Comment by lm28469 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lm28469 | Hacker News Reader

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It's not everyday I quote Ted Kaczynski, but I think he had a valid point when, in his manifesto, he theorise that no amount of regulation is capable of making us safe from technological abuse.

125 - 135 from: https://www.josharcher.uk/static/files/2018/01/Industrial_So....

> It is not possible to make a LASTING compromise between technology and freedom, because technology is by far the more powerful social force and continually encroaches on freedom through REPEATED compromises.

> A technological advance that appears not to threaten freedom often turns out to threaten it very seriously later on ... In many cases the new technology changes society in such a way that people eventually find themselves FORCED to use it.

> While technological progress AS A WHOLE continually narrows our sphere of freedom, each new technical advance CONSIDERED BY ITSELF appears to be desirable.

> Another reason why technology is such a powerful social force is that, within the context of a given society, technological progress marches in only one direction; it can never be reversed. Once a technical innovation has been introduced, people usually become dependent on it, so that they can never again do without it, unless it is replaced by some still more advanced innovation.

> No social arrangements, whether laws, institutions, customs or ethical codes, can provide permanent protection against technology. History shows that all social arrangements are transitory; they all change or break down eventually. But technological advances are permanent within the context of a given civilization.

The issue is that, ultimately and generally, the government does what a majority of people wants (or at least tolerates). Why are we tolerating this loss of freedoms? The only answer I can arrive at is "because it doesn't inconvenience people enough to do something about it".

Protesting against something takes a lot of energy, and inconveniencing you only a little (or very much but extremely rarely) doesn't make most people's list of priorities.

The way I see it is that our systems became so complex that we lost sight of what's good for us, as individual and as a group.

Most people are too busy to even acknowledge these issues. When you're barely able to financially take care of your family or when you're too deep in the consumerism game you don't have time for these high level questions.

People are more outraged about the latest episode of Game of Thrones than they will ever be about the current state of humanity and its impact on Nature, the erosion of privacy and freedom, &c.

> The way I see it is that our systems became so complex that we lost sight of what's good for us, as individual and as a group.

I feel ask though it's more that our systems became so complex that no one, let alone the lay in that specific tech, are even capable of understanding the consequences and what we're loosing.

It's not unreasonable for a lay person to be told about facial recognition and think "well, it's just doing a better job than what a cop would have done anyway" without realizing that it often does worse than a cop statistically and that unlike a cop, all the cameras can be coordinated so that your movements are stored indefinitely and viewable by anyone, something that couldn't happen when a person was looking at people on their beat.

Ditto with online tracking, it's the extent of the ramifications that people don't think/know about. Even then, there are no alternatives that provide the simplicity of communication that Facebook does, so even after something like Cambridge Analytica, most people don't really have options to move away from without completely changing how they socialize, and to be honest, most people don't understand just how much information they leak even still.

>[. . .] no one, let alone the lay in that specific tech, are even capable of understanding the consequences and what we're loosing.

This 100%. Living deep in flyover country, I have heard the sentence in your second paragraph from several people.

And do you know who I blame?

Creators and marketers of AI/ML. People on this site are included in that list.

They are being lauded as the saviors of humanity. Think of all we can learn and do with AI/ML. Nevermind that they're just sufficiently large datasets with sufficiently complicated math problems. Also nevermind where that data is coming from or what it contains.

You won't have to worry about online shopping, because we'll be able to get you your stuff faster! Isn't that great?!

In flyover country, deep in flyover country, away from huge cities, away from tech, people do not understand what data is out there about them and what is being done with it. That is the biggest problem with all of this. They literally don't understand why it's a problem, let alone the nuance of the problems.

> Why are we tolerating this loss of freedoms? The only answer I can arrive at is "because it doesn't inconvenience people enough to do something about it".

Throughout recorded history, people have usually been "ruled" by some form of king, warrior, aristocracy, etc. But it's not like one leader could really hurt or kill every single person in a large society, so the people as a collective shouldn't really need to follow his orders. So why do they?

The simplest answer is, there are a series of trade-offs made when following a leader (or government). You have less autonomy, but you may gain some benefits, such as security, order, direction, and the possibility that they might accomplish some of your wishes. Of course, if the leader controls an army, you could say fear is a big motivator to follow their wishes, but then why does the army follow the leader? Same thing: security, order, direction, accomplishment of wishes, etc.

We all make tradeoffs to live in a society. The loss of most freedoms isn't actually a huge impact to your ability to live your life; even in a highly repressive society, you can still eat, sleep, socialize, which is all most animals need. The idea that your society might be secretly abusing its citizens is troubling, but it's not as bad as, say, a food shortage, or waves of crime. So on the whole, mass surveillance is a minor inconvenience, and not something worth flooding to the polls (or storming the gates).

==Why are we tolerating this loss of freedoms?==

Fear. Why do people think it is unsafe to walk outside when statistics show us we have never been safer? Why are people afraid of public places when crime is far more likely to happen in the home?

We need to go deeper though. The decrease in perceived safety is, at least in part, due to 24/7 news reporting about violence, crime, terrorism, hate and generally negative topics. Which itself is due to progress in information technology and in the way we make money out of it. There is literally no benefit for the general public in this.

Don't get me wrong, you have all the reasons to fear these things if you live where these things happen, but I'd bet my left hand that most people in 1st world countries ever witness any kind of serious violence.

The book Fortress America [1] posits that, in America at least, it has been a long shifting of the fear from red to black. Basically, after USSR was defeated, we shifted more vigorously into a "law and order" society. Politicians and the media played up the threat (even though all data was showing a safer society) of gangs and "thugs".

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Fortress-America-Embraced-Abandoned-D...

Tech has also given us freedoms. It's just what people do with it. This world would be so easy if nobody was cheating or aggressing on anyone else. And it's not lile that because people are terrible. Most people in this world are immoral and/or idiotic. The average person is not enlightened, nor even genuinely motivated to helping their fellow if they gets nothing in return.

Now you are asking for not just good nature or enlightenment, but for something more... moral courage.

The sad part is the people who are will be lost forever as we march this ugly walk into the Grest Filters which consciousness seems to tend to do to itself.

The only way to get something like moral courage from the masses is to spread ideas into people's minds the same way religious leaders or propagandists do. People love crusaded and want to be important so will become a part of them.

Your question was well-answered by the quote you are replying to.

Put more succinctly: It is the full time job of law enforcement to use these tools to solve crimes. Even if literally everyone protests them next month, if you wait 10 years, people will have moved on with their lives, and it will be implemented anyway.

Here is a concrete example:

Back in high school, a holocaust survivor visited our class. We were told the fundamental difference between the US and Nazi germany was that in the US, you could travel without carrying papers (which meant that people could keep the inevitable failings of democracy in check, since privacy while traveling and meeting people basically implies freedom of assembly and press).

That difference no longer exists in the US in any practical way because technology has obsoleted the legal mechanism of “you can’t ask for my drivers license without probable cause”.

>That difference no longer exists in the US in any practical way because technology has obsoleted the legal mechanism of “you can’t ask for my drivers license without probable cause”.

Are you sure this is quite as absolute and one-way as you’re saying here? ID isn’t required by government to be driven, use public transport, fly on private aircraft, use boats, etc. Sure as a practical matter in the US non-car options are not nearly as powerful as in most first world countries, but that’s not a matter of law. And while technology helped create the current state of affairs, it can disrupt it too. The motivation for drivers licenses is a real one of public safety. If self-driving cars mean most people cease manual driving though, the need for licenses will cease as well (and also most of the typical suspicions and justifications police use to pull over a car). That may result in a significant clawback of travel privacy in some respects. Practical is not always the equivalent of legal long term is it?

> The motivation for drivers licenses is a real one of public safety.

If the true purpose of a drivers license was public safety there are surely a large number of people who wouldn't be permitted to operate a motor vehicle. Or at the very least we would be required to periodically prove our competency.

>If the true purpose of a drivers license was public safety there are surely a large number of people who wouldn't be permitted to operate a motor vehicle.

That's silly. Driving in America at least is a quasi-right: while not technically a right by law, as things stand the economy and much of society in the country would collapse if most adults were not able to drive. But at the same time driving is not natural and definitely represents real danger. So the law reflects a balance between these two competing interests, with safety concerns slowly getting pushed harder over time. Driving requirements are relatively forgiving, and removal is taken seriously. But there are a lot of laws and thinking around how to improve safety. The licensing process has become more of a ramp too, with many (all?) states having increasingly graduated licensing and some starting to have rechecks needed for the elderly. Licensing for non-necessity driving (commercial vehicles, motorbikes etc) sees a significant spike in requirements.

People very much care. In highschool I had a good friend hit and killed by a drunk driver while they were walking right near school, and I would strongly resent any putting down of how devastating that was for the family and our group. But "individualized mechanized arbitrary point to point transportation" is also very much critical, and with current technology that means "a human driving". It's very unfairly glib to impugn that society isn't trying to balance here. What is needed to radically change the status quo is to finish the car technology so that a human is not needed. Once that is the case and manual driving becomes a fun luxury I expect we'll see licensing requirements and training increase a great deal, looking more like what professional motor racers do. The converse from a privacy perspective is that no, many people will not bother to carry drivers licenses with them anymore, nor will they need to.

Generalized authentication is and should be an important role of government, so some form of ID will still matter. But in terms of needing to have it on you? No, I do not think that legal requirements around that will change. The "true purpose" of a drivers license is in fact trying to have some minimum level of competence and personal responsibility attached to the act of personally controlling a multi-ton pile of metal moving at high speeds.

>Why are we tolerating this loss of freedoms?

The press sold us out. They rolled up, told us they were the forth estate. People are busy so they outsourced their critical thinking about government to experts. The press then proceed to not give half a shit about civics.

This is what I don't understand about the hard-line 2A advocates. They're so concerned with being able to "defend against the government" if needed but guns are no longer the government's biggest source of power over the people. Data and surveillance are far more powerful in 2019 than any weapon.

Full disclosure: I'm a gun owner. But I'd swap the second amendment for a data privacy amendment in a heartbeat.

> This is what I don't understand about the hard-line 2A advocates. They're so concerned with being able to "defend against the government" if needed but guns are no longer the government's biggest source of power over the people.

They also fail to realize that the 2A already failed, and that it's premise wasn't that gun ownership protected against a tyrannical government. It's that gun ownership was necessary to the militia-based security posture which was the alternative to relying on a powerful standing military and armed police forces for external and internal security, and that preventing the creation and reliance on those large standing forces in the first place was the safeguard against tyranny.

"But I'd swap the second amendment for a data privacy amendment in a heartbeat."

In practice, that would be a bad trade, because you can verify that you still have your 2A rights by being in possession of a gun, whereas with data privacy, all you have are solemn assurances that your rights are being respected, and when you discover you were lied to and you didn't actually have data privacy after all, you've got nothing.

If you mean some sort of impossibly-strong, enforced-by-God-or-aliens data privacy amendment, maybe. But that's not on the table.

(My point here is independent of the question of the 2A itself, but just looking at it as the proposed trade. Trading something concretely verifiable for promises that the promising people have every motivation to break secretly and you have no ability to audit is a bad trade.)

I definitely see your point. Though I would argue most of our rights are intangible and without ability to audit yet they're (so far, at least mostly) enforced by the court system. Your right to due process, for example. And your right to free speech. And your right against unreasonable government search and seizure. All we have are solemn assurances from the court system that our rights are being protected. So far, at least mostly, it's worked.

Just because something is difficult doesn't mean it isn't worthwhile.

For those who don't know, Ted murdered people with improvised explosive devices.

I've done some research that introduced me to some of his more... acceptable writing.

http://homepages.rpi.edu/~bulloj/tjk/tjk1.html

He was eventually caught after he coerced the NYTs into publishing his manifesto and his brother recognized the arguments contained within it.

Not quite stylometric analysis, but I think that's an interesting angle of the story.

a.k.a. "Unabomber" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Kaczynski

For eighteen years, while living in the woods.

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