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Comment by cimi_ | Hacker News Reader

Setting who wants to do this aside in order to avoid the constant 'X is worse than Y' arguments.

I don't think it's unreasonable to assume that in a near future we will have cameras that can do much more than identification on a massive scale. It may be easy to track things like how stressed, healthy, sober etc. people are without their consent or without them even noticing. And this would be precise, not speculative like the current online tracking.

Would you live comfortably in this world? Would you build this?

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This kind of world gets built by some people who are excited to work towards this goal, but also by a much larger group of people for whom meeting their daily needs outweighs the abstract, distant drawbacks that they can pretend to rationalize away.

It will be built through economic coercion appealing to their livelihoods, and the impacts will be perceived as externalities. Incidentally, this is the same way most of the modern world got built over the last several centuries, with those having to work to earn their keep taking on various risks to enrich themselves ostensibly to provide for their families: mining, military service, or data mining others' personal information to sell ads; their participation in these has far-reaching impacts on the world, but gets distributed over a large population and avoids hitting close to home.

Some people can't rationalize this away, so (in a low-violence society) they quit and do something else. Given enough time, the workers who are uneasy will be replaced by people who have no such qualms. They, and their bosses, will make good money until an outraged public prompts government regulations to catch up. By that point, they will likely have a seat at the table. In an authoritarian society, or when the state itself is the actor, there's even less of a chance of this balance.

The problem is that the same applies for Police, Mental Health, Child Protection services. In those organizations, it does incredible amounts of damage.

In fact, part of the attraction of working in, say Child protection services is the damage you can selectively inflict on others. Same for the police, but much more direct. 15 minutes of research will tell you that they're not doing their duty for the money.

This is WHY you would want the power of government artificially limited by an independent and powerful judiciary.

Good Analysis. What is the optional thing a 2x programmer can do now to stop if possible or atleaset delay such a totalitarian regime to happen ?

What kind of world?

When you hypothesize a world where AI uses cameras everywhere to know everything they can about everybody, you haven't characterized that world at all.

First, IS IT REALLY EVERYBODY? (But let's assume for now, it's really everybody).

The question that will characterize the kind of world, is what is done with that information.

You can choose to use it to oppress and repress people; or you could use it to help them. If you detect a person overly drunk, you can send somebody fetch her, and either send her to the police station or to her home. Here you can ask what kind of world you would live more comfortably in? But it has nothing to do with cameras AI, and databases.

If the AI detects that some person is becoming stressed and loses her health, you can use that information to fire her, (bad health leads to bad productivity right?), to forbid her to get insurance, etc, or you can use that information to give her some holidays and schedule a consultation with health services. Here you can ask what kind of world you would live more comfortably in? But it has nothing to do with cameras AI, and databases.

And if the AI detects that some crime is being committed or about to be, you can send the police after or before the damage is done to the victim, and you can put the criminal in jail or send back to his country of origin, or leave him on the streets to try again another crime. Here you can ask what kind of world you would live more comfortably in? But it has nothing to do with cameras AI, and databases.

You can extrapolate based on what's being done with the information that people are gathering now. Targeted advertisements, intrusive employee surveillance in places like Amazon warehouses or the TSA, to name some instances I've personally read about. How about buying data to target political ads?

Almost every tracking method or tool that has been created is used by businesses to exploit me as much as possible, so why should I believe that further developments would be used any differently?

I understand the point you are trying to make, and maybe I am too pessimistic when thinking that the negative outcomes are more likely to happen on large scale than the positive ones.

I think 'who holds the power?' is a good lens to try to judge this through. Unless there is a major shift in how humans relate to the World, I think unleashing this power is dangerous.

Edit: typo

>I think 'who holds the power?' is a good lens to try to judge this through.

Eventually some one with bad intentions will end in power even if started with a pretty good guy(Example: US president start and end). Its better to think of the worst and place the checks at the earliest (like the constitution)

Yup. Think about how you can recognize your friends without even seeing their face, by the way they walk, what they wear, how tall they are, and other contextual clues. Computers will be able to do all of that. Also think about other things that only computers with massive amounts of data will be able to do. Computers will be able to enumerate your wardrobe, your possessions. They'll be able to figure out most of the books you've read or own. They'll know where you work, what your schedule is, where you shop, what you do for fun, when you take vacations and where. They'll be able to learn all of this even if you don't freely give all this information up through social media posts and what-have-you by following you in the background of other stuff or through other "feeds". Imagine how much easier it is to identify someone in a picture or a video if you can pull in "big data" context which narrows down the possible/likely people who could be in that location at that time (wearing those clothes, doing that activity, within a given weight/height range, etc, etc, etc.)

We don't really know what the feasible computational and data limits are here, the potential (and likelihood, I think) is that they are much, much lower than where we would like them to be. In the near future something very close to ubiquitous surveillance is very likely to be the norm. And that has all sorts of chilling implications. If systems can keep track of where you are and what you're doing most hours of most days then that opens up a lot of questions in terms of free expression, political organizing, civil disobedience, etc.

Sound like advertiser's heaven. Sign me out please.

I know people like to imagine of all the orwellian possibilities, but it could have some useful medical cases too. It would be great to put some kind of camera in my grandparent's home to automatically monitor their health. My grandfather fell in the middle of the night, passed out, and was not discovered until the next day. He was still alive, but injured, but it could have been serious.

>Think about how you can recognize your friends without even seeing their face, by the way they walk, what they wear, how tall they are, and other contextual clues.

Yep, but think also how many times you approached a friend from behind and patted him/her on the back only to realize that you just patted a perfect stranger?

I have no particular problem to believe that one's gait is "distinctive", but quite a few in believing that that particular stroll is "unique".

You might also think about how often you walk right past your friends without recognizing them.

2015: CCTV 'fightcams' detect violence 'before it happens'

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/crime/11407094/CCTV-...

The accelerometer in a smart phone might be sufficient to identify gait parameters which map to stress, relaxation etc. Why bother with cameras?

If the goal is to police and/or suppress, using this system means that your targets don't have to carry a phone (and that you don't need to have access to the phone's data).

There are ways to induce people to carry the instruments of their surveillance with them (including phones).

If you do that, you can just simplify it down to an automatic bluetooth beacon that identifies you to the government- and if you don't carry one you're not allowed out in public.

I think they just don't want to be quite so blatant and obvious about it.

And, in the not so distant future after that, it's safe to assume that people will be forced to have chip implants. Why use a camera and ml when you can just tag someone?

Forced? That sounds a bit too 1984-ish. I believe in a more Brave New World future, where people will pay good money to get chipped and the only "natties" (unchipped people) will be people who either cannot afford it, or "wackos".

Even if it gets built, I can count on thousands of my countrymen to install it improperly, lose the documents, mail the cheques late, accidentally lose equipment, and fail to plug it in.

Don’t worry, systems like this are incredibly fragile. You could spray paint the cameras and force the government into an attrition war (I can spray paint them faster than you can replace them, and paint is cheap).

I think fighting this will be much more like trying to stop Facebook shadow profiling you. You won't know where the surveillance devices will be, or rather, everything will be one.

When the price of getting caught spray painting cameras is you and your family getting executed, or being sent to a 're-education camp', would you still do it? No matter how 'incredibly fragile' you perceive the system to be?

This is already a daily reality for certain minorities in some countries already.

https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/ne94dg/jingwang-a...

If that's the price for spray painting cameras, the marginal additional punishment for getting caught murdering those who are arresting the spray-painters is no longer sufficient to deter me from attempting it.

Once you go full family execution, that's pretty much the limit of escalation against an individual. If you're willing and able to destroy everything and everyone I care about, there is no longer any bound you can control on what I might be willing to do to prevent that, or avenge it, and you are now relying entirely on my own ethical reticence and my resource limitations to avoid me engaging in acts of terrorism against your nation-state and its loyalists.

And that's the practical argument for proportional punishments, if your government is so dysfunctional that there is no moral argument for them. If you lock up all the Uighurs just for existing, for example, you may find that the ones who escape your pogrom are more willing to fight, and to fight dirty.

Realistically, we should probably be talking about vandalism of surveillance equipment in terms of how many cameras or camera-equivalents you could be compelled by force to replace whenever you are caught destroying one. And that is balanced by how likely you are to be caught when destroying one. Which depends somewhat on how many cameras/snitches in the area are fully operational.

There's probably an optimal camera-destroying algorithm to be discovered in there somewhere.

    > you may find that the ones who 
    > your pogrom are more willing to 
    > fight, and to fight dirty.

...neatly justifying your continuing oppression of them and others and investment in your security machine.

This stuff is frequently by design.

There are plenty of camera designs that are essentially invisible. There can be plenty of those cameras that are installed in an overlapping fashion. If you want to go vandalizing the visible cameras, you might get entered into the arrest queue somewhere but indeed the police likely have more pressing issues.

Sure, if the powers-that-be get nervous, any sweep would miss a lot of subversives while picking up plenty of random people - just like purges in the many repressive regimes around the world. The main win for repression here is they no longer need a system like, say, East Germany where 25% of population spied on their neighbors.

I suppose you might count it a win that in this coming future, your car isn't going to start when you act staggering drunk rather than when you objectively are staggering drunk. But I can't see the win here.

I'm always so surprised by this community. In discussions about self driving cars and AI, everyone says "the tech isn't there yet", "it's weak because of X scenario", etc.

But talk about cameras and surveillance? The tech is everywhere and can do everything with perfect accuracy and will come for you and your babies if you even sneeze wrong!. Come on.

Having worked with security camera systems (I used to install them) let me tell you something: the cameras are shit, the quality they produce is shit, clients are cheap as fuck and don't want to repair them, they break constantly, the software is terrible to use... I could go on.

We are a very long way away from the dystopia you are describing. People will gladly unintentionally fuck this up long before it becomes what you're fearing it will be.

An authoritarian government that has declared as a matter of policy that the system on which it has spent billions is flawless doesn't need to worry that it isn't flawless. You'll say that wasn't you entering the subversive bookshop - but sorry, citizen, the system is infallible, so why are you lying to us?

Yeah, the consensus "here" is that deep learning, self-driving cars, all that, is "half-there". Presently, deep learning works, has a fairly high accuracy rate, in some percentage of cases. Sure, you can implement it right now in all sorts of places. The question is what the costs of the small but significant failure rate is going to be and who will pay that cost?. If some nobody pays the cost, well, a high failure rate may be fine with the institution that implements this.

With cars, the idea of a 0.1% chance of dying each time you step into a vehicle is terrifying - that's much higher than you get now, humans are actually amazingly good at driving. IE, fortunately, the system probably won't stomach the costs of bad self-driving cars.

But with the justice system spotting potential criminals, yeah, pulling in some innocents isn't going to bother a system with N degrees of repression. Most people in the justice system have no choice but to plea bargain now. Most people in the justice system are also guilty but the innocent-but-not-wealthy minority is generally SOL. And that is in our ostensible democracy, that's known by most sophisticated observers of the system, and only handful make an effort to change it. So a half-assed evidence gatherer of whatever sort will make lots of people happy, put lot of guilty and innocent people in jail and hardly needs great reliability. Indeed, with AI parole-granting systems, we're already there.

People said facial recognition was absolutely impossible a decade ago. Now we can remap one face to another in real time. The tech is there.

The second thing you mention seems largely unrelated to the first. Deepfakes (especially live deepfakes) require extensive learning on extensive data sets. Sure, you could do facial recognition that way, but useful facial recognition would learn from a single still photo.

Ubiquitous surveillance would presumably try to have every camera within view of at least one other camera, so sabotaging them is a good way to get tracked down and arrested.

> Ubiquitous surveillance would presumably try to have every camera within view of at least one other camera, so sabotaging them is a good way to get tracked down and arrested.

You don't have to attack the camera directly to sabotage it. Cutting power or communications cables and jamming transmissions works too.

Same thing applies to cutting cables. You'll be seen and tracked. Jammers are both trackable and illegal in most places.

Believe me, I wish it was that easy.

I think it would be harder to keep every inch of cable in view of a camera than keep every camera in view of another.

Jammers are trackable, but if you use them judiciously, I think they could be used to cover other attacks: activate jammer, attack camera infrastructure, deactivate jammer, and flee.

> Would you live comfortably in this world?

if its not then I find a way to adapt. I accept that the only thing constant is change.

> Would you build this?

many2 reason or could be simply just because is exciting

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