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This is the most dystopian thing I've read in a while. Prison Planet Earth, where everyone is uniquely identified by a number, perhaps surgically implanted on

This is the most dystopian thing I've read in a while. Prison Planet Earth, where everyone is uniquely identified by a number, perhaps surgically implanted on an RFID tag? How much compute resource would be needed to create an AI minder for each and every human on top of that, constantly updating their social credit score on a daily basis?

version_five 4y ago
It's a short post by a well know computer scientist about the birthday paradox. It has nothing to do with that stuff.
boringuser2 4y ago
Just to note, an explicit social credit score to many would be more preferable and transparently accessible than the the data widely collected and used by companies to gauge your social credit in the west: bank records, employment history, credit, rental history, civil court records, etc, all freely available with common reporting software.
OkayPhysicist 4y ago
If you don't live in the extreme 3rd world, you probably already have a unique identifier in the form of "Country or Territory+ID number". It turns out relying on names when billions of people are using the same list of a couple hundred names is troublesome for record keeping.
acyou 4y ago
We are indeed happily discussing how to assign each human a unique serial number, without too much discussion of why or if it should be done.
asdajksah2123 4y ago
Your reasoning logic, applied consistently, would consider almost everything we have today dystopian. For example: "Using the Hindu-Arabic numeral system instead of the Roman numeral system is the most dystopian thing I've heard about in a while. Prison Planet Earth, where everyone is uniquely identified by a number, perhaps surgically implanted on an RFID tag? How much compute resource would be needed to create an AI minder for each and every human on top of that, constantly updating their social credit score on a daily basis?" It's the slippery slope argument taken to an extreme. The way to fight the slippery slope fallacy is to fight against the things that may be dystopian/bad. Not argue that anything that is good/neutral is bad because it may potentially make some minor dystopian/bad outcome slightly more likely. If you do want to make such an argument, then you have to weigh the pros vs the cons. And it's very hard to see how a word problem to illustrate the Birthday Paradox comes anywhere close to the bad outweighing any possible benefit from it.

version_five 4y ago

It's a short post by a well know computer scientist about the birthday paradox. It has nothing to do with that stuff.

boringuser2 4y ago

Just to note, an explicit social credit score to many would be more preferable and transparently accessible than the the data widely collected and used by companies to gauge your social credit in the west: bank records, employment history, credit, rental history, civil court records, etc, all freely available with common reporting software.

OkayPhysicist 4y ago

If you don't live in the extreme 3rd world, you probably already have a unique identifier in the form of "Country or Territory+ID number". It turns out relying on names when billions of people are using the same list of a couple hundred names is troublesome for record keeping.

acyou 4y ago

We are indeed happily discussing how to assign each human a unique serial number, without too much discussion of why or if it should be done.

asdajksah2123 4y ago

Your reasoning logic, applied consistently, would consider almost everything we have today dystopian. For example: "Using the Hindu-Arabic numeral system instead of the Roman numeral system is the most dystopian thing I've heard about in a while. Prison Planet Earth, where everyone is uniquely identified by a number, perhaps surgically implanted on an RFID tag? How much compute resource would be needed to create an AI minder for each and every human on top of that, constantly updating their social credit score on a daily basis?" It's the slippery slope argument taken to an extreme. The way to fight the slippery slope fallacy is to fight against the things that may be dystopian/bad. Not argue that anything that is good/neutral is bad because it may potentially make some minor dystopian/bad outcome slightly more likely. If you do want to make such an argument, then you have to weigh the pros vs the cons. And it's very hard to see how a word problem to illustrate the Birthday Paradox comes anywhere close to the bad outweighing any possible benefit from it.