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The other rule here is that you cannot avoid politics if you want to create a better world. If you want the freedom to develop technology without worrying it wi
by roughly 2mo ago
The other rule here is that you cannot avoid politics if you want to create a better world. If you want the freedom to develop technology without worrying it will be used by a police state, you need to put in the work to make sure a police state doesn't happen - you cannot ignore politics and just "focus on technology."
- api 2mo agoThere's a deep failed idea here. It's the idea that technology is an alternative to politics, period. I think that whole idea has failed. You can't avoid building technologies that could be used by a police state, because literally everything can be used for warfare or aggression. The first person who sharpened a stick or a rock created a weapon. Everything is a weapon. Everything is dual-use. If you want to prevent a police state or any other undesirable political outcome, you have to confront the politics directly. "Change the tools and you change the rules," an old saying from 1990s cyber-culture, is an idea that I think has failed. Instead what happens is that the rules determine what's done with the tools. Those 90s cyber-hippie and cyber-libertarian types vastly underestimated the power of the political to the point of making a category error. Cryptocurrency is a great case in point. It started as an attempt to create a technology that would act as an escape hatch from corrupt casino capitalism and state-backed financialization. Instead it became an insane absurdist parody of those things. The same types of corrupt individuals who profited off "too big to fail" and the rest of it simply took cryptocurrency and used it to implement the same type of system but on a block chain. The rules (and rulers) changed the tools, not the other way around.
- cucumber3732842 2mo agoI mean you kind of can. The whole premise of AI is basically that we'll make white collar administrative compliance work dirt cheap in the long run and we'll all be richer for it and we'll sidestep the whole "fight with all those industries" step because the sheer economics of it will make it happen and as those industries become cheaper/poorer there will be even less reason to not kick them to the curb. Kind of like how once certain state shed a lot of their manufacturing or agriculture, adopting policy that's bad for the rest became easier. Or how now that solar is cheap we mostly DGAF about coal.
- roughly 2mo agoThe Marxists were wrong about the inevitability of history no matter which direction or by what mechanism one wants to assert it. You’ve gotta put in the work no matter what, there’s no eliding the actual effort of politics.
- cucumber3732842 2mo agoThe "work" here is changing the technological picture to the point where the political one becomes a non issue, at least for whatever incremental step you're looking at. Because once the technological picture changes enough, whoever your enemy is has to essentially roll over and take it, or your society will get out competed by some other one that did adopt it. Like no amount of politics is putting the allure of the wealth potential of using a printing press to disseminate information cheaply back in the bag even if that comes at the expense of ending a gravy train for a subset of the current winners in your society.
- NoidFonsense 2mo agoNot everything is dual use. Some information technology grossly favors centralization or decentralization of power based on the type of information problem it solves. Cryptocurrency is clearly a counterexample to your main point. The fact that some people use cryptocurrency tech to implement centrally managed private currencies is largely irrelevant. To the extent that cryptocurrencies are used to implement private currencies, it largely just hampers them technolgicially if it has any effect at all. These projects just like to use the term cryptocurrency to imply some level of legitimate decentralization or security that doesn't really exist. It's like saying that because you can use a screwdriver as a weapon, it's inherently a destructive technology (or some mixture of destructive and constructive). On closer inspection it's clear that the screwdriver doesn't sit on the pareto front for weapons, but it does sit on the pareto front for manufacturing tools. So a screwdriver is clearly a technology whose existence favors construction over destruction. Similarly I would argue that technology like bittorrent or bitcoin favor decentralization over centralization. As another example, surveilance technology favors centralization. None of what we are seeing now with flock would be possible without cheap mass produced digital cameras. The balance of technology favors cheap cameras (and counter-surveilance is often impossible or expensive) and it favors centralization because you need a lot of data to create inferences based on this spurrious data. If we could have predicted these effects, perhaps we could have delayed the development of cheap cameras, but it just goes to show how complicated this game is. We could just as easily have said that more cameras would lead to unprecedented public transparency (e.g. bodycams on cops, dash cams). Unintended consequences.
- __MatrixMan__ 2mo agoOn the other hand, a few heuristics will get you pretty far: Don't build technology that interacts with people in ways they did't consent to. Don't build skinner boxes. Let the user decide who gets whatever data they generate while using the thing. Let the user control how it will work, insofar as it doesn't contradict the other heuristics. These are political principles, but they're pretty basic. You don't have to keep up to date with the news, just check in with your morals once in a while.
- roughly 2mo agoYeah, there’s definitely good design principles, but as others have pointed out, it’s extremely difficult to build technologies that are not trivially dual-use. And, to be clear, I’m not saying “politics” as in “did you hear what Trump said?” I’m saying politics as in “what is your city council doing, how are your neighbors doing, and what are the consequences of your work and economic choices and who’s paying them.” Most of the news is a circus; that stuff is not.
- rapind 2mo agoIt’s not at all hard to not “intentionally” build asshole software, but your definitely leaving money on the table. The nit pick arguments are just a defence to avoid honesty and introspection IMO.
- sleight42 2mo agoHard to say whether this is a feature or a bug of capitalism. It's like an alternate definition of enshittification though: Once you've exploited every moral way to make money with your business, expand your scope to every "legal" way. Note where this particular Venn diagram will fail to overlap.
- __MatrixMan__ 2mo agoI'd call it a bug. If we don't fix it, I think that our habit of creating incentives towards outcomes that nobody actually wants will eventually kill us.
- bko 2mo agoHow do you make sure a police state doesn't happen? Block traffic? Tweet? Cut off ties with friends and family that don't share your political beliefs? Of course you can avoid politics. Just be a good person. Vote for who you think is the best candidate at the time. And move on with your life. Ironically the people most involved in politics don't have their own house in order. They're often mentally ill, over educated, underemployed and without meaningful ties in their life (e.g. family, real life community, etc).
- zero-sharp 2mo agoThe people most involved in politics are mentally ill? Got it...
- copper-float 2mo agoThis definitely feels true, yeah.
- roughly 2mo agoBy being durably involved in your community and by being aware of and not ignoring the consequences of your actions, of the policies you advocate for, the actions of the politicians you endorse, etc. By not just voting once and moving on.
- bko 2mo agoWhat does this mean? This is all vague. "Being aware" "advocate for" What are you talking about? Should you hound co-workers that don't work for you? Leave pamphlets on cars with bad bumper stickers? Subscribe to the New Yorker? If you're interested in politics you should read it, but you should not let it affect your life in any meaningful way.
- roughly 2mo ago> you should not let it affect your life in any meaningful way. Oh, I’ve got really bad news for you.
- IncreasePosts 2mo agoActually, you cannot avoid sex. Everything is about sex, even politics. If you want the freedom to develop technology without worrying it will be used by a police state, you cannot ignore sex and just "focus on technology"
- bigfishrunning 2mo agoExcept for sex, which is about power
- preg_match 2mo agoFor some people it’s just about pleasure, for others about intimacy. Sex is not implicitly always about power.
- bigfishrunning 2mo agoI understand that, I was referencing a quote (often misattributed to Oscar Wilde, I don't know its true source)
- panny 2mo ago>you cannot ignore politics and just "focus on technology." Stallman was right again https://www.azquotes.com/quote/755239 https://www.azquotes.com/quote/755239
- tshaddox 2mo agoPolitics in the broadest sense is just any decision-making process where a single decision affects multiple people and those people don't all agree on which decision should be made.
- TZubiri 2mo agoAn conscientious objection is definitely a right you have as a professional, but it's a neutral action, you refuse to do something, and you let someone else do it. If you really are against it, you actively do something about it, like presenting a law or making a criminal complaint. That said, they are both compatible, you can refuse to do something, and make efforts so that nobody does it. But I think the the latter is the actual core security model of our society, and refusals aren't really effective to the point that I wouldn't worry much about it and just focus on compartimentalizing and executing on my duties. Isn't it theoretically possible that upper management divides duties so that engineers cannot accurately judge the ethical correctness of the task and the overall mission? As an individual you don't have the right tools to make such an evaluation. You can be pushed to investigate further, but the moment you do so, you cease your role as an engineer and put your citizen hat on. I personally wouldn't object on most cases, my threshold would be very high, a database of people's sexuality is not even close to even being concerning to me, that's like a Wikipedia infobox property. But even if it were a feature that did concern me, like a citizen-ID to real time coordinates system, I wanna be at the helm of it, either way (if I get the privilege). If something is wrong, I'd be in a privileged position to do something about it internally, judicially or through congress, there's also whistleblowing if it comes to that, but that's not in me.
- nisegami 2mo ago>An objection of conscience is definitely a right you have as a professional, but it's a neutral action, you refuse to do something, and you let someone else do it. Correct, and the lessons in the CIA's very own Simple Sabotage Field Manual are still as helpful as when they were written.
- roughly 2mo ago> An conscientious objection is definitely a right you have as a professional, but it's a neutral action, you refuse to do something, and you let someone else do it. Yes, but it’s still the case that you didn’t do it. You cannot directly control the actions of others, just your own. Do that, at least. Getting other people to also not do it is the rest of the political act. It’ll never be the case that nobody’s willing to perform an act, but if all the people who are doing so under duress stop, at the very least it helps one identify the proper size and shape of one’s political coalition and the power therein. And, yes, people have bills. That’s what we mean by politics. We’re 50 years behind the curve on building the capacity for people to act in their own interest or on their own beliefs; that’s no reason not to start now.
- rnd0 2mo agoWe are well, well past the point where it's possible to avoid a police state.
- cpill 2mo agodefine "put in the work" what does that work look like. an example please!