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Comment by naasking | Hacker News Reader

But if it's really AI for everyone, then it can be used by the people against their government as well.

In its majestic equality, the law forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets and steal loaves of bread.

There's no comparing the incentives, resources, and potential for harm between the state and citizens.

I think you seriously underestimate the people, and seriously overestimate the government.

The point being, the harm the government is doing right now is obscured from the people, but with AI trawling all public data, these issues can be revealed much sooner.

I find this naive. One day every 2-4years the govt answers to the people. Every other days is story after story of the govt bending to the will of powerful/wealthy special interests.

Giving each side force multipliers doesn't even the playing field, it makes the absolute gap even larger.

Firstly, you're incorrect that the government answers to the people only on elections. They lose plenty in the courts against ordinary citizens.

Secondly, your point would be valid if the force multipliers applied equally. This likely isn't true.

So which side gains more advantage? If the government could sufficiently obscure their actions such that the data weren't available to analyze, that would give it the advantage. However, the government is constrained by certain transparency requirements that don't apply to citizens, so by default, citizens know more about their representatives than their representatives know about their citizens.

> Firstly, you're incorrect that the government answers to the people only on elections. They lose plenty in the courts against ordinary citizens.

The executive branch losing a court case isn't answering to the people. It's answering to the judicial branch. Being granted explicit permission as a citizen to do something you legally should be allowed to do isn't gaining anything at all. An innocent person being allowed to remain innocent again isn't giving anything to citizens. Those are basic rights..

> If the government could sufficiently obscure their actions such that the data weren't available to analyze, that would give it the advantage

The govt already does this across the board. I'm not certain how you could argue otherwise. Taking a issue in the news recently, we still don't have national rates on use of force by the police across the country. As in literally no-one knows what the police is doing because centralized records aren't kept, and every area does it differently. Police departments have fought body cameras. Fought enabling citizens to even see how they are executing their jobs.

It was a sliver of data available under Obama (although to his credit, his admin tried to improve it), and yet: https://www.engadget.com/2017/04/14/trump-admin-killing-open...

I appreciate your optimism and wish I shared it. I think you overestimate peoples ability to care, understand, and do anything about any data found wrongs.

Not all people, but enough people. This sort of optimism is precisely the reason open source exists. There are plenty of data scientists who would crunch some numbers in their spare time for similar reasons.

Statisticians already do this with elections around the world, for instance.

Victory Coffee is for everyone!

And the chocolate ration has been increased to 20g this week!

(apologies to George Orwell)

Well its "We have made new TPUs for Google Cloud and we probs won't sell them!"

Google decides if you are part of the everyone included in their AI for everyone

Cool. A civil war.

s/civil war/checks and balances/

AI for everyone, data is not.

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