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AI is fundamentally ‘a surveillance technology’

227 points by skilled 3y ago

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ben_w 3y ago
Ironic opening line from a website whose full screen banner is desperately trying to convince me that the tracking cookies they don't strictly need are of any benefit to me. > Why is it that so many companies that rely on monetizing the data of their users seem to be extremely hot on AI?
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- weikju 3y ago
  The article is just relaying what someone said and not their own opinion, I guess, so they can get away with that
- eimrine 3y ago
  Just disable CSS, it solves GDPR problem and still let me see a text and pictures.
jdthedisciple 3y ago
Does anybody know of a facial recognition AI that actually classifies faces as (non)-liars as she claims? Not sure about this take. You need data at the end of the day, to build good AI models. These days it feels like anyone's public takes are more or less just a means to promote their own cause. And I say this as a happy and long-time Signal user.
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- jazzyjackson 3y ago
  AOL keyword "deception analysis" There's no science behind it but that never stopped someone from selling software to the police, high tech polygraphs are probably out there. Closest thing I've found in production is more "nervous person recognition" used at airports for triggering secondary screening: >> the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Science and Technology Directorate (S&T) seeks to improve DHS’s ability to quickly and objectively screen individuals for malintent. FAST combines cutting-edge behavioral and physiological science with deception detection theory and state-of-the-art sensor technologies. [0] I don't think her hot take is mere self-promotion, but rejection that building "good models" is necessary or helpful to average people, maybe there's some benefits but it increases the power of the state more than the individual (old debate in computing) [0] https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/Future%20Attribute%20Screening%20Technology-FAST.pdf https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/Future%...
- mufasachan 3y ago
  A simple research on Scholar with "facial recognition liars" leads to a few niche articles about the topic. So it seems that facial recognition for liars is a thing. After a quick look on the articles you can see those methods are very simple and they are not studied at the state of the arts level. It looks like much more an academic research field rather than an industrial field. So her claims are preventive alarmist. Although, I would say she is not the most informed person in surveillance task in AI. Another surveillance field in AI is the "person re-identification" task. It aims to determine if two pictures of a person from surveillance cameras depict the same person or not. This is my field of research and you have a tons of papers each year in big AI venues and also big company in the author (alibaba, tencent, mostly big chinese tech companies, I saw one paper with Google once on a related task). Also, I would like to highlight something. She said we need some people to annotate the datasets. For this surveillance task, actually, we have a bunch of methods that aims to less rely on human annotations : LUPerson and LUPerson-NL datasets and respective methods (CVPR 21 and 22) for example. Finally, I would like to conclude that I mostly agree with her. A bit of nuance would be to see the interaction with the nature of data and the surveillance capabilities. AI on camera data are obviously surveillance. When it comes more blur it's what "surveillance" is for "code taken from the internet to train Github copilot method"? Or what is the surveillance capability from database of digital arts? Those questions seem to be much more relevant and hard in regard of the use of data for surveillance. AI is just a name of a method that we use to process big data at scale in this context.
firtoz 3y ago
This is a bit too much of a stretch. It's like saying that newspapers are fundamentally a gossip technology.
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- mdp2021 3y ago
  Are you returning that judgement as a function of the submission title (which apparently rewrites between «gossip» and attention calling an original note, «AI is a way, I think, to entrench and expand the surveillance business model»), of Coldewey's summary of the interview, of the interview itself ( https://youtu.be/amNriUZNP8w https://youtu.be/amNriUZNP8w ), of the paper that is the occasion for the interview (it must be Open (For Business): Big Tech, Concentrated Power, and the Political Economy of Open AI - https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4543807 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4543807 )...? Whittaker's point is about a certain cone of issues. Her position was previously exposed at least at https://slate.com/technology/2023/05/meredith-whittaker-interview-geoffrey-hinton-ai-threats.html https://slate.com/technology/2023/05/meredith-whittaker-inte...
  - firtoz 3y ago
    It's mainly about the title and the article on Techcrunch. The interview and the other links you provided are more reasonable and less click-baity.
happytiger 3y ago
This isn’t novel. So is the Internet itself. How do we protect against the downsides? Do we need a privacy bill of rights? I say yes.
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- flagrant_taco 3y ago
  The modern internet is easily used for surveillance, the early versions wouldn't have been very useful for surveillance though. We could pretty easily strip most of the risks out if we cared to, though we'd lose functionality along with it and more importantly it wouldn't be the massive revenue driver it is today.
nathias 3y ago
this is a bad argument, it could be applied equally to all communication technology
- krapp 3y ago
  It does. All communication technology is surveillance technology.
  - nonrandomstring 3y ago
    I'm just reading a rather well written PhD thesis that disputes this [0] Certainly, any badly designed communication system is incidentally a surveillance device. And there are many examples stretching back to the 1940s. However, a properly designed communication system is inherently a counter-surveillance system. It just took us 80 years to figure out that important functional requirement. [1] https://research.tue.nl/files/197416841/20220325_Appelbaum_hf.pdf https://research.tue.nl/files/197416841/20220325_Appelbaum_h...
  - falcor84 3y ago
    Not by definition. For example, radio broadcast isn't.
    - krapp 3y ago
      Definitions don't matter. The device I carry in my pocket is "defined" as a "smartphone" despite being a computer that just happens to have an app that simulates an archaic device called a "telephone" installed on it. It also provides convenient access for law enforcement to monitor all of my social media accounts and communications and metadata and scan my storage for contraband. Preferably with a warrant but of course probably with any number of backdoors installed by design. We all know at this point that warrants don't matter either. Radio broadcast can certainly be used for surveillance, in that at the very least the location of the broadcast signal can be triangulated and monitored. Which is how law enforcement can also use the "smartphone" in my pocket to track my location in realtime. Even when it's turned off. Because the definition of the "off" button doesn't matter, either. It isn't an "off button" it's a button that runs an app that simulates "turning the phone off," but might just put it into a low power state or who knows? Your computer spies on you. The web spies on you. Your appliances spy on you. Your car spies on you. Your lightbulbs spy on you. The locks on your front door spy on you. Unless you're primitive enough not to use modern "smart" technology (which isn't defined as surveillance technology but which always seems to be in the news because it gets used or abused as exactly that.) Everything, everywhere, spies on you all the time. And if it doesn't, wait a few years, someone will find a way to make sure that it does. But none of it will be surveillance "by definition." Convenience, customer obsession, safety, the definitions will be plentiful but none of them will matter.
guardian5x 3y ago
AI can be used as a surveillance technology. But it isn't fundamentally one, there are many other applications.
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- weikju 3y ago
  Pretty sure the article is about what passes for AI these days and not AI in general
nuc1e0n 3y ago
The current wave of AI seems more like an investment scam to me. Like crypto currencies and NFTs were.
- entropi 3y ago
  I also agree that it is a bubble, but I feel like it is more of a "dotcom" type of bubble rather than crypto/NFT type of bubble, if it makes any sense.
  - DebtDeflation 3y ago
    It makes sense. Investor hopes and the resultant valuations have gotten way ahead of the actual state of the market, but the underlying AI tech is real and useful and being applied everywhere. Crypto/NFT was never anything more than a blatant scam.
  - _ugfj 3y ago
    However, the dangers here are immense. There was https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xoVJKj8lcNQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xoVJKj8lcNQ where they argued for 2028 being an AI election where the person with most computing power wins. Propaganda produced by humans on small scale killed 300 000 people in the US alone in this pandemic https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2022/05/13/1098071284/this-is-how-many-lives-could-have-been-saved-with-covid-vaccinations-in-each-sta https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2022/05/13/1098071... imagine the next pandemic when it'll be produced on an industrial scale by LLMs. Literally millions will die of it. This bubble must be extinguished by all force US regulators possess. There's not much time left, it must banned with prejudice.
- Mistletoe 3y ago
  https://www.institutionalinvestor.com/article/2c4fad0w6irk838pca3gg/portfolio/money-is-pouring-into-ai-skeptics-say-its-a-grift-shift https://www.institutionalinvestor.com/article/2c4fad0w6irk83... I agree and it is the current last hope investors are putting their dreams in for the overvalued stock market to keep going up. “But what if AI changes everything?” I don’t really see their point of view and I would love to see how AI would usher in this new era of value being created if anyone wants to share. Wouldn’t it more be used to lay off millions of people and information workers that can be replaced by AI, that now can’t buy things?
mdp2021 3y ago
The submitted summary of the video-recorded interview at TechCrunch Disrupt are occasioned by the article Open (For Business): Big Tech, Concentrated Power, and the Political Economy of Open AI - https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4543807 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4543807 I suggest to read (at least) the abstract (too long to be copied here) to get some more proper idea of the debated area.
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nologic01 3y ago
> [AI] requires the surveillance business model I think this is putting the horse before the cart. There is no doubt that the surveillance business model has captured tech. But "AI" - which to me is just the shortest possible way to say "algorithmic processing of digital information" - is just one more category of tools exploited to buttress and expand the dominance of said business model. It just happens that while other innovations (blockchain, quantum computing etc) are not immediately (or ever) usable, AI tools are practical and deployable here and now. To better understand my point imagine the polar opposite system: a digital universe that fully respects our various professed humanistic values and uses technology only to empower individuals, bind society together etc. We would still need large scale algorithmic support if we are to manage interfacing our biologically defined brain bandwidth with the vast and growing silicon exo-brain. In other words, lets us not concede that surveillance capitalism owns every possible future of tech.
- qp11 3y ago
  Scale requires Purpose. When there is no Purpose, or no Purpose that Everyone accepts, and yet things are mindlessly scaled up, the scaler makes enemies. And its all pure chaos what happens next.
  - nonrandomstring 3y ago
    Ubiquity is the materialised love-child of two other monsters, omnipotence and omniscience. Whereas we recognise the pathological parents for what they are, we still think ubiquity is adorable.
- api 3y ago
  > lets us not concede that surveillance capitalism owns every possible future of tech. It does as long as it's the only way to finance tech, which seems to be the case.
  - nologic01 3y ago
    why is that such a popular opinion. Tech has been financed for decades by individuals, corporates and public sector actors. Even today a large fraction is financed by "healthy" tech services demand. One of the many dramatic flaws of surveillance capitalism is that it cannot really provide the entire tech stack society needs. It thrives as a parasitic model, predicated on political dysfunction and public ignorance. Society must finance the bulk of the infrastructure and then hand over the keys to the digital kingdom as it were. What is undeniable is that surveillance is the most lucrative mode. This is not surprising: borderline legal / morally dubious activities are always the most profitable.
jorlow 3y ago
AI (or probably more accurately, ML) is an efficiency technology. Surveillance is one thing it can make more efficient, sure.
- johnnyworker 3y ago
  It's the thing it does make more efficient, which was predictable. And accuracy doesn't matter. If it's 99% and the powerful are whitelisted for human review, that's enough. That's enough to pull a mesh so fine over every human being on the planet, forever, that reaches deeply into them before they can even begin to form a personality. The jump from individuals listening to individual phone calls as they were happening to what became possible in the decades after that might be smaller than the jump from that to the capability of transcribing anything anyone utters, even in their sleep, automatically, and adding it to a giant corpus of data to fish for suspects or assets or blackmail recipients in, in seconds. With then being able to act on those people as if they were a dataset (set a few flags, which systems or humans downstream heed without question, done). It's a very grave threat, and I find it interesting that people decades ago who wrote about it called it that, but now that we're in it, we find it very easy to just shrug it off. But it's the same lethal threat to what it means to be human. Privacy is required for thought, without thought there's no humanity worth mentioning, QED.
  - pradn 3y ago
    Imagine an adversary country surveilling all the youth of another, or even just at elite schools, and being able to use that as blackmail as they age into the leadership class. Or maybe we just won’t care any more. We’ve recently had a US president accused of all sorts of unsavory things, but who still retains a massive following, even among Evangelicals. What possible revelation could bring him down?
    - johnnyworker 3y ago
      I think it really depends on the person. If you're Assange, it doesn't matter if you did it. It's easier if you did it, but it doesn't have priority. For your in-group (be that cult followers or large power structures), you can get away with pretty much anything. Which I think makes it even harder to get people to understand how shit this timeline is, because everybody is dreaming about what it could do for them, not to them. And the people who have reason to believe to never be at the wrong end of these sticks, have no idea how it deforms them, either. Humanity has proven its skill at dehumanizing humans in all sorts of ways, with all sorts of rhetorical and technological means, so yeah, sure, "AI" (which in practicality means "surveil everyone and get them to like/do what you want them to like and do", the rest are gimmicks and chaff) is "nothing new", but it's still like humans going from "always having had weapons" to "fucking nukes".
imgabe 3y ago
I think people do a disservice to their cause when they make semantic arguments like this. Isn't enough to say that AI can be used for enhanced surveillance by malicious actors? What does it mean to be a "surveillance technology"? Now you have people arguing about whether AI fits the definition of this made up term instead of talking about the potentially nefarious surveillance applications.
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- DrScientist 3y ago
  I think she is pointing out there is a bit of a vicious cycle. AI needs data [1], so in the end people compete on the data - this drives more and more surveillance type behaviour - including using AI to collect data [2]. [1] not controversial I hope [2] eg face recognition, identification by joining the dots from traded data. It's not necessarily nefarious per se - just the dynamic - and once the data is out there....
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londondev45 3y ago
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- throwaway914 3y ago
  "Brian Heater is the Hardware Editor at TechCrunch. He worked for a number of leading tech publications, including Engadget, PCMag, Laptop, and Tech Times, where he served as the Managing Editor. His writing has appeared in Spin, Wired, Playboy, Entertainment Weekly, The Onion, Boing Boing, Publishers Weekly, The Daily Beast and various other publications. He hosts the weekly Boing Boing interview podcast RiYL, has appeared as a regular NPR contributor and shares his Queens apartment with a rabbit named Lucy." ? This site isn't my first choice for news, but I'm not sure how any of that dismisses from the points made in the article. Maybe someday we'll care about consumer protection laws and starve the growing industry around AI for training data.
rvz 3y ago
No shit. As already said years ago. [0] Closed source software is surveillance technology. Internet of Things is surveillance technology. Blockchain / crypto is surveillance technology. Virtual Reality is surveillance technology. AI is surveillance technology. Very disappointed that it took you guys this long to realize that, but it is too late to stop all of it entirely. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31617042 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31617042
- moritonal 3y ago
  I guess the most generic is that "Convince is a surveillance technology"? Passing the buck to someone else will always have surveillance effects.
- npteljes 3y ago
  Not really though. Cloud, for example, is more closely tied to surveillance than the examples you provided.
- wrsh07 3y ago
  I'm not saying it's contradictory to say closed source is surveillance tech and open source is surveillance tech, but it's certainly unintuitive. For my part, it feels like some tech is designed for specific use cases (eg pinboard, kagi). If you trust those developers they don't need to open source their work. If you look at it from a systems perspective, ad tech benefits from scale and data, so when a product is built "for everyone" and monetized with ads.... Yeah it's going to be surveillance tech
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npteljes 3y ago
Bad premise, and therefore nonsense conclusions, because AI can have many uses, aside from surveillance. In this regard, it's not like a gun, which is very specifically an instrument to kill, and has secondary uses like shooting sports, but rather it's a tool, like tongs, which can be used for building, cooking, and also to torture someone. Advertising companies are jumping at AI for two things: it is hoped that it can give them an edge, and second, because they already have data, which is in fact fundamental for AI.
- andai 3y ago
  In many countries guns are used in a nonlethal way. My friend during psychosis stabbed a policeman in the leg with a kitchen knife, and was only shot in the leg as a response.
  - swader999 3y ago
    I don't think any country has a police force with a shoot to wound policy. Your friend was extremely lucky. It's not practical to shoot to wound in most circumstances. The arms and legs move faster than a shooter can react and that's why center of mass is what is trained.
    - einr 3y ago
      Sweden does. (I know because I live in Sweden.) https://polisen.se/om-polisen/polisens-arbete/polisens-befogenheter/polisens-ratt-att-anvanda-skjutvapen/ https://polisen.se/om-polisen/polisens-arbete/polisens-befog... Relevant part: "Om polisen skjuter mot en person ska de sträva efter att bara för tillfället oskadliggöra personen. Skotten ska i första hand riktas mot benen, men om omständigheterna kräver det får polisen skjuta direkt mot överkroppen – till exempel om den hotfulla personen befinner sig nära i avstånd och angreppet går fort." Google translation: "If the police shoot at a person, they must aim to render the person harmless only for the time being. The shots must primarily be aimed at the legs, but if the circumstances require it, the police may shoot directly at the upper body - for example, if the threatening person is close in distance and the attack is fast." EDIT: some data from https://polisen.se/om-polisen/polisens-arbete/polisens-befogenheter/hur-ofta-anvander-polisen-skjutvapen/ https://polisen.se/om-polisen/polisens-arbete/polisens-befog... -- out of 1.13 million police interventions in 2022, shots were fired at a person or vehicle 21 times. Out of those, 2 had lethal outcomes.
Maro 3y ago
Occam's razor: the most profitable business model for Internet companies with very DAUs and Timespent/DAUs in the last 20 years was showing advertisements. Those very profitable companies are always working on cutting edge stuff, whether it's distributed systems, database research, datacenters, mobile hardware and software, or, as it is today, the various tools and methods grouped under the umbrella term AI.
nine_k 3y ago
Science and technology are fundamentally about overcoming limitations and enabling previously impossible things. The process is ethically neutral, or oblivious if you will. Once you discover nitration, it will be used to produce both hunger-reducing fertilizers and devastating explosives. One cannot be discovered without the other, because they often involve the same chemical compounds. If you used said limitations to protect something you value, you have to start looking for a better protection. It's a constant process of adaptation. It cannot and should not be stopped. Instead we should be looking for ways to adapt, preferably ahead of time. Restrictions work to a rather small extent. Be fully aware that a new scientific or engineering breakthrough will have all the potential to result in more deadly weapons, invasion of your privacy, undermining democracy, exacerbating inequality, putting you personally out of job, and disrupting whatever else you hold dear. It's always high time to think about factors which would eliminate or at least limit such consequences, and these must be positive factors, things people do willingly and profitably, not bans. It's time to think not how to ban the privacy-invading AI (it will never work), but how to have a smaller footprint that may be used to invade your privacy, and, most importantly, how to run things in such.a way that invading your privacy is not profitable, even though still possible. And, inevitably, learn to live with even less privacy by default.
- pjmorris 3y ago
  > The process is ethically neutral, or oblivious if you will. I like 'oblivious' here, as it seems to me a matter of chance about who will achieve a breakthrough. It does seem to me that once a breakthrough is achieved by someone it will be used to enhance their power over others (counterexamples welcome!) To my mind, this power calls into doubt its ethical neutrality. Yes, it is the people in possession who are making the ethical choices... but they are ethical choices enabled by the technology.
- bamboozled 3y ago
  You've left out the "unintended consequences" bit? Soil degradation at scale from fertilizer use? Ocean run off? It's time to think not how to ban the privacy-invading AI (it will never work), but how to have a smaller footprint that may be used to invade your privacy, and, most importantly, how to run things in such.a way that invading your privacy is not profitable, even though still possible. And, inevitably, learn to live with even less privacy by default. When 50%+ of the cars driving around your city are Google / Waymo cars which are essentially intelligence gathering tanks with unparalleled surveillance capability, I don't see how anyone is going to be reducing any footprints ? Cashless society? Home assistant robots that "phone home"? Face it, this is not going to be getting better anytime soon. We can try adapt all we like but maybe we should just be walking around with EMP emitting back packs on if we care about our privacy?
madsbuch 3y ago
That is fundamentally wrong: I am currently setting up my workbench for federated learning to get more intimate with that field.
AndrewThrowaway 3y ago
Out of topic question. Would it be possible to combine machine learning with something like 23andMe and match 100 000 person photos with their DNA. Would we have an AI model which basically can tell how the persons looks like from a strand of hair? Imagine finding some DNA on a crime scene. Witnesses can say that this person was a bit overweight so you slide some slider to the right a bit and get a pretty good AI generated portrait of a criminal. How cool and scary that would be.
- lionkor 3y ago
  And oh so biased
  - memefrog 3y ago
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- largbae 3y ago
  I think it's fundamentally possible but the training set needed might be so large that you're better off just actually cataloging the DNA of most humans and pulling up the picture of the closest match.
- Gelomodns 3y ago
  There are already features you can extract from DNA. 23andMe shows you your traits and confidence level depending on the research. But you know just bring it to the real thing: With DNA, Video and ML you will be able to track and find that person through face recognition and probability automatically. Hail skynet
- bookofjoe 3y ago
  >Recent advances in Forensic DNA Phenotyping of appearance, ancestry and age [July 2023] https://www.fsigenetics.com/article/S1872-4973(23)00045-5/fulltext https://www.fsigenetics.com/article/S1872-4973(23)00045-5/fu... ........................ >DNA Facial Mapping https://www.policechiefmagazine.org/dna-facial-mapping/ https://www.policechiefmagazine.org/dna-facial-mapping/ ........................ >How Australian police will use DNA sequencing to predict what suspects look like [2021] https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2021/dec/08/how-australian-police-will-use-dna-sequencing-to-predict-what-suspects-look-like https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2021/dec/08/how-a... ........................ >The Role of Hair in DNA Testing https://www.hairphysician.com/the-role-of-hair-in-dna/ https://www.hairphysician.com/the-role-of-hair-in-dna/
iandanforth 3y ago
This has no more validity than "the internet is fundamentally a surveillance technology." It's a conflation of a tool's sometimes harmful usage with an inseparable aspect of its nature. And the idea that AI "requires the surveillance business model" is demonstrably false. Thousands of researchers over the last 7 decades have contributed to the development of the collection of technologies we call AI without that business model. However this is Meredith Whittaker so we can assume she knows that. So yeah, those are provocative statements made for rhetorical effect to emphasize that power will use technology to do bad things and enshrine and enhance its power.
- ToucanLoucan 3y ago
  > This has no more validity than "the internet is fundamentally a surveillance technology." It's a conflation of a tool's sometimes harmful usage with an inseparable aspect of its nature. I mean at some point the conflation itself is rather fair game, given that such massive swaths of the modern Internet apply it directly. The most predominant search engine sells ads. The most predominant social media sites, all of them, run on paid placement of content (ads). In fact, every social media site with even a little traffic besides perhaps Mastodon does (I honestly don't know I've never used it). Twitter/X is trying to get off advertising as it's revenue source and because of that is worth a 10th of what it was when Elon bought it less than a year ago. Amazon you could make an argument isn't based on ads (entirely) but it's also the largest retail website in the history of man and that's probably the only reason, and also, it's largest cash cow at the moment is AWS which is absolutely shoulders deep in ads, ad services, serving ads, and ad targeting. Podcasts? Ads. Listicles? Ads. Substacks? Ads. Need a driver file to make an ancient videogame work? You'll find a website that hosts it, alongside some ads. Wanna download some ROMs for SNES games you definitely own? Ads. Pirating some pornography with surprisingly good production value that's riffing on Pirates of the Caribbean? Sounds fun, also, the website you get the torrent link from has ads. And like, you can get into the semantics of there's no other way to fund a website, they didn't all choose it, some don't use surveillance to serve their ads, and all the rest, and to that I say, you have much more trust in corporations than I do. Salesforce would sell my grandmother into sex slavery if they could make $5 doing so so you'll have to forgive me if I just don't necessarily trust the internet ad machine when it says pinky promise we aren't exploiting your data, especially since every time they have a data leak incident, oops, there's all my data again. Aw shucks aw geez. User data is practically the only currency on the internet anymore, and user attention in turn is the only resource being mined by social media. Of course it's for advertising. What else would it be for? What else could it be for? > However this is Meredith Whittaker so we can assume she knows that. So yeah, those are provocative statements made for rhetorical effect to emphasize that power will use technology to do bad things and enshrine and enhance its power. I mean that seems like something worth emphasizing? Ad tech has had a massive influence over the modern internet space, which is why it's so fucking bad. Basically every terrible decision you lament on a daily basis, every dark pattern, every annoying thing, can in some way or another be traced to ad tech. All that shit about when you talk about needing a new hose near your phone and suddenly you have ads for hoses, that's ad tech. The entire pivot to video fiasco! Facebook wanted to stream video and bullshitted publishers and media orgs with cooked numbers that it was "what people wanted" even though demonstrably no they fucking did not, do not, and never will want that, it's what ad tech wanted and therefore it was sacrosanct, right up until it killed literally hundreds if not thousands of websites. Except even that wasn't enough, because ad tech still wants it, and so we have video platforms left and right because these companies do not work for us, they work for advertisers. Like no it isn't everything, no single entity could be that bad. I'm just saying if all of ad tech was Thanos-snapped out of existence tomorrow, the Internet would be incredibly different, better in a lot of ways, so I feel the conflation is fair game.
beepbooptheory 3y ago
What is it, in general, that makes people feel so motivated to defend AI? Every commenter can't be the CEO of some AI adjacent company.. Beyond that, why care so much? You can still use it even if its imperfect, you can even still use it while recognizing the fraught society it is being introduced into and the consequences of that introduction. And even in that recognition, we can be excited for what this stuff might actually be useful for. But the discourse in general seems to always resolve into something indistinguishable from kids arguing that the PS3 is superior to the xbox. Isn't the "hacker" spirit one which itches to utilize and exploit? To be empowered and to be quick to kill your darlings? Why are we so quick to subordinate ourselves here? To appeal to ambiguous authorities? Is it all just some tacit futurism the AI fanboys have fallen in line with? Where has the confidence, the spirit, the sense of breezy mastery gone? There has got to still be interesting people around, those that are too cool for BigCompany Product.
- insanitybit 3y ago
  > Isn't the "hacker" spirit one which itches to utilize and exploit? To be empowered and to be quick to kill your darlings? Isn't that the answer? Someone is saying "entire technology, broadly, is bad" and a bunch of people who love technologies, who want to use this for all sorts of things, are going "what? no". Who's subordinating? If I were to agree with the article would I be subordinate to techcrunch? No one is "fanboying" we're on a highly technical website with practitioners who, more or less, have a better understanding of the technology than virtually everyone involved in writing this article. No one is even talking about BigCompany Product. A quick scan of the comments shows no mentions of meta or openai or chatgpt.
  - beepbooptheory 3y ago
    > Someone is saying "entire technology, broadly, is bad" and a bunch of people who love technologies, who want to use this for all sorts of things, are going "what? no". Exactly what I am trying to talk about, that is, this concern over big T Technology, rather than simply caring about one technology or another because of what they do or enable. These constant injections of vague existential stakes, when did this start happening? I am not quite that old, but I know it hasn't always been quite like this. Is it perhaps what we have landed on as an ideology to deal with economic insecurities in the tech world? Like the wider world is disillusioned with idea that one app or another can fix the world, and now stakeholders like us need to go all in on a more profound kind of technological determinism? Where Technology is a Pure Form that needs protection? Or is it maybe just a new generation? Younger people did not see the same kind of technological advancements older people have, so "technology " feels somehow more monolithic, self-same to them? And honestly, it is all more interesting than sad or annoying to me... And its not about AI in general, we saw the same kind of rhetoric with crypto stuff too. Its just a shift in the way are people are talking ultimately, and its very strange. In general I know you are right about this forum, but it has been harder and harder to sift through lately, but maybe thats just me.
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insanitybit 3y ago
I can run models locally on my laptop, so no, it isn't. I can even train it locally on my own data if I want to. Hyperbole really serves no purpose when it's so extreme. Instead of talking about the merits of "how can this technology be abused?" you're putting everyone else on the defensive, having to say "I'm not abusing it". Like, > AI is a way, I think, to entrench and expand the surveillance business model,” she said. “The Venn diagram is a circle.” No it isn't. If you want to say "facial recognition is a surveillance technology" OK. I find it deeply ironic that you then point out a use case where facial recognition is not used for surveillance and is actually protecting people (by blurring out faces) when you've just said that "The Venn diagram is a circle" but ok, at least the hyperbole is not so absurd if we limit it there. But then you just look like you're saying "AI" for headlines because yeah, we've been talking about facial recognition being surveillance technology for like 30 years or more... This article should have been reframed as something more like "The surveillance impacts of advanced AI techniques on Facial Recognition", to throw out a half assed attempt at a title/ rephrasing. The hyperbole should have been applied exclusively to surveillance applications, which is hardly polarizing by contrast, and the interesting bit would have been to hear about how AI factors in. Instead this was a puff piece with no real technical content, nothing interesting, and is practically a time piece from the early 2000s surveillance discussion with "AI" slapped onto the headline for clicks.
- sealeck 3y ago
  You can also turn your phone into a CCTV camera and yet a city where the state has 1 million surveillance cameras is qualitatively different to your homegrown back garden solution.
- olalonde 3y ago
  The term "surveillance business model" itself is a serious abuse of language. Surveillance is something done by states and police forces, usually to catch criminals or suppress dissent. People use it as a label for Google's business model simply because it has a negative connotation. It's a cheap tactic in my opinion.
  - yakireev 3y ago
lmpdev 3y ago
This thread is caught up in semantics, which is regrettable The thesis of the article should have been articulated "AI is disproportionately used as a surveillance technology owning to its computational requirements, the current state of industrial-user relations and the inability for legal systems to respond fast enough to protect individuals" Edit 1: I don't know how to make that more consise without losing the meat of the argument Edit 2: the emphasis should be directed to (yet again), industrial-user relations. We really need the equivalent to unions but for representating the rights of users. We're in an unchecked second guilded age and it's wreaking havoc on not just individuals but future businesses. These ill-gotten gains are going to devastate the tech sector, when it inevitably gets corrected in 5-x years
- coldtea 3y ago
  >and the inability for legal systems to respond fast enough to protect individuals Is it really inability when not doing so benefits you and your lobbying friends?
  - ToucanLoucan 3y ago
    I mean it's probably not helped by the fact that most regulators can't even change their phone's wallpaper without help from an intern. But also they are not even remotely scrambling to solve the problem either so, both? Both.
  - prewett 3y ago
    Cynicism isn't insight.
    - coldtea 3y ago
      Actually it is insight. Much closer to the facts on the ground than the opposite. It is a take informed by actual experience of reality, as opposed to boy-scout naivety.
- RHSman2 3y ago
  Did you apply semantics? I think so
Garlef 3y ago
I'm pretty happy using midjourney.
mark_l_watson 3y ago
I started following Meredith Whittaker on social media this year. I think she has very rational views on security and privacy. I have been making my living as an AI practitioner since 1982 but in the last few years I have flipped my interests more to technologies effects on society, privacy, etc. I wish everyone in tech would take a little time to read the books Privacy is Power and Surveillance Capitalism. Personally, I place some hope in open source, open LLMs, self hosting AI, etc. I say “some hope” because the surveillance industrial military complex has so many more resources than organizations like Hugging Face.
rqtwteye 3y ago
Most of the big data stuff is surveillance technology. The more data you collect the more you know about people.
- BizarroLand 3y ago
  The more you know about people, the more you can sell them what they want to buy, and make them WANT to buy what you're selling. We are ALL vulnerable to disinformation. We are ALL vulnerable to emotional manipulation. We are ALL targets for the complex. Our only saving grace is that we are not ALL worth monitoring directly. Most of us, by a wide majority, are barely even pixels on a screen somewhere. You can look at the ocean all you want but it's hard to pinpoint a single drop of water in it until it makes a splash. I would go so far as to say it has become an evil complex that one day our 7th great grandchildren will revile and lament for us having lived through it. Not because of any excessive torture but because of our being stuck in Tantalus's maw, so close to having everything we could want or need to have happy, jubilant lives and yet forever having it snatched out of reach by a relative handful of exceedingly greedy and selfish people.
laserbeam 3y ago
Well, true. AI as we know it today can only be made as a byproduct of surveillance and underpaid labor. And yes... It's pushed forward mostly by for profit companies which have surveillance as their core business model. But, I really wish the article said more than that. It's an overall bland read that doesn't say much else.
kajumix 3y ago
This may be true, but perhaps benign. Technology in general has made the world a smaller place. This is quite obvious in the context of travel across distances. But consider living in a small village where everyone knows everybody else, and also what is going on in the lives of other people in the village. This village is effectively a surveillance society but we don't frown upon it. AI makes it possible to do it on a global scale.
suckitsam 3y ago
“There’s no way to make these systems without human labor at the level of informing the ground truth of the data — reinforcement learning with human feedback, which again is just kind of tech-washing precarious human labor. It’s thousands and thousands of workers paid very little, though en masse it’s very expensive, and there’s no other way to create these systems, full stop,” she explained. I'm suddenly curious to see man-hour comparisons between these kinds of endeavors and, say, building the Great Pyramids.
aaroninsf 3y ago
This is remarkably inane. It's almost as if someone spent some time prompting ChatGPT to come up with a list of potential click-bait arguments to make to elevate one's personal brand.
rldjbpin 3y ago
with discussions such as this, and for other common AI fearmongering (e.g. work and education), the conclusion i always find is that machine learning is only making things "easier" or more accessible for thrid parties to do. in mad men days, advertizers would come up with own their rationale on what to show you in the screen from market surveys; person of interest may get followed throughout the day during investigation; what have you. the motivations of people haven't changed; the technology only made some things more feasible or easier to implement. in the end, just being cognizant of how internet companies farm our data in general should empower anyone enough to find their own middle ground. or you can wait for the technology to become mature enough for on-device solutions for your homework problem (similar to how Firefox is handling translation - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37658915 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37658915)

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ben_w 3y ago

Ironic opening line from a website whose full screen banner is desperately trying to convince me that the tracking cookies they don't strictly need are of any benefit to me. > Why is it that so many companies that rely on monetizing the data of their users seem to be extremely hot on AI?

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weikju 3y ago
The article is just relaying what someone said and not their own opinion, I guess, so they can get away with that
eimrine 3y ago
Just disable CSS, it solves GDPR problem and still let me see a text and pictures.

jdthedisciple 3y ago

Does anybody know of a facial recognition AI that actually classifies faces as (non)-liars as she claims? Not sure about this take. You need data at the end of the day, to build good AI models. These days it feels like anyone's public takes are more or less just a means to promote their own cause. And I say this as a happy and long-time Signal user.

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jazzyjackson 3y ago
AOL keyword "deception analysis" There's no science behind it but that never stopped someone from selling software to the police, high tech polygraphs are probably out there. Closest thing I've found in production is more "nervous person recognition" used at airports for triggering secondary screening: >> the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Science and Technology Directorate (S&T) seeks to improve DHS’s ability to quickly and objectively screen individuals for malintent. FAST combines cutting-edge behavioral and physiological science with deception detection theory and state-of-the-art sensor technologies. [0] I don't think her hot take is mere self-promotion, but rejection that building "good models" is necessary or helpful to average people, maybe there's some benefits but it increases the power of the state more than the individual (old debate in computing) [0] https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/Future%20Attribute%20Screening%20Technology-FAST.pdf https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/Future%...
mufasachan 3y ago
A simple research on Scholar with "facial recognition liars" leads to a few niche articles about the topic. So it seems that facial recognition for liars is a thing. After a quick look on the articles you can see those methods are very simple and they are not studied at the state of the arts level. It looks like much more an academic research field rather than an industrial field. So her claims are preventive alarmist. Although, I would say she is not the most informed person in surveillance task in AI. Another surveillance field in AI is the "person re-identification" task. It aims to determine if two pictures of a person from surveillance cameras depict the same person or not. This is my field of research and you have a tons of papers each year in big AI venues and also big company in the author (alibaba, tencent, mostly big chinese tech companies, I saw one paper with Google once on a related task). Also, I would like to highlight something. She said we need some people to annotate the datasets. For this surveillance task, actually, we have a bunch of methods that aims to less rely on human annotations : LUPerson and LUPerson-NL datasets and respective methods (CVPR 21 and 22) for example. Finally, I would like to conclude that I mostly agree with her. A bit of nuance would be to see the interaction with the nature of data and the surveillance capabilities. AI on camera data are obviously surveillance. When it comes more blur it's what "surveillance" is for "code taken from the internet to train Github copilot method"? Or what is the surveillance capability from database of digital arts? Those questions seem to be much more relevant and hard in regard of the use of data for surveillance. AI is just a name of a method that we use to process big data at scale in this context.

firtoz 3y ago

This is a bit too much of a stretch. It's like saying that newspapers are fundamentally a gossip technology.

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mdp2021 3y ago
Are you returning that judgement as a function of the submission title (which apparently rewrites between «gossip» and attention calling an original note, «AI is a way, I think, to entrench and expand the surveillance business model»), of Coldewey's summary of the interview, of the interview itself ( https://youtu.be/amNriUZNP8w https://youtu.be/amNriUZNP8w ), of the paper that is the occasion for the interview (it must be Open (For Business): Big Tech, Concentrated Power, and the Political Economy of Open AI - https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4543807 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4543807 )...? Whittaker's point is about a certain cone of issues. Her position was previously exposed at least at https://slate.com/technology/2023/05/meredith-whittaker-interview-geoffrey-hinton-ai-threats.html https://slate.com/technology/2023/05/meredith-whittaker-inte...
- firtoz 3y ago
  It's mainly about the title and the article on Techcrunch. The interview and the other links you provided are more reasonable and less click-baity.

happytiger 3y ago

This isn’t novel. So is the Internet itself. How do we protect against the downsides? Do we need a privacy bill of rights? I say yes.

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flagrant_taco 3y ago
The modern internet is easily used for surveillance, the early versions wouldn't have been very useful for surveillance though. We could pretty easily strip most of the risks out if we cared to, though we'd lose functionality along with it and more importantly it wouldn't be the massive revenue driver it is today.

nathias 3y ago

this is a bad argument, it could be applied equally to all communication technology

krapp 3y ago
It does. All communication technology is surveillance technology.
- nonrandomstring 3y ago
  I'm just reading a rather well written PhD thesis that disputes this [0] Certainly, any badly designed communication system is incidentally a surveillance device. And there are many examples stretching back to the 1940s. However, a properly designed communication system is inherently a counter-surveillance system. It just took us 80 years to figure out that important functional requirement. [1] https://research.tue.nl/files/197416841/20220325_Appelbaum_hf.pdf https://research.tue.nl/files/197416841/20220325_Appelbaum_h...
- falcor84 3y ago
  Not by definition. For example, radio broadcast isn't.
  - krapp 3y ago
    Definitions don't matter. The device I carry in my pocket is "defined" as a "smartphone" despite being a computer that just happens to have an app that simulates an archaic device called a "telephone" installed on it. It also provides convenient access for law enforcement to monitor all of my social media accounts and communications and metadata and scan my storage for contraband. Preferably with a warrant but of course probably with any number of backdoors installed by design. We all know at this point that warrants don't matter either. Radio broadcast can certainly be used for surveillance, in that at the very least the location of the broadcast signal can be triangulated and monitored. Which is how law enforcement can also use the "smartphone" in my pocket to track my location in realtime. Even when it's turned off. Because the definition of the "off" button doesn't matter, either. It isn't an "off button" it's a button that runs an app that simulates "turning the phone off," but might just put it into a low power state or who knows? Your computer spies on you. The web spies on you. Your appliances spy on you. Your car spies on you. Your lightbulbs spy on you. The locks on your front door spy on you. Unless you're primitive enough not to use modern "smart" technology (which isn't defined as surveillance technology but which always seems to be in the news because it gets used or abused as exactly that.) Everything, everywhere, spies on you all the time. And if it doesn't, wait a few years, someone will find a way to make sure that it does. But none of it will be surveillance "by definition." Convenience, customer obsession, safety, the definitions will be plentiful but none of them will matter.

guardian5x 3y ago

AI can be used as a surveillance technology. But it isn't fundamentally one, there are many other applications.

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weikju 3y ago
Pretty sure the article is about what passes for AI these days and not AI in general

nuc1e0n 3y ago

The current wave of AI seems more like an investment scam to me. Like crypto currencies and NFTs were.

entropi 3y ago
I also agree that it is a bubble, but I feel like it is more of a "dotcom" type of bubble rather than crypto/NFT type of bubble, if it makes any sense.
- DebtDeflation 3y ago
  It makes sense. Investor hopes and the resultant valuations have gotten way ahead of the actual state of the market, but the underlying AI tech is real and useful and being applied everywhere. Crypto/NFT was never anything more than a blatant scam.
- _ugfj 3y ago
  However, the dangers here are immense. There was https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xoVJKj8lcNQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xoVJKj8lcNQ where they argued for 2028 being an AI election where the person with most computing power wins. Propaganda produced by humans on small scale killed 300 000 people in the US alone in this pandemic https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2022/05/13/1098071284/this-is-how-many-lives-could-have-been-saved-with-covid-vaccinations-in-each-sta https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2022/05/13/1098071... imagine the next pandemic when it'll be produced on an industrial scale by LLMs. Literally millions will die of it. This bubble must be extinguished by all force US regulators possess. There's not much time left, it must banned with prejudice.
Mistletoe 3y ago
https://www.institutionalinvestor.com/article/2c4fad0w6irk838pca3gg/portfolio/money-is-pouring-into-ai-skeptics-say-its-a-grift-shift https://www.institutionalinvestor.com/article/2c4fad0w6irk83... I agree and it is the current last hope investors are putting their dreams in for the overvalued stock market to keep going up. “But what if AI changes everything?” I don’t really see their point of view and I would love to see how AI would usher in this new era of value being created if anyone wants to share. Wouldn’t it more be used to lay off millions of people and information workers that can be replaced by AI, that now can’t buy things?

mdp2021 3y ago

The submitted summary of the video-recorded interview at TechCrunch Disrupt are occasioned by the article Open (For Business): Big Tech, Concentrated Power, and the Political Economy of Open AI - https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4543807 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4543807 I suggest to read (at least) the abstract (too long to be copied here) to get some more proper idea of the debated area.

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nologic01 3y ago

> [AI] requires the surveillance business model I think this is putting the horse before the cart. There is no doubt that the surveillance business model has captured tech. But "AI" - which to me is just the shortest possible way to say "algorithmic processing of digital information" - is just one more category of tools exploited to buttress and expand the dominance of said business model. It just happens that while other innovations (blockchain, quantum computing etc) are not immediately (or ever) usable, AI tools are practical and deployable here and now. To better understand my point imagine the polar opposite system: a digital universe that fully respects our various professed humanistic values and uses technology only to empower individuals, bind society together etc. We would still need large scale algorithmic support if we are to manage interfacing our biologically defined brain bandwidth with the vast and growing silicon exo-brain. In other words, lets us not concede that surveillance capitalism owns every possible future of tech.

qp11 3y ago
Scale requires Purpose. When there is no Purpose, or no Purpose that Everyone accepts, and yet things are mindlessly scaled up, the scaler makes enemies. And its all pure chaos what happens next.
- nonrandomstring 3y ago
  Ubiquity is the materialised love-child of two other monsters, omnipotence and omniscience. Whereas we recognise the pathological parents for what they are, we still think ubiquity is adorable.
api 3y ago
> lets us not concede that surveillance capitalism owns every possible future of tech. It does as long as it's the only way to finance tech, which seems to be the case.
- nologic01 3y ago
  why is that such a popular opinion. Tech has been financed for decades by individuals, corporates and public sector actors. Even today a large fraction is financed by "healthy" tech services demand. One of the many dramatic flaws of surveillance capitalism is that it cannot really provide the entire tech stack society needs. It thrives as a parasitic model, predicated on political dysfunction and public ignorance. Society must finance the bulk of the infrastructure and then hand over the keys to the digital kingdom as it were. What is undeniable is that surveillance is the most lucrative mode. This is not surprising: borderline legal / morally dubious activities are always the most profitable.

jorlow 3y ago

AI (or probably more accurately, ML) is an efficiency technology. Surveillance is one thing it can make more efficient, sure.

johnnyworker 3y ago
It's the thing it does make more efficient, which was predictable. And accuracy doesn't matter. If it's 99% and the powerful are whitelisted for human review, that's enough. That's enough to pull a mesh so fine over every human being on the planet, forever, that reaches deeply into them before they can even begin to form a personality. The jump from individuals listening to individual phone calls as they were happening to what became possible in the decades after that might be smaller than the jump from that to the capability of transcribing anything anyone utters, even in their sleep, automatically, and adding it to a giant corpus of data to fish for suspects or assets or blackmail recipients in, in seconds. With then being able to act on those people as if they were a dataset (set a few flags, which systems or humans downstream heed without question, done). It's a very grave threat, and I find it interesting that people decades ago who wrote about it called it that, but now that we're in it, we find it very easy to just shrug it off. But it's the same lethal threat to what it means to be human. Privacy is required for thought, without thought there's no humanity worth mentioning, QED.
- pradn 3y ago
  Imagine an adversary country surveilling all the youth of another, or even just at elite schools, and being able to use that as blackmail as they age into the leadership class. Or maybe we just won’t care any more. We’ve recently had a US president accused of all sorts of unsavory things, but who still retains a massive following, even among Evangelicals. What possible revelation could bring him down?
  - johnnyworker 3y ago
    I think it really depends on the person. If you're Assange, it doesn't matter if you did it. It's easier if you did it, but it doesn't have priority. For your in-group (be that cult followers or large power structures), you can get away with pretty much anything. Which I think makes it even harder to get people to understand how shit this timeline is, because everybody is dreaming about what it could do for them, not to them. And the people who have reason to believe to never be at the wrong end of these sticks, have no idea how it deforms them, either. Humanity has proven its skill at dehumanizing humans in all sorts of ways, with all sorts of rhetorical and technological means, so yeah, sure, "AI" (which in practicality means "surveil everyone and get them to like/do what you want them to like and do", the rest are gimmicks and chaff) is "nothing new", but it's still like humans going from "always having had weapons" to "fucking nukes".

imgabe 3y ago

I think people do a disservice to their cause when they make semantic arguments like this. Isn't enough to say that AI can be used for enhanced surveillance by malicious actors? What does it mean to be a "surveillance technology"? Now you have people arguing about whether AI fits the definition of this made up term instead of talking about the potentially nefarious surveillance applications.

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DrScientist 3y ago
I think she is pointing out there is a bit of a vicious cycle. AI needs data [1], so in the end people compete on the data - this drives more and more surveillance type behaviour - including using AI to collect data [2]. [1] not controversial I hope [2] eg face recognition, identification by joining the dots from traded data. It's not necessarily nefarious per se - just the dynamic - and once the data is out there....
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londondev45 3y ago

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throwaway914 3y ago
"Brian Heater is the Hardware Editor at TechCrunch. He worked for a number of leading tech publications, including Engadget, PCMag, Laptop, and Tech Times, where he served as the Managing Editor. His writing has appeared in Spin, Wired, Playboy, Entertainment Weekly, The Onion, Boing Boing, Publishers Weekly, The Daily Beast and various other publications. He hosts the weekly Boing Boing interview podcast RiYL, has appeared as a regular NPR contributor and shares his Queens apartment with a rabbit named Lucy." ? This site isn't my first choice for news, but I'm not sure how any of that dismisses from the points made in the article. Maybe someday we'll care about consumer protection laws and starve the growing industry around AI for training data.

rvz 3y ago

No shit. As already said years ago. [0] Closed source software is surveillance technology. Internet of Things is surveillance technology. Blockchain / crypto is surveillance technology. Virtual Reality is surveillance technology. AI is surveillance technology. Very disappointed that it took you guys this long to realize that, but it is too late to stop all of it entirely. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31617042 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31617042

moritonal 3y ago
I guess the most generic is that "Convince is a surveillance technology"? Passing the buck to someone else will always have surveillance effects.
npteljes 3y ago
Not really though. Cloud, for example, is more closely tied to surveillance than the examples you provided.
wrsh07 3y ago
I'm not saying it's contradictory to say closed source is surveillance tech and open source is surveillance tech, but it's certainly unintuitive. For my part, it feels like some tech is designed for specific use cases (eg pinboard, kagi). If you trust those developers they don't need to open source their work. If you look at it from a systems perspective, ad tech benefits from scale and data, so when a product is built "for everyone" and monetized with ads.... Yeah it's going to be surveillance tech

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npteljes 3y ago

Bad premise, and therefore nonsense conclusions, because AI can have many uses, aside from surveillance. In this regard, it's not like a gun, which is very specifically an instrument to kill, and has secondary uses like shooting sports, but rather it's a tool, like tongs, which can be used for building, cooking, and also to torture someone. Advertising companies are jumping at AI for two things: it is hoped that it can give them an edge, and second, because they already have data, which is in fact fundamental for AI.

andai 3y ago
In many countries guns are used in a nonlethal way. My friend during psychosis stabbed a policeman in the leg with a kitchen knife, and was only shot in the leg as a response.
- swader999 3y ago
  I don't think any country has a police force with a shoot to wound policy. Your friend was extremely lucky. It's not practical to shoot to wound in most circumstances. The arms and legs move faster than a shooter can react and that's why center of mass is what is trained.
  - einr 3y ago
    Sweden does. (I know because I live in Sweden.) https://polisen.se/om-polisen/polisens-arbete/polisens-befogenheter/polisens-ratt-att-anvanda-skjutvapen/ https://polisen.se/om-polisen/polisens-arbete/polisens-befog... Relevant part: "Om polisen skjuter mot en person ska de sträva efter att bara för tillfället oskadliggöra personen. Skotten ska i första hand riktas mot benen, men om omständigheterna kräver det får polisen skjuta direkt mot överkroppen – till exempel om den hotfulla personen befinner sig nära i avstånd och angreppet går fort." Google translation: "If the police shoot at a person, they must aim to render the person harmless only for the time being. The shots must primarily be aimed at the legs, but if the circumstances require it, the police may shoot directly at the upper body - for example, if the threatening person is close in distance and the attack is fast." EDIT: some data from https://polisen.se/om-polisen/polisens-arbete/polisens-befogenheter/hur-ofta-anvander-polisen-skjutvapen/ https://polisen.se/om-polisen/polisens-arbete/polisens-befog... -- out of 1.13 million police interventions in 2022, shots were fired at a person or vehicle 21 times. Out of those, 2 had lethal outcomes.

Maro 3y ago

Occam's razor: the most profitable business model for Internet companies with very DAUs and Timespent/DAUs in the last 20 years was showing advertisements. Those very profitable companies are always working on cutting edge stuff, whether it's distributed systems, database research, datacenters, mobile hardware and software, or, as it is today, the various tools and methods grouped under the umbrella term AI.

nine_k 3y ago

Science and technology are fundamentally about overcoming limitations and enabling previously impossible things. The process is ethically neutral, or oblivious if you will. Once you discover nitration, it will be used to produce both hunger-reducing fertilizers and devastating explosives. One cannot be discovered without the other, because they often involve the same chemical compounds. If you used said limitations to protect something you value, you have to start looking for a better protection. It's a constant process of adaptation. It cannot and should not be stopped. Instead we should be looking for ways to adapt, preferably ahead of time. Restrictions work to a rather small extent. Be fully aware that a new scientific or engineering breakthrough will have all the potential to result in more deadly weapons, invasion of your privacy, undermining democracy, exacerbating inequality, putting you personally out of job, and disrupting whatever else you hold dear. It's always high time to think about factors which would eliminate or at least limit such consequences, and these must be positive factors, things people do willingly and profitably, not bans. It's time to think not how to ban the privacy-invading AI (it will never work), but how to have a smaller footprint that may be used to invade your privacy, and, most importantly, how to run things in such.a way that invading your privacy is not profitable, even though still possible. And, inevitably, learn to live with even less privacy by default.

pjmorris 3y ago
> The process is ethically neutral, or oblivious if you will. I like 'oblivious' here, as it seems to me a matter of chance about who will achieve a breakthrough. It does seem to me that once a breakthrough is achieved by someone it will be used to enhance their power over others (counterexamples welcome!) To my mind, this power calls into doubt its ethical neutrality. Yes, it is the people in possession who are making the ethical choices... but they are ethical choices enabled by the technology.
bamboozled 3y ago
You've left out the "unintended consequences" bit? Soil degradation at scale from fertilizer use? Ocean run off? It's time to think not how to ban the privacy-invading AI (it will never work), but how to have a smaller footprint that may be used to invade your privacy, and, most importantly, how to run things in such.a way that invading your privacy is not profitable, even though still possible. And, inevitably, learn to live with even less privacy by default. When 50%+ of the cars driving around your city are Google / Waymo cars which are essentially intelligence gathering tanks with unparalleled surveillance capability, I don't see how anyone is going to be reducing any footprints ? Cashless society? Home assistant robots that "phone home"? Face it, this is not going to be getting better anytime soon. We can try adapt all we like but maybe we should just be walking around with EMP emitting back packs on if we care about our privacy?

madsbuch 3y ago

That is fundamentally wrong: I am currently setting up my workbench for federated learning to get more intimate with that field.

AndrewThrowaway 3y ago

Out of topic question. Would it be possible to combine machine learning with something like 23andMe and match 100 000 person photos with their DNA. Would we have an AI model which basically can tell how the persons looks like from a strand of hair? Imagine finding some DNA on a crime scene. Witnesses can say that this person was a bit overweight so you slide some slider to the right a bit and get a pretty good AI generated portrait of a criminal. How cool and scary that would be.

lionkor 3y ago
And oh so biased
- memefrog 3y ago
  [dead]
largbae 3y ago
I think it's fundamentally possible but the training set needed might be so large that you're better off just actually cataloging the DNA of most humans and pulling up the picture of the closest match.
Gelomodns 3y ago
There are already features you can extract from DNA. 23andMe shows you your traits and confidence level depending on the research. But you know just bring it to the real thing: With DNA, Video and ML you will be able to track and find that person through face recognition and probability automatically. Hail skynet
bookofjoe 3y ago
>Recent advances in Forensic DNA Phenotyping of appearance, ancestry and age [July 2023] https://www.fsigenetics.com/article/S1872-4973(23)00045-5/fulltext https://www.fsigenetics.com/article/S1872-4973(23)00045-5/fu... ........................ >DNA Facial Mapping https://www.policechiefmagazine.org/dna-facial-mapping/ https://www.policechiefmagazine.org/dna-facial-mapping/ ........................ >How Australian police will use DNA sequencing to predict what suspects look like [2021] https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2021/dec/08/how-australian-police-will-use-dna-sequencing-to-predict-what-suspects-look-like https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2021/dec/08/how-a... ........................ >The Role of Hair in DNA Testing https://www.hairphysician.com/the-role-of-hair-in-dna/ https://www.hairphysician.com/the-role-of-hair-in-dna/

iandanforth 3y ago

This has no more validity than "the internet is fundamentally a surveillance technology." It's a conflation of a tool's sometimes harmful usage with an inseparable aspect of its nature. And the idea that AI "requires the surveillance business model" is demonstrably false. Thousands of researchers over the last 7 decades have contributed to the development of the collection of technologies we call AI without that business model. However this is Meredith Whittaker so we can assume she knows that. So yeah, those are provocative statements made for rhetorical effect to emphasize that power will use technology to do bad things and enshrine and enhance its power.

ToucanLoucan 3y ago
> This has no more validity than "the internet is fundamentally a surveillance technology." It's a conflation of a tool's sometimes harmful usage with an inseparable aspect of its nature. I mean at some point the conflation itself is rather fair game, given that such massive swaths of the modern Internet apply it directly. The most predominant search engine sells ads. The most predominant social media sites, all of them, run on paid placement of content (ads). In fact, every social media site with even a little traffic besides perhaps Mastodon does (I honestly don't know I've never used it). Twitter/X is trying to get off advertising as it's revenue source and because of that is worth a 10th of what it was when Elon bought it less than a year ago. Amazon you could make an argument isn't based on ads (entirely) but it's also the largest retail website in the history of man and that's probably the only reason, and also, it's largest cash cow at the moment is AWS which is absolutely shoulders deep in ads, ad services, serving ads, and ad targeting. Podcasts? Ads. Listicles? Ads. Substacks? Ads. Need a driver file to make an ancient videogame work? You'll find a website that hosts it, alongside some ads. Wanna download some ROMs for SNES games you definitely own? Ads. Pirating some pornography with surprisingly good production value that's riffing on Pirates of the Caribbean? Sounds fun, also, the website you get the torrent link from has ads. And like, you can get into the semantics of there's no other way to fund a website, they didn't all choose it, some don't use surveillance to serve their ads, and all the rest, and to that I say, you have much more trust in corporations than I do. Salesforce would sell my grandmother into sex slavery if they could make $5 doing so so you'll have to forgive me if I just don't necessarily trust the internet ad machine when it says pinky promise we aren't exploiting your data, especially since every time they have a data leak incident, oops, there's all my data again. Aw shucks aw geez. User data is practically the only currency on the internet anymore, and user attention in turn is the only resource being mined by social media. Of course it's for advertising. What else would it be for? What else could it be for? > However this is Meredith Whittaker so we can assume she knows that. So yeah, those are provocative statements made for rhetorical effect to emphasize that power will use technology to do bad things and enshrine and enhance its power. I mean that seems like something worth emphasizing? Ad tech has had a massive influence over the modern internet space, which is why it's so fucking bad. Basically every terrible decision you lament on a daily basis, every dark pattern, every annoying thing, can in some way or another be traced to ad tech. All that shit about when you talk about needing a new hose near your phone and suddenly you have ads for hoses, that's ad tech. The entire pivot to video fiasco! Facebook wanted to stream video and bullshitted publishers and media orgs with cooked numbers that it was "what people wanted" even though demonstrably no they fucking did not, do not, and never will want that, it's what ad tech wanted and therefore it was sacrosanct, right up until it killed literally hundreds if not thousands of websites. Except even that wasn't enough, because ad tech still wants it, and so we have video platforms left and right because these companies do not work for us, they work for advertisers. Like no it isn't everything, no single entity could be that bad. I'm just saying if all of ad tech was Thanos-snapped out of existence tomorrow, the Internet would be incredibly different, better in a lot of ways, so I feel the conflation is fair game.

beepbooptheory 3y ago

What is it, in general, that makes people feel so motivated to defend AI? Every commenter can't be the CEO of some AI adjacent company.. Beyond that, why care so much? You can still use it even if its imperfect, you can even still use it while recognizing the fraught society it is being introduced into and the consequences of that introduction. And even in that recognition, we can be excited for what this stuff might actually be useful for. But the discourse in general seems to always resolve into something indistinguishable from kids arguing that the PS3 is superior to the xbox. Isn't the "hacker" spirit one which itches to utilize and exploit? To be empowered and to be quick to kill your darlings? Why are we so quick to subordinate ourselves here? To appeal to ambiguous authorities? Is it all just some tacit futurism the AI fanboys have fallen in line with? Where has the confidence, the spirit, the sense of breezy mastery gone? There has got to still be interesting people around, those that are too cool for BigCompany Product.

insanitybit 3y ago
> Isn't the "hacker" spirit one which itches to utilize and exploit? To be empowered and to be quick to kill your darlings? Isn't that the answer? Someone is saying "entire technology, broadly, is bad" and a bunch of people who love technologies, who want to use this for all sorts of things, are going "what? no". Who's subordinating? If I were to agree with the article would I be subordinate to techcrunch? No one is "fanboying" we're on a highly technical website with practitioners who, more or less, have a better understanding of the technology than virtually everyone involved in writing this article. No one is even talking about BigCompany Product. A quick scan of the comments shows no mentions of meta or openai or chatgpt.
- beepbooptheory 3y ago
  > Someone is saying "entire technology, broadly, is bad" and a bunch of people who love technologies, who want to use this for all sorts of things, are going "what? no". Exactly what I am trying to talk about, that is, this concern over big T Technology, rather than simply caring about one technology or another because of what they do or enable. These constant injections of vague existential stakes, when did this start happening? I am not quite that old, but I know it hasn't always been quite like this. Is it perhaps what we have landed on as an ideology to deal with economic insecurities in the tech world? Like the wider world is disillusioned with idea that one app or another can fix the world, and now stakeholders like us need to go all in on a more profound kind of technological determinism? Where Technology is a Pure Form that needs protection? Or is it maybe just a new generation? Younger people did not see the same kind of technological advancements older people have, so "technology " feels somehow more monolithic, self-same to them? And honestly, it is all more interesting than sad or annoying to me... And its not about AI in general, we saw the same kind of rhetoric with crypto stuff too. Its just a shift in the way are people are talking ultimately, and its very strange. In general I know you are right about this forum, but it has been harder and harder to sift through lately, but maybe thats just me.

deleted 3y ago

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insanitybit 3y ago

I can run models locally on my laptop, so no, it isn't. I can even train it locally on my own data if I want to. Hyperbole really serves no purpose when it's so extreme. Instead of talking about the merits of "how can this technology be abused?" you're putting everyone else on the defensive, having to say "I'm not abusing it". Like, > AI is a way, I think, to entrench and expand the surveillance business model,” she said. “The Venn diagram is a circle.” No it isn't. If you want to say "facial recognition is a surveillance technology" OK. I find it deeply ironic that you then point out a use case where facial recognition is not used for surveillance and is actually protecting people (by blurring out faces) when you've just said that "The Venn diagram is a circle" but ok, at least the hyperbole is not so absurd if we limit it there. But then you just look like you're saying "AI" for headlines because yeah, we've been talking about facial recognition being surveillance technology for like 30 years or more... This article should have been reframed as something more like "The surveillance impacts of advanced AI techniques on Facial Recognition", to throw out a half assed attempt at a title/ rephrasing. The hyperbole should have been applied exclusively to surveillance applications, which is hardly polarizing by contrast, and the interesting bit would have been to hear about how AI factors in. Instead this was a puff piece with no real technical content, nothing interesting, and is practically a time piece from the early 2000s surveillance discussion with "AI" slapped onto the headline for clicks.

sealeck 3y ago
You can also turn your phone into a CCTV camera and yet a city where the state has 1 million surveillance cameras is qualitatively different to your homegrown back garden solution.
olalonde 3y ago
The term "surveillance business model" itself is a serious abuse of language. Surveillance is something done by states and police forces, usually to catch criminals or suppress dissent. People use it as a label for Google's business model simply because it has a negative connotation. It's a cheap tactic in my opinion.
- yakireev 3y ago

lmpdev 3y ago

This thread is caught up in semantics, which is regrettable The thesis of the article should have been articulated "AI is disproportionately used as a surveillance technology owning to its computational requirements, the current state of industrial-user relations and the inability for legal systems to respond fast enough to protect individuals" Edit 1: I don't know how to make that more consise without losing the meat of the argument Edit 2: the emphasis should be directed to (yet again), industrial-user relations. We really need the equivalent to unions but for representating the rights of users. We're in an unchecked second guilded age and it's wreaking havoc on not just individuals but future businesses. These ill-gotten gains are going to devastate the tech sector, when it inevitably gets corrected in 5-x years

coldtea 3y ago
>and the inability for legal systems to respond fast enough to protect individuals Is it really inability when not doing so benefits you and your lobbying friends?
- ToucanLoucan 3y ago
  I mean it's probably not helped by the fact that most regulators can't even change their phone's wallpaper without help from an intern. But also they are not even remotely scrambling to solve the problem either so, both? Both.
- prewett 3y ago
  Cynicism isn't insight.
  - coldtea 3y ago
    Actually it is insight. Much closer to the facts on the ground than the opposite. It is a take informed by actual experience of reality, as opposed to boy-scout naivety.
RHSman2 3y ago
Did you apply semantics? I think so

Garlef 3y ago

I'm pretty happy using midjourney.

mark_l_watson 3y ago

I started following Meredith Whittaker on social media this year. I think she has very rational views on security and privacy. I have been making my living as an AI practitioner since 1982 but in the last few years I have flipped my interests more to technologies effects on society, privacy, etc. I wish everyone in tech would take a little time to read the books Privacy is Power and Surveillance Capitalism. Personally, I place some hope in open source, open LLMs, self hosting AI, etc. I say “some hope” because the surveillance industrial military complex has so many more resources than organizations like Hugging Face.

rqtwteye 3y ago

Most of the big data stuff is surveillance technology. The more data you collect the more you know about people.

BizarroLand 3y ago
The more you know about people, the more you can sell them what they want to buy, and make them WANT to buy what you're selling. We are ALL vulnerable to disinformation. We are ALL vulnerable to emotional manipulation. We are ALL targets for the complex. Our only saving grace is that we are not ALL worth monitoring directly. Most of us, by a wide majority, are barely even pixels on a screen somewhere. You can look at the ocean all you want but it's hard to pinpoint a single drop of water in it until it makes a splash. I would go so far as to say it has become an evil complex that one day our 7th great grandchildren will revile and lament for us having lived through it. Not because of any excessive torture but because of our being stuck in Tantalus's maw, so close to having everything we could want or need to have happy, jubilant lives and yet forever having it snatched out of reach by a relative handful of exceedingly greedy and selfish people.

laserbeam 3y ago

Well, true. AI as we know it today can only be made as a byproduct of surveillance and underpaid labor. And yes... It's pushed forward mostly by for profit companies which have surveillance as their core business model. But, I really wish the article said more than that. It's an overall bland read that doesn't say much else.

kajumix 3y ago

This may be true, but perhaps benign. Technology in general has made the world a smaller place. This is quite obvious in the context of travel across distances. But consider living in a small village where everyone knows everybody else, and also what is going on in the lives of other people in the village. This village is effectively a surveillance society but we don't frown upon it. AI makes it possible to do it on a global scale.

suckitsam 3y ago

“There’s no way to make these systems without human labor at the level of informing the ground truth of the data — reinforcement learning with human feedback, which again is just kind of tech-washing precarious human labor. It’s thousands and thousands of workers paid very little, though en masse it’s very expensive, and there’s no other way to create these systems, full stop,” she explained. I'm suddenly curious to see man-hour comparisons between these kinds of endeavors and, say, building the Great Pyramids.

aaroninsf 3y ago

This is remarkably inane. It's almost as if someone spent some time prompting ChatGPT to come up with a list of potential click-bait arguments to make to elevate one's personal brand.

rldjbpin 3y ago

with discussions such as this, and for other common AI fearmongering (e.g. work and education), the conclusion i always find is that machine learning is only making things "easier" or more accessible for thrid parties to do. in mad men days, advertizers would come up with own their rationale on what to show you in the screen from market surveys; person of interest may get followed throughout the day during investigation; what have you. the motivations of people haven't changed; the technology only made some things more feasible or easier to implement. in the end, just being cognizant of how internet companies farm our data in general should empower anyone enough to find their own middle ground. or you can wait for the technology to become mature enough for on-device solutions for your homework problem (similar to how Firefox is handling translation - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37658915 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37658915)