6 ms·

Don't want to contradict your point, just a FWIW ... Yesterday I saw a TV ad for Meta suggesting that with VR you will be able to stand in a small conversation

by a9h74j 4y ago

Don't want to contradict your point, just a FWIW ... Yesterday I saw a TV ad for Meta suggesting that with VR you will be able to stand in a small conversational circle with Socrates. Yea, it will be educational. But skepticism aside, with a personal instance of AI some benefits could be significant. Just having a personal AI critic to read your writing and give feedback could be a huge benefit -- or if not your writing, your thought process. Queue the spying on you part.

autoexec 4y ago
Right? The fact that we have all this cool tech, but it's all actively being used against us instead of working for us really dulls my enthusiasm for technology. What good is it if we get robot butlers or personal AI assistants if the assistants can't keep our personal info to themselves and the robots record everything they see and hear and stream that back to MegaCorp along with extensive telemetry detailing every time we have sex with them? Already we've seen Roombas being used to spy on the people who paid for them, with iRobot Corporation selling maps of the inside of their homes to random 3rd parties.
- tim333 4y ago
  The benefits often outweigh the 'spying on you', which is usually just targeted ads.
  - eternalban 4y ago
    No, this is not an accurate assessment of what is at stake here. So yeah, targeted ads and spooky tv sets are annoying at the least but the poing is that the infrastructure could easily support 1984 style monitors. Regardless of the purpose of current usage, this is infrastructure for a surveillance society. That is the issue. The infrastructure is not going to go away unless we rip it down [down to and including transport layer] and rebuild with privacy and other human rights protections as a primary requirement of ubiquitous networking. DARPA was not concerned about these matters so all these fall under the 'operators discretion'.
    - a9h74j 4y ago
      machine voice: Your post shows a combined social volatility plus initiative score over 37. Please report to the HappyWellnessCenter for your injections. ... While you are there, the weed is free.
    - sizzle 4y ago
      Their algorithm dispenses a personalized feed that uses soooo much data from your watch preferences alone, regardless of it's permissions. This is so far ahead of user suggestion systems on other platforms, which are generally driven by collaborative filtering. Which inadvertantly is a stopgap for psychological exploitation of users. Other platforms plateau on their information gathering of profile due to the implicit conformity of the exchanges on social media. Not TikTok though. I want to start by saying this isn't your Cold War sheen propaganda. This is Harmonious Society, "river crab" propaganda. This method can belie and camouflage the salient points of persuasion, sure. But it's not only intended to stream a deluge of coercive media. The purpose is to dominate the aesthetic discourse around topics, learning as much about you as they can, while ingratiating their clusters of community norms at the same time. There isn't a monolithic identity either. It's about picking the winners of our long form cultural evolution. Country to country data definitely shows varying preferences, but aside from the initial exposure to determine what clusters you associate with, these feeds are tailored heavily by user interaction. The public description of their process divulges the use of object and character recognition, along with audio/tag keywords, to all items in a video. So even on a virtual machine with no app permissions, this site is making an incredibly detailed profile of your media consumption habits. For example, when you stop watching a video at a certain point, TikTok records what items were in it up to that point making you stay, and what audio/objects occurred at the point of losing interest. This catalog culminates as a set of meticulous preferences that end up correlating to all sorts of useful suggestion information; preferences for video formats(do you like dance videos, rants, or documentary content?), types of speech(language and culture obviously, but also intonation, volume, frequency of use, monologue vs dialogue), length and pacing, even framing of the camera, its all logged and associated with your device and you. Along with this, topics and community clusters are accrued. This goes way beyond blanket brainwashing or disinformation propaganda in it's effectiveness. It's like if a personal interrogator was assigned to billions of people to know every minute detail of their personal media narratives. And at the same time, became a congenial friend who is coaxing all of them to subtlety shift their identities and preferences. Mass media always takes this trend to some degree, but TikTok isolates the individual's identity. (I didn’t write this lol)
  - autoexec 4y ago
    It's not about ads. it's about manipulation and gathering data to be used against you at every and any opportunity. The data that's sold and passed around is used to determine things like how much you pay for things vs your neighbor. It determines what services you are offered and at what terms. If a store thinks I make more money than you, I might for example be told they've got a return policy that is much more generous than what they'll tell you. There are places where you will wait longer on hold, getting repeatedly bumped back to make room for people who have a better "consumer score" than you do. The data is handed over to the state and locked away until it's useful to them. It's can get you arrested or questioned by police when you've committed no crime. It can get you sued for things which should not be crimes but are. It's used by politicians who carve out the borders of their districts specifically to limit the ability for your vote to make any difference. That data is used to target you with lies and misinformation. It allows you to be targeted by extremist groups. It can be used to decide if you get hired or not. You could be turned down for housing because of it. There are millions of things that might prejudice another person against you. Your lifestyle, your politics, your religion, the people you associate with, your sexual history, your medical conditions, etc. You can't know who is accessing your information or for what reason, or know how accurate that data is, or know if/how it is being protected. It's a gross violation of your rights, which yes, sometimes is used to manipulate you into buying something you might not have bought otherwise, but increasingly is used for much much more and once the intimate details of your life have been taken from you, you can never take them back or prevent them from spreading. However much you enjoy the products that are spying you, you can't ever say if the benefits outweigh the costs. You aren't even allowed to know what the costs are or when you are paying for them, and there will never come a time when you have paid in full and it can no longer cost you something else.
    - a9h74j 4y ago
      Ten years ago Sherry Terkel, in Alone Together, described various electronic companions being deployed, even for very young kids. Imagine a dossier/record of all your secret whispers to electronic "friends" recorded from the time you are three years old. As the comments above suggest, the risks go beyond merely violating informed consent.

by a9h74j 4y ago

autoexec 4y ago

Right? The fact that we have all this cool tech, but it's all actively being used against us instead of working for us really dulls my enthusiasm for technology. What good is it if we get robot butlers or personal AI assistants if the assistants can't keep our personal info to themselves and the robots record everything they see and hear and stream that back to MegaCorp along with extensive telemetry detailing every time we have sex with them? Already we've seen Roombas being used to spy on the people who paid for them, with iRobot Corporation selling maps of the inside of their homes to random 3rd parties.

tim333 4y ago
The benefits often outweigh the 'spying on you', which is usually just targeted ads.
- eternalban 4y ago
  No, this is not an accurate assessment of what is at stake here. So yeah, targeted ads and spooky tv sets are annoying at the least but the poing is that the infrastructure could easily support 1984 style monitors. Regardless of the purpose of current usage, this is infrastructure for a surveillance society. That is the issue. The infrastructure is not going to go away unless we rip it down [down to and including transport layer] and rebuild with privacy and other human rights protections as a primary requirement of ubiquitous networking. DARPA was not concerned about these matters so all these fall under the 'operators discretion'.
  - a9h74j 4y ago
    machine voice: Your post shows a combined social volatility plus initiative score over 37. Please report to the HappyWellnessCenter for your injections. ... While you are there, the weed is free.
  - sizzle 4y ago
    Their algorithm dispenses a personalized feed that uses soooo much data from your watch preferences alone, regardless of it's permissions. This is so far ahead of user suggestion systems on other platforms, which are generally driven by collaborative filtering. Which inadvertantly is a stopgap for psychological exploitation of users. Other platforms plateau on their information gathering of profile due to the implicit conformity of the exchanges on social media. Not TikTok though. I want to start by saying this isn't your Cold War sheen propaganda. This is Harmonious Society, "river crab" propaganda. This method can belie and camouflage the salient points of persuasion, sure. But it's not only intended to stream a deluge of coercive media. The purpose is to dominate the aesthetic discourse around topics, learning as much about you as they can, while ingratiating their clusters of community norms at the same time. There isn't a monolithic identity either. It's about picking the winners of our long form cultural evolution. Country to country data definitely shows varying preferences, but aside from the initial exposure to determine what clusters you associate with, these feeds are tailored heavily by user interaction. The public description of their process divulges the use of object and character recognition, along with audio/tag keywords, to all items in a video. So even on a virtual machine with no app permissions, this site is making an incredibly detailed profile of your media consumption habits. For example, when you stop watching a video at a certain point, TikTok records what items were in it up to that point making you stay, and what audio/objects occurred at the point of losing interest. This catalog culminates as a set of meticulous preferences that end up correlating to all sorts of useful suggestion information; preferences for video formats(do you like dance videos, rants, or documentary content?), types of speech(language and culture obviously, but also intonation, volume, frequency of use, monologue vs dialogue), length and pacing, even framing of the camera, its all logged and associated with your device and you. Along with this, topics and community clusters are accrued. This goes way beyond blanket brainwashing or disinformation propaganda in it's effectiveness. It's like if a personal interrogator was assigned to billions of people to know every minute detail of their personal media narratives. And at the same time, became a congenial friend who is coaxing all of them to subtlety shift their identities and preferences. Mass media always takes this trend to some degree, but TikTok isolates the individual's identity. (I didn’t write this lol)
- autoexec 4y ago
  It's not about ads. it's about manipulation and gathering data to be used against you at every and any opportunity. The data that's sold and passed around is used to determine things like how much you pay for things vs your neighbor. It determines what services you are offered and at what terms. If a store thinks I make more money than you, I might for example be told they've got a return policy that is much more generous than what they'll tell you. There are places where you will wait longer on hold, getting repeatedly bumped back to make room for people who have a better "consumer score" than you do. The data is handed over to the state and locked away until it's useful to them. It's can get you arrested or questioned by police when you've committed no crime. It can get you sued for things which should not be crimes but are. It's used by politicians who carve out the borders of their districts specifically to limit the ability for your vote to make any difference. That data is used to target you with lies and misinformation. It allows you to be targeted by extremist groups. It can be used to decide if you get hired or not. You could be turned down for housing because of it. There are millions of things that might prejudice another person against you. Your lifestyle, your politics, your religion, the people you associate with, your sexual history, your medical conditions, etc. You can't know who is accessing your information or for what reason, or know how accurate that data is, or know if/how it is being protected. It's a gross violation of your rights, which yes, sometimes is used to manipulate you into buying something you might not have bought otherwise, but increasingly is used for much much more and once the intimate details of your life have been taken from you, you can never take them back or prevent them from spreading. However much you enjoy the products that are spying you, you can't ever say if the benefits outweigh the costs. You aren't even allowed to know what the costs are or when you are paying for them, and there will never come a time when you have paid in full and it can no longer cost you something else.
  - a9h74j 4y ago
    Ten years ago Sherry Terkel, in Alone Together, described various electronic companions being deployed, even for very young kids. Imagine a dossier/record of all your secret whispers to electronic "friends" recorded from the time you are three years old. As the comments above suggest, the risks go beyond merely violating informed consent.