5 ms·
"It was terribly dangerous to let your thoughts wander when you were in any public place or within range of a telescreen. The smallest thing could give you away
by toomuchcoffee 14y ago
"It was terribly dangerous to let your thoughts wander when you were in any public place or within range of a telescreen. The smallest thing could give you away. A nervous tic, an unconscious look of anxiety, a habit of muttering to yourself--anything that carried with it the suggestion of abnormality, of having something to hide. In any case, to wear an improper expression on your face...; was itself a punishable offense. There was even a word for it in Newspeak: facecrime..."
1984, Book 1, Chapter V
- starpilot 14y agoI read that book in high school too.
- thornofmight 14y agoIt's relevant.
- malandrew 14y agoYup, because this time it is facial recognition technology. What if it is mind-reading technology in 20 years time? If you don't draw the line in cement instead of sand at some point such as now with facial recognition technology, it will be redrawn over and over and over again. Given that several the hacker community here familiar with dystopian future literature accepts this as inevitable in many comments, suggests that a slippery slope argument is not in the least bit far fetched. If here there are people are accepting, then in other areas of society there are people actively arguing in favor of using facial recognition technology everywhere. Those same people will probably be arguing for equivalent of telescreens once something akin to them are invented.
- grueful 14y agoThere exist algorithms for estimating emotion from facial video. The accuracy is kind of hit or miss, but it's enough for "he's experiencing anxiety during the security search, he must be a terrorist."
- toomuchcoffee 14y agoOr as they say in Eurasia, "behaving abnormally": http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4464298
- Daniel_Newby 14y agoOnce you can download an isotope separator or a plague kit, privacy concerns become moot. The societies not running under total AI supervision will simply go extinct. So the question is what kind of supervised society do you want?
- lifeisstillgood 14y agoIsotope seperator - plague kit I assume this is downloading nuclear bombs or viruses? And that means that we need AI to monitor us constantly in case some idiot kills everyone?
- Daniel_Newby 14y agoYes. If your household fabricator can make arbitrary machinery, you can say "Make me a uranium-235 enricher."
- thornofmight 14y agoAny sci-fi book recommendations where I can read about this sort of thing?
- kapitalx 14y agoI wonder if one could get away with vandalizing cameras as protected speech. I would certainly start wearing makeup: http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-20003431-1.html http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-20003431-1.html
- lectrick 14y agoI'm already intending to do this with traffic cameras. Freedom-sniping, I'll call it.
- raleec 14y agohttp://wtop.com/64/3025740/Speed-cam-shooter-Dont-do-what-I-did http://wtop.com/64/3025740/Speed-cam-shooter-Dont-do-what-I-...
- falcolas 14y agoA bit more concrete information on how to defeat facial recognition: http://cvdazzle.com/ http://cvdazzle.com/
- fein 14y agoI know this is a shot in the dark, as you linked the site, so I don't know how in depth you may have dived into the issue: > Partially obscure the nose-bridge are: The region where the nose, eyes, and forehead intersect is a key facial feature. Wouldn't a big pair of aviators, or any sunglasses, pretty much take care of this?
- Evbn 14y agoThis is explicitly discussed on the linked page.
- timClicks 14y agoWhen I read this article a few months ago, I wondered if protesters should just start wearing hats: http://www.npr.org/blogs/krulwich/2012/05/04/152011840/who-killed-mens-hats-think-of-a-three-letter-word-beginning-with-i http://www.npr.org/blogs/krulwich/2012/05/04/152011840/who-k...