5 ms·

What kind of safeguards are we imagining the bulldozer should have? Should we attach an AI camera to the engine to prevent bulldozing the wrong things?

kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 2y ago
More regulation, of course. It's worked so well for guns, after all. Because making more laws prevents people who disregard laws from breaking other laws. Really, we should just cut to the chase and outlaw murder.
- awesome_dude 2y ago
  It has worked for guns - the countries where guns are a problem either have very lax regulation, or very lax enforcement (because of a breakdown of government)
  - coffeecantcode 2y ago
    Well, there are also countries like Switzerland where there is a substantially higher amount of gun ownership compared to that of the rest of Europe but very few of the same issues of other countries with similar ownership per capita. Though, that’s probably due to the required service training and the screenings that come along with it. And it being a relatively small country.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - azernik 2y ago
      So... not lax regulation
      - coffeecantcode 2y ago
        Lax is relative.
    - fc417fc802 2y ago
      There are areas of similarly low crime in the US, depending on how you go about drawing lines on your map. Probably it is a mistake to treat any country as a single unit in such an analysis.
      - coffeecantcode 2y ago
        Fair
  - fc417fc802 2y ago
    I think there are several serious issues with such a claim. However I'll limit myself to pointing out that at absolute minimum you'd need to define "problem" and "working". For example, I'd observe that organized crime pretty much everywhere in the world possesses weapons. The extent to which they resort to them varies of course, but it seems unreasonable to blindly dismiss that as being due entirely to regulation.
    - awesome_dude 2y ago
      You're right defining problem and working is tricky Here is a very coarse overview of what I would term "problem". It's the list of countries by firearm related homicide rates https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_firearm-related_homicide_rates https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_firearm-r... Sorting the second table (Homicide rates by firearm per 100,000 inhabitants. Latest available year.) by rate is rather eye-opening. The USA is four times as high as Canada - and almost forty times as high as Australia Jamaica * 44.706 2022 Saint Lucia * 30.580 2022 Honduras * 28.721 2021 Bahamas 28.538 2022 Saint Kitts and Nevis * 25.207 2021 Ecuador * 22.565 2022 Belize * 22.454 2022 Trinidad and Tobago * 20.551 2020 Saint Vincent and the Grenadines 20.128 2021 Puerto Rico * 18.382 2016 Colombia * 18.127 2022 Mexico * 17.497 2022 Brazil * 15.945 2020 Barbados 11.717 2022 Panama * 10.227 2021 Antigua and Barbuda * 8.532 2022 Costa Rica * 8.304 2021 Uruguay 6.807 2022 Dominican Republic * 6.724 2022 Paraguay * 4.803 2021 El Salvador * 4.782 2022 Bermuda 4.674 2021 United States * 4.054 2020 Chile * 3.637 2022 Guatemala * 3.436 2021 Suriname * 3.398 2022 Guyana * 2.983 2021 Peru * 2.937 2020 Argentina * 2.305 2022 Egypt * 2.062 2011 Nicaragua 2.000 2021
- CoastalCoder 2y ago
  I have mixed feelings about outlawing concealed bulldozers.
dullcrisp 2y ago
It sounds like the article is advocating something more along the lines of, buy a copy of a newspaper and if the front page has a picture of your customer committing war crimes with your product maybe ask them about it.
- thorncorona 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - CoastalCoder 2y ago
    The night is young. Perhaps better comments will show up still.
    - pdfernhout 2y ago
      I'll put in my two cents. The issue could be seen as a variation of my sig (and related writings): "The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity." Bulldozers are made with the technology of abundance (like metal and other advanced materials, engines, supportive repair infrastructure, international delivery methods, GPS positioning, and so on). But because the owners and users of bulldozers probably mostly don't understand the irony mentioned in my sig yet, they use bulldozers from a scarcity perspective, using them more to destroy biological diverse miracles like Amazonian Rainforest (or social diverse miracles like old New York City neighborhoods) and then create precarious biological or social monocultures or other problematical things, often supporting artificial scarcity in how the new products are distributed (compared, to, say, just picking fruit off trees in the jungle while living there, or having affordable housing in a city) as the owners and users of bulldozers privatize gains while socializing risks and costs (which in aggregate might greatly outweigh the privatized gains, as a net blight on human society and the rest of Nature). An alternative is to use those same technologies of abundance differently to build a world that overall works better for everyone. So, the "safeguard" for bulldozers is ultimately a transcendent shift in perspective spreading outward from people who have an "aha" moment about this to others some of whom own and use bulldozers and who also become similarly enlightened. For a fictional example of this happening, see James P. Hogan's 1982 sci-fi novel "Voyage from Yesteryear. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyage_from_Yesteryear https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyage_from_Yesteryear Or, for another fictional story, coincidentally by the same author who wrote the 1944 short story "Killdozer!", Theodore Sturgeon, see his later 1956 short story "The Skills of Xanadu" (a story which envisioned nanotech and mobile wirelessly-networked wearable computing, and also inspired Ted Nelson's work on hypertext and "Xanadu" and so indirectly helped inspire the World Wide Web): https://ia601205.us.archive.org/22/items/theodore-sturgeon-/Theodore%20Sturgeon%20-%20The%20Skills%20of%20Xanadu.pdf https://ia601205.us.archive.org/22/items/theodore-sturgeon-/... Radio theater version: https://archive.org/details/pra-BB3830.08 https://archive.org/details/pra-BB3830.08 This same sorts of transcendent perspective shift as a safeguard applies to things like nuclear energy use and AI, as I discuss here: https://pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html https://pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transce... "There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security thinking. Those "security" agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all." Also related on global mindshift (a bit simplistic perhaps compared to imagining overlapping fields of agency and priority, but still encouraging): "The Wombat (All is One)" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IHyH3MPgZDo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IHyH3MPgZDo This is off the top of my head, not having thought about the bulldozer theme much. Maybe I will have a better analogical idea on this later. Totally tangential, but today I just saw a blurb about a new book on Abundance: https://newrepublic.com/article/192061/ezra-klein-derek-thomspon-abundance-agenda-government-anti-doge https://newrepublic.com/article/192061/ezra-klein-derek-thom... "Klein and Thompson’s vision for more effective government is something like an anti-DOGE: They imagine a future United States where careful and informed elected officials find ways to strip back the barriers to effective policy and allow the government to invest efficiently in underdeveloped pockets of society. They call for an “abundance agenda.” Abundance here does not mean the greater access to disposable money and goods for which twentieth-century liberals fought. For Klein and Thompson, abundance means a government that is capable of building things, capable of innovation, and capable of implementation at scale."
mandmandam 2y ago
The author pointed out that commercial machinery can be fitted with a kill-switch, which would have been easy to activate had Caterpillar decided that genocide was against company values. > What enabled this remote disabling was a practice known as “VIN-locking,” which manufacturers use to prevent unauthorized repairs to their products ... When it suits their purposes, then, the technology exists for heavy machinery companies to monitor, control and even disable products. Human rights abuses against Palestinians and Indians apparently don’t rise to the level of violating company values, let alone cause enough concern for the company to brick their machines You can imagine more complicated safeguards if you like, but there's a simple solution sitting and waiting right there. All that's requires is for Caterpillar to decide they have any principles other than money... > In 2017, an investigation by The Guardian and The Bureau of Investigative Journalism revealed that after the conclusion of the Corrie case, Caterpillar hired the corporate espionage company C2i* to spy on the family and report back on any subsequent actions they might be planning. ... Not fucking likely though. * Think this was actually the Increment Group, Intelligence Company. C2i were in the same investigation for spying on environmental 'activists'.
- fc417fc802 2y ago
  It's surprising to me that the conclusion reached here is "they should use the kill switch more" instead of a horrified "kill switches and remote monitoring in purchased products shouldn't be a legal practice".
  - mandmandam 2y ago
    That was not the conclusion, in either the article or my comment. Hypothetically - if you learned that your product was being used to run over people "dead and alive, in the hundreds", so that "everything squirts out", would you shrug and fob off responsibility? Even when you already had the technology to shut down those machines installed, and major human rights orgs are warning of genocide? ... Or would you just argue that your machines shouldn't have had that capability in the first place? ... Do you see how far that's missing the point? Tbh even that would be better than Caterpillar's likely response, which was probably to try and book even more sales based on the 'success' of their machinery and the pending reconstruction.
karaterobot 2y ago
We have to keep bulldozers out of the hands of criminals. Honestly, the only protection against a bad guy with a bulldozer is a good guy with a bulldozer.

kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 2y ago

More regulation, of course. It's worked so well for guns, after all. Because making more laws prevents people who disregard laws from breaking other laws. Really, we should just cut to the chase and outlaw murder.

awesome_dude 2y ago
It has worked for guns - the countries where guns are a problem either have very lax regulation, or very lax enforcement (because of a breakdown of government)
- coffeecantcode 2y ago
  Well, there are also countries like Switzerland where there is a substantially higher amount of gun ownership compared to that of the rest of Europe but very few of the same issues of other countries with similar ownership per capita. Though, that’s probably due to the required service training and the screenings that come along with it. And it being a relatively small country.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - azernik 2y ago
    So... not lax regulation
    - coffeecantcode 2y ago
      Lax is relative.
  - fc417fc802 2y ago
    There are areas of similarly low crime in the US, depending on how you go about drawing lines on your map. Probably it is a mistake to treat any country as a single unit in such an analysis.
    - coffeecantcode 2y ago
      Fair
- fc417fc802 2y ago
  I think there are several serious issues with such a claim. However I'll limit myself to pointing out that at absolute minimum you'd need to define "problem" and "working". For example, I'd observe that organized crime pretty much everywhere in the world possesses weapons. The extent to which they resort to them varies of course, but it seems unreasonable to blindly dismiss that as being due entirely to regulation.
  - awesome_dude 2y ago
    You're right defining problem and working is tricky Here is a very coarse overview of what I would term "problem". It's the list of countries by firearm related homicide rates https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_firearm-related_homicide_rates https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_firearm-r... Sorting the second table (Homicide rates by firearm per 100,000 inhabitants. Latest available year.) by rate is rather eye-opening. The USA is four times as high as Canada - and almost forty times as high as Australia Jamaica * 44.706 2022 Saint Lucia * 30.580 2022 Honduras * 28.721 2021 Bahamas 28.538 2022 Saint Kitts and Nevis * 25.207 2021 Ecuador * 22.565 2022 Belize * 22.454 2022 Trinidad and Tobago * 20.551 2020 Saint Vincent and the Grenadines 20.128 2021 Puerto Rico * 18.382 2016 Colombia * 18.127 2022 Mexico * 17.497 2022 Brazil * 15.945 2020 Barbados 11.717 2022 Panama * 10.227 2021 Antigua and Barbuda * 8.532 2022 Costa Rica * 8.304 2021 Uruguay 6.807 2022 Dominican Republic * 6.724 2022 Paraguay * 4.803 2021 El Salvador * 4.782 2022 Bermuda 4.674 2021 United States * 4.054 2020 Chile * 3.637 2022 Guatemala * 3.436 2021 Suriname * 3.398 2022 Guyana * 2.983 2021 Peru * 2.937 2020 Argentina * 2.305 2022 Egypt * 2.062 2011 Nicaragua 2.000 2021
CoastalCoder 2y ago
I have mixed feelings about outlawing concealed bulldozers.

dullcrisp 2y ago

It sounds like the article is advocating something more along the lines of, buy a copy of a newspaper and if the front page has a picture of your customer committing war crimes with your product maybe ask them about it.

thorncorona 2y ago
[flagged]
- CoastalCoder 2y ago
  The night is young. Perhaps better comments will show up still.
  - pdfernhout 2y ago
    I'll put in my two cents. The issue could be seen as a variation of my sig (and related writings): "The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity." Bulldozers are made with the technology of abundance (like metal and other advanced materials, engines, supportive repair infrastructure, international delivery methods, GPS positioning, and so on). But because the owners and users of bulldozers probably mostly don't understand the irony mentioned in my sig yet, they use bulldozers from a scarcity perspective, using them more to destroy biological diverse miracles like Amazonian Rainforest (or social diverse miracles like old New York City neighborhoods) and then create precarious biological or social monocultures or other problematical things, often supporting artificial scarcity in how the new products are distributed (compared, to, say, just picking fruit off trees in the jungle while living there, or having affordable housing in a city) as the owners and users of bulldozers privatize gains while socializing risks and costs (which in aggregate might greatly outweigh the privatized gains, as a net blight on human society and the rest of Nature). An alternative is to use those same technologies of abundance differently to build a world that overall works better for everyone. So, the "safeguard" for bulldozers is ultimately a transcendent shift in perspective spreading outward from people who have an "aha" moment about this to others some of whom own and use bulldozers and who also become similarly enlightened. For a fictional example of this happening, see James P. Hogan's 1982 sci-fi novel "Voyage from Yesteryear. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyage_from_Yesteryear https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyage_from_Yesteryear Or, for another fictional story, coincidentally by the same author who wrote the 1944 short story "Killdozer!", Theodore Sturgeon, see his later 1956 short story "The Skills of Xanadu" (a story which envisioned nanotech and mobile wirelessly-networked wearable computing, and also inspired Ted Nelson's work on hypertext and "Xanadu" and so indirectly helped inspire the World Wide Web): https://ia601205.us.archive.org/22/items/theodore-sturgeon-/Theodore%20Sturgeon%20-%20The%20Skills%20of%20Xanadu.pdf https://ia601205.us.archive.org/22/items/theodore-sturgeon-/... Radio theater version: https://archive.org/details/pra-BB3830.08 https://archive.org/details/pra-BB3830.08 This same sorts of transcendent perspective shift as a safeguard applies to things like nuclear energy use and AI, as I discuss here: https://pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html https://pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transce... "There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security thinking. Those "security" agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all." Also related on global mindshift (a bit simplistic perhaps compared to imagining overlapping fields of agency and priority, but still encouraging): "The Wombat (All is One)" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IHyH3MPgZDo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IHyH3MPgZDo This is off the top of my head, not having thought about the bulldozer theme much. Maybe I will have a better analogical idea on this later. Totally tangential, but today I just saw a blurb about a new book on Abundance: https://newrepublic.com/article/192061/ezra-klein-derek-thomspon-abundance-agenda-government-anti-doge https://newrepublic.com/article/192061/ezra-klein-derek-thom... "Klein and Thompson’s vision for more effective government is something like an anti-DOGE: They imagine a future United States where careful and informed elected officials find ways to strip back the barriers to effective policy and allow the government to invest efficiently in underdeveloped pockets of society. They call for an “abundance agenda.” Abundance here does not mean the greater access to disposable money and goods for which twentieth-century liberals fought. For Klein and Thompson, abundance means a government that is capable of building things, capable of innovation, and capable of implementation at scale."

mandmandam 2y ago

The author pointed out that commercial machinery can be fitted with a kill-switch, which would have been easy to activate had Caterpillar decided that genocide was against company values. > What enabled this remote disabling was a practice known as “VIN-locking,” which manufacturers use to prevent unauthorized repairs to their products ... When it suits their purposes, then, the technology exists for heavy machinery companies to monitor, control and even disable products. Human rights abuses against Palestinians and Indians apparently don’t rise to the level of violating company values, let alone cause enough concern for the company to brick their machines You can imagine more complicated safeguards if you like, but there's a simple solution sitting and waiting right there. All that's requires is for Caterpillar to decide they have any principles other than money... > In 2017, an investigation by The Guardian and The Bureau of Investigative Journalism revealed that after the conclusion of the Corrie case, Caterpillar hired the corporate espionage company C2i* to spy on the family and report back on any subsequent actions they might be planning. ... Not fucking likely though. * Think this was actually the Increment Group, Intelligence Company. C2i were in the same investigation for spying on environmental 'activists'.

fc417fc802 2y ago
It's surprising to me that the conclusion reached here is "they should use the kill switch more" instead of a horrified "kill switches and remote monitoring in purchased products shouldn't be a legal practice".
- mandmandam 2y ago
  That was not the conclusion, in either the article or my comment. Hypothetically - if you learned that your product was being used to run over people "dead and alive, in the hundreds", so that "everything squirts out", would you shrug and fob off responsibility? Even when you already had the technology to shut down those machines installed, and major human rights orgs are warning of genocide? ... Or would you just argue that your machines shouldn't have had that capability in the first place? ... Do you see how far that's missing the point? Tbh even that would be better than Caterpillar's likely response, which was probably to try and book even more sales based on the 'success' of their machinery and the pending reconstruction.

karaterobot 2y ago

We have to keep bulldozers out of the hands of criminals. Honestly, the only protection against a bad guy with a bulldozer is a good guy with a bulldozer.