenous bloc that believes in the same things and would stand behind a single policy platform. The reality is nothing at all like that.
  - ALittleLight 5y ago
    That's true, but you'd need an implausibly high percentage of developers to agree to the boycott for it to work. Since that conformity is unlikely it's even harder to attain because every individual thinks "Even I forgo this lucrative job it'll still be done by someone else and I'll just have less money."
ctdonath 5y ago
You’re not powerless. Shut off the anxiety generators, and be the change you want in the world. I dumped Facebook & Twitter, and am reducing HN & other social media. Get news from proper objective sources, choose the category of media you consume (TownsendsPlus.com provides great reality checks), and otherwise choose the life you want to live - and live it.
- makeworld 5y ago
  And companies like this will continue on, making the world worse for everyone. Including you. This cannot be changed by changing yourself.
  - ctdonath 5y ago
    I’m old enough to gave seen many such juggernauts collapse when enough individuals decided to change themselves.
    - getcrunk 5y ago
      Such as?
      - ctdonath 5y ago
        Smith-Corona was the #1 worldwide most recognized brand. I was contracting there when they shut down, as typewriter purchases practically ended (in favor of personal computers). Kodak was the name in photography, with few viable competitors. When I heard (internally) their 5-year plan to address the onset of digital photography, I knew they were doomed. Individual purchases of film cameras plummeted, favoring digital cameras, and thus individual choices ended chemical photography within months. Likewise hundreds of other corporate examples. Market-dominating businesses falter and fail, time and again, because individuals choose another option - LOTS of individuals. Every purchase & interaction is an individual choice. Comes a point when the juggernauts are no longer chosen by enough. I've been on social media since the days of dial-up BBSes. I watched AOL and CompuServe rise, seemingly steamrolling the digital world to dominance; then ... they vanished almost overnight. Likewise other media juggernauts (usenet, MySpace, Second Life, etc), unstoppable until individual users cumulatively decided to go elsewhere. "But Facebook/Twitter/etc are different!" No they're not. They're showing the same life cycle others did, albeit with a couple more digits in user count. They're showing the same cracks (over-moderation, boredom, "nobody goes there 'cuz it's too packed") as others have done. We're due for a new platform populated by mass migration of cumulative individuals. Ultimately, it's your choice. What life do you want to live? Sure it's easy to go with the crowd, and deviation may be difficult ... but the choice is yours. And theirs. Live the life you want, be true to yourself - and you may be surprised how many make the same choice, in part because you did.
heavyset_go 5y ago
> This, Chicago police automated policing program (detects crime before it happenes and actually hurt innocent people) One of the worst things I've seen was posted here on HN[1] almost a year ago. It's an in-depth report on a similar program to Chicago's, but in Florida. There was a companion article[2] with videos from the program, and it's just horrifying. It shows several videos taken from body cameras of police officers harassing, assaulting and abducting people, some of them children, because they showed up in their system as being related to, or knowing, people who are suspected, and not convicted, of crimes. Here's a summary of the program[3], and law enforcement's own comments about its purpose: > The motivation of the program is more sinister than merely “fighting crime”: The Sheriff’s Office acknowledged that they want these “problem people” gone. Pasco County Sheriff Chris Nocco, the architect of the program, boasted that the goal was to predict which residents are likely to commit crimes and then “take them out.” In the words of a former Pasco County deputy, they were under orders to “[m]ake their lives miserable until they move or sue.” [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24363871 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24363871 [2] https://projects.tampabay.com/projects/2020/investigations/police-pasco-sheriff-targeted/body-cam-footage/ https://projects.tampabay.com/projects/2020/investigations/p... [3] https://ij.org/case/pasco-predictive-policing/ https://ij.org/case/pasco-predictive-policing/
- FireBeyond 5y ago
  Thanks for bringing this up. That investigation was horrific. And, no doubt, has lead to absolutely nothing changing there.
permo-w 5y ago
the place to start is phoning up your local representative

shadowgovt 5y ago

Dystopian sci-fi (cyberpunk in particular) did a pretty good job of looking at emergent technology and human nature and extrapolating.

slakrems 5y ago
Can’t wait for the live streamed rapes! /s

wolverine876 5y ago

> It's crazy watching the world turn into a dystopia and being powerless to stop it. We feel powerless - I feel it too at times - but we're not. Who would have thought the world could change this much? We can change it also for the better. The social world we envision is very deeply ingrained in humans, probably through evolution. We are social creatures, not sociopathic. I think a start is standing up for our human values (honesty, respect, fairness, justice, compassion, humanitarianism, reason, knowledge, etc. etc.- doing the right thing). The Internet has been seen as a different place, an experimental place, where those values don't matter or don't apply - we could try something different; it has been like a virutal game world where we can act out being someone different. The experiment is over. It turns out the values do matter (of course, there's reasons they survive human history) - and they matter more than in the physical world, due to the power of communication on the Internet. It's time to stop accepting what we wouldn't accept at a dinner table or in a professional social situation (or choose your analogy). The Internet is part of IRL, no different than a restaurant. HN, for example, has much improved; I hope it will go further and adopt that concept.

redis_mlc 5y ago
> HN, for example, has much improved No, HN has turned into a Marxist echo chamber in the past couple of years. Marxism is corrosive to honesty, respect, fairness, justice, compassion, humanitarianism, reason, knowledge - it resulted in Russian gulags and CCP live organ harvesting.

throwawaaarrgh 5y ago

Dystopian novels aren't very sci-fi. Many of their authors just researched what was already going on in their own time and formed a new narrative around them. The only thing different today is how people allow themselves to be taken advantage of. They used to give up their freedom for security. Now they give up their privacy for entertainment. But even mega-corps being the new oligarchy isn't new. The railroads, oil companies, and newspapers were controlling government and public perception a century ago. The internet is the new railroad, and tech is the new oil and newspaper. It's never going to change. Society is doped up on Uber Eats and Instagram Live and The Nightly 30 Minutes of Fear and Hate. People don't want to think about how their society is fucked, they want to think about who's going to win The Bachelor, or why The Other (Political Party, Nation, Ethnicity) is evil and must be destroyed. People much smarter than me have been pointing this out for a century, too.

getcrunk 5y ago
Yea your right! My ethics in tech professor taught us that tech doesn't bring new issues just new presentations. U can abstract this all down to power/greed/tendencies of human nature (comfort, ease)
deckard1 5y ago
Every time someone pops up with one of those "Google destroyed my business and won't respond" type problems I'm always reminded of the movie Brazil. Just read the automated messages Google sends out sometime and the callousness of how they can ruin lives by sheer algorithmic accident. I call this phenomenon: Getting Fucked By Scale. It's the idea that a scaled algorithm (take, for example, YouTube automated copyright filters) have some percentage of false positives. Maybe that percent is only 0.05%. At a scale of millions and billions of people, that's a lot of people getting fucked. And today, any one of us could end up as Sam Lowry. A fly gets stuck in the Google machine and your life is suddenly going sideways.
- idrios 5y ago
  Brazil really is a great depiction of our current dystopia. The fly in the machine leading to Archibald Buttle's wrongful execution is a great analogy for the people whose lives are thrown sideways when the Google algorithm bans their account. But another scene that really sticks with me is the one where Sam Lowry has the desk in his room, but some person in the room next to him keeps stealing it from him. The fact that 1 desk is shared by 2 rooms is this nonsensical optimization that really just inconveniences him, but highlights how powerless everyone in this world is. For a real world example, there was a time when I was trying to block Facebook and other sites on my phone by editing my phone's hosts file, but couldn't find a way to do it that didn't involve rooting my phone. While trying to find how to do it, I found some people who wanted to do the same thing but all were met with the response "it's locked down to protect you, why would you want to block a website?" It's a very helpless feeling to not have control over something you own. The worst part is, most people I know see issues like this situation with Citizen's and think we need more centralization of power in order to prevent it.

xvector 5y ago

> and being powerless to stop it. You are only powerless so long as you decide to stay within the comfortable confines of the law. The crowd of Hacker News alone certainly has enough ability to cause serious problems for Citizen, whether through activism within their own megacorporations or independent ability.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
Nextgrid 5y ago
You don't even have to break the law. Hacker News and the software engineering industry has a decent influence in the world, as we can't (yet) be automated away and it takes years to become proficient. If we as an industry collectively agree that X is bad and refuse to work on it, X will be significantly disrupted, as their only option might to be offering more money (to get someone to defect and renege on the promise) than they can afford or that makes sense with their economics. Creepy adtech could die tomorrow if people refuse to work on it. The same applies to this Citizen crap.
- kelnos 5y ago
  I just don't see that as feasible. I consider the entire concept of Palantir to be disgusting, but there are clearly enough software developers who think that enabling state surveillance makes people safer. All it takes is a few thousand such people (a small fraction of a percent), and it doesn't matter what "the industry" agrees not to work on. I feel like you might have the misconception that "tech people" are some homogenous bloc that believes in the same things and would stand behind a single policy platform. The reality is nothing at all like that.
- ALittleLight 5y ago
  That's true, but you'd need an implausibly high percentage of developers to agree to the boycott for it to work. Since that conformity is unlikely it's even harder to attain because every individual thinks "Even I forgo this lucrative job it'll still be done by someone else and I'll just have less money."

ctdonath 5y ago

You’re not powerless. Shut off the anxiety generators, and be the change you want in the world. I dumped Facebook & Twitter, and am reducing HN & other social media. Get news from proper objective sources, choose the category of media you consume (TownsendsPlus.com provides great reality checks), and otherwise choose the life you want to live - and live it.

makeworld 5y ago
And companies like this will continue on, making the world worse for everyone. Including you. This cannot be changed by changing yourself.
- ctdonath 5y ago
  I’m old enough to gave seen many such juggernauts collapse when enough individuals decided to change themselves.
  - getcrunk 5y ago
    Such as?
    - ctdonath 5y ago
      Smith-Corona was the #1 worldwide most recognized brand. I was contracting there when they shut down, as typewriter purchases practically ended (in favor of personal computers). Kodak was the name in photography, with few viable competitors. When I heard (internally) their 5-year plan to address the onset of digital photography, I knew they were doomed. Individual purchases of film cameras plummeted, favoring digital cameras, and thus individual choices ended chemical photography within months. Likewise hundreds of other corporate examples. Market-dominating businesses falter and fail, time and again, because individuals choose another option - LOTS of individuals. Every purchase & interaction is an individual choice. Comes a point when the juggernauts are no longer chosen by enough. I've been on social media since the days of dial-up BBSes. I watched AOL and CompuServe rise, seemingly steamrolling the digital world to dominance; then ... they vanished almost overnight. Likewise other media juggernauts (usenet, MySpace, Second Life, etc), unstoppable until individual users cumulatively decided to go elsewhere. "But Facebook/Twitter/etc are different!" No they're not. They're showing the same life cycle others did, albeit with a couple more digits in user count. They're showing the same cracks (over-moderation, boredom, "nobody goes there 'cuz it's too packed") as others have done. We're due for a new platform populated by mass migration of cumulative individuals. Ultimately, it's your choice. What life do you want to live? Sure it's easy to go with the crowd, and deviation may be difficult ... but the choice is yours. And theirs. Live the life you want, be true to yourself - and you may be surprised how many make the same choice, in part because you did.

heavyset_go 5y ago

> This, Chicago police automated policing program (detects crime before it happenes and actually hurt innocent people) One of the worst things I've seen was posted here on HN[1] almost a year ago. It's an in-depth report on a similar program to Chicago's, but in Florida. There was a companion article[2] with videos from the program, and it's just horrifying. It shows several videos taken from body cameras of police officers harassing, assaulting and abducting people, some of them children, because they showed up in their system as being related to, or knowing, people who are suspected, and not convicted, of crimes. Here's a summary of the program[3], and law enforcement's own comments about its purpose: > The motivation of the program is more sinister than merely “fighting crime”: The Sheriff’s Office acknowledged that they want these “problem people” gone. Pasco County Sheriff Chris Nocco, the architect of the program, boasted that the goal was to predict which residents are likely to commit crimes and then “take them out.” In the words of a former Pasco County deputy, they were under orders to “[m]ake their lives miserable until they move or sue.” [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24363871 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24363871 [2] https://projects.tampabay.com/projects/2020/investigations/police-pasco-sheriff-targeted/body-cam-footage/ https://projects.tampabay.com/projects/2020/investigations/p... [3] https://ij.org/case/pasco-predictive-policing/ https://ij.org/case/pasco-predictive-policing/

FireBeyond 5y ago
Thanks for bringing this up. That investigation was horrific. And, no doubt, has lead to absolutely nothing changing there.

permo-w 5y ago

the place to start is phoning up your local representative