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Automating this in bulk enables societal harms considerably more dangerous than anyone could have reasonably foreseen prior to 2020. If it was discovered that

Automating this in bulk enables societal harms considerably more dangerous than anyone could have reasonably foreseen prior to 2020. If it was discovered that someone had been operating a secret network of CCTV cameras pointed at every street corner on Earth for the last 20 years, would you say "well, you had no reasonable expectation of privacy anyway"?

nl 3y ago
I'm sympathetic to the "doing things in bulk is different to doing it as a once off". But in this case the harm isn't obvious to me. (Also, why 2020? I could understand if you'd said 2016 with Cambridge Analytica but 2020 isn't clear to me).
- SheinhardtWigCo 3y ago
  Cambridge Analytica collected structured data: friend networks, likes, and interests. At that time, it wasn't plausible to obtain equally powerful insights from unstructured data. That only became a realistic scenario when GPT-3 came out, in 2020.
  - nl 3y ago
    Oh. I assure you plenty of companies were doing NLP based classification in this field much earlier than that. AdSense for example was doing it on pages, and of course Google search strings were a similar example.
hackernewds 3y ago
I don't think your camera analogy is equivalent. It's moreso like actors were filmed with the full knowledge they were, except now the studios are going to make creating deep fakes movies of them available not only to themselves, but to everyone
userbinator 3y ago
If it was discovered that someone had been operating a secret network of CCTV cameras pointed at every street corner on Earth for the last 20 years, would you say "well, you had no reasonable expectation of privacy anyway"? If it really was every, then likely yes. No doubt there would be some interesting footage of important public figures in there too. Not that I'm advocating against privacy in general, but when "I know what you did" is no longer asymmetrical, as in "I know what you did too", it'll certainly change how society thinks about these things.
- pixl97 3y ago
  Eh, probably not in any way that is good. Tyranny of the moral majority is a very common problem in societies with low privacy. While everybody may have their own set of oddities, some will be more harshly judged than others. For example just about every religious society will have very strong opinions and actions against homosexuality, they will say they have the same actions against adultery, but it's unlikely to play out near as severe.
JCharante 3y ago
I honestly wouldn’t mind. It’s the street corner. Although I’d rather they have coordinated with governments to give the police access to the cameras

nl 3y ago

I'm sympathetic to the "doing things in bulk is different to doing it as a once off". But in this case the harm isn't obvious to me. (Also, why 2020? I could understand if you'd said 2016 with Cambridge Analytica but 2020 isn't clear to me).

SheinhardtWigCo 3y ago
Cambridge Analytica collected structured data: friend networks, likes, and interests. At that time, it wasn't plausible to obtain equally powerful insights from unstructured data. That only became a realistic scenario when GPT-3 came out, in 2020.
- nl 3y ago
  Oh. I assure you plenty of companies were doing NLP based classification in this field much earlier than that. AdSense for example was doing it on pages, and of course Google search strings were a similar example.

hackernewds 3y ago

I don't think your camera analogy is equivalent. It's moreso like actors were filmed with the full knowledge they were, except now the studios are going to make creating deep fakes movies of them available not only to themselves, but to everyone

userbinator 3y ago

If it was discovered that someone had been operating a secret network of CCTV cameras pointed at every street corner on Earth for the last 20 years, would you say "well, you had no reasonable expectation of privacy anyway"? If it really was every, then likely yes. No doubt there would be some interesting footage of important public figures in there too. Not that I'm advocating against privacy in general, but when "I know what you did" is no longer asymmetrical, as in "I know what you did too", it'll certainly change how society thinks about these things.

pixl97 3y ago
Eh, probably not in any way that is good. Tyranny of the moral majority is a very common problem in societies with low privacy. While everybody may have their own set of oddities, some will be more harshly judged than others. For example just about every religious society will have very strong opinions and actions against homosexuality, they will say they have the same actions against adultery, but it's unlikely to play out near as severe.

JCharante 3y ago

I honestly wouldn’t mind. It’s the street corner. Although I’d rather they have coordinated with governments to give the police access to the cameras