The Panopticon Is Already Here
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
While Tethics and AI are buzzwords du jour, the problem is more general: The weakening of liberal democratic values.
We need laws and regulation that guarantee privacy more concretely as a foundational right.
By letting its foreign policy wonder into grey area by playing overtures with regimes of all kind without any reservations, it allowed for norms, and boundaries to be blurred, and resolve of its camp blunted.
What is happening now, is that the whole Western camp have descended into whataboutism with relation to what rogue regime each bloc member is playing ball with, without no authority left in the bloc "clean enough" to police it.
What rogue regimes made to the West in the last 20 years, is nothing, but a gang initiation in reverse.
First they lured the West into playing their dirty games, and when Western countries thoroughly dirtied their hands, then come and say "your hands are as dirty as mine, what's the point fighting now?"
Make no mistake, I think that facebook and social media have chilling effects on discourse and are, on the whole, very negative, but I can still get on any forum and call my national leader a clown (aka Xi = Winnie the Poo) and not risk going to jail.
I'm not making a comparison – I'm simply arguing against something.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/159184620X?psc=1&ref=ppx_pop_...
And Argentina is kept in line via WHO loans and regular scourging through economic means.
I am very curious when exactly you imagine a period where "The West"'s hands weren't dirty. Both before and after WW2 ended, for example, many European nations still had colonial empires where unspeakable atrocities were happening under their direct rule (not as abhorrent as the Holocaust, but still extraordinarily disgusting). In the period that followed, "the West", just as much as Russia and China, immediately started supporting favorable dictators wherever there was some conflict - like the military anti-communist dictatorship in Greece with Allied backing, and many far-right regimes in South America and Asia.
During this same time, gay people were legally persecuted across "the West" just as much as elsewhere (though, oddly enough, with a short reprieve in early communist Russia - before WW2, before Stalin) - including, famously, war heroes like Alan Turing. Lynchings were still happening in the USA. In fact, the USA at this time had a system of first class and second class citizens with explicitly racist laws.
And in the years that followed, while civil rights movements grew in power in Europe and the US (with strong opposition from the government, for a very long time), "the West" only escalated its fight against democracy in the rest of the world - either by supporting brutal dictatorships established by others (Indonesia, South Vietnam, a lot of South America, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, even in communist bloc countries such as Romania), or by orchestrating their own coups to install loyal dictators in place of elected leaders (with initial success in Iran or Nicaragua, or ending in failure in Cuba, North Vietnam). Other European countries supported horrible regimes in their former colonies, usually supporting white or loyalist people against revolutionary or "brown" people - such as Swiss, UK and US support of the apartheid state in South Africa in the 1980s.
How does that saying go? "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it". Thank you Google.
“Until they secure their personal liberty, at some unimaginable cost, free people everywhere will have to hope against hope that the world’s most intelligent machines are made elsewhere.”
I don’t agree, with the “right” people in charge, the intelligent machines pose a risk to humankind everywhere.
What exactly are you suggesting, other than "be a good person?"
I didn't say "be a good person", so what exactly are you taking issue with, other than what it "seems like" to you? I even stated that I'm not primarily concerned with outcome or others, this isn't advice to anyone, it's a statement of fact.
> "I know what's required for human dignity..."
This is a personal value statement, different people have different ideas of what dignity means. There are likely some universals but there's a huge amount of variance too.
Of course it is. What else could it be?
> different people have different ideas of what dignity means
Then they can come forward and state that theirs is compatible with being subject to totalitarian rule.
Even without trying, I find so many wise words in support to what I know to be true both in my heart of hearts and from decades of lived experience.
> I am well acquainted with all the arguments against freedom of thought and speech — the arguments which claim that it cannot exist, and the arguments which claim that it ought not to. I answer simply that they don’t convince me and that our civilisation over a period of four hundred years has been founded on the opposite notice.
and
> The fallacy is to believe that under a dictatorial government you can be free inside.
-- George Orwell
> the concept of “freedom and the pursuit of non-material goals” is incredibly important, but also incredibly fragile. Not only does it allow us to pursue our own lives, it also prevents us from becoming tools of crime. It is humanity’s first line of defense, or we should say the last. Actually, it’s the sole line of defense. [..] Freedom is not a handout, we need to earn it with our efforts. You can lock up my body but you can never imprison my will.
-- Qu Weiguo
> Suppose that humans happen to be so constructed that they desire the opportunity for freely undertaken productive work. Suppose that they want to be free from the meddling of technocrats and commissars, bankers and tycoons, mad bombers who engage in psychological tests of will with peasants defending their homes, behavioral scientists who can't tell a pigeon from a poet, or anyone else who tries to wish freedom and dignity out of existence or beat them into oblivion.
-- Noam Chomsky
In the meantime, the criticism is that "other people think differently", with not even a hint of what arguments they might have.
And the kicker is, if the arguments are for totalitarian rule, their content wouldn't even matter, I could simply kill or ignore or slander the people who bring them forward to win the argument -- while that would violate my own principles, it would not violate theirs. If being ruled by and deciding facts by force is okay, my force is as well as any -- but if that path is suggested in earnest, the hypocrisy instantly becomes visible. And preaching water and drinking wine isn't even a different set of values, it's nothing.
This article and a lot of the literature assumes the same tools are not also turned upon the managers of society (i.e. that they get to use the times in secret). Many fear that knowledge of our lives will support interference in our lives. Perhaps any such interference must be just as observable and prohibited by law in a free society.
Who watches the watchers? We all could. When there is a conflict or question we have records to review and public opinion to adjudicate.
Of course we would have to rethink a number of assumable cultural expectations.
There's so much in this article that merits comment / discussion, but this sentence really jumped out at me. I'd been vaguely aware that this kind of thing was happening in the PRC, but not at this historic scale....
Western values matter more than ever. Here's hoping for a sea change this fall.
This should be universally obvious but fundamentally people are people no matter their origin or culture.
We need to bow out in the same manner with the debate against the East. There’s a billion people, if they don’t want free uncensored Internet, who are we to say anything? If they wanted it, they’d have it. They know the ins and outs of the idiosyncrasies of their society, the same way the west does (how the west reconciles virtual slave labor to maintain it’s lifestyle of affordable luxuries (everything from food to clothes to electronics)).
But, there is a new issue. Slavery in America was considered the ‘peculiar’ institution. Surveillance state is something we have to ignore, similar to, I don’t know, making your women wear varieties of face coverings (Islam), we have to accept they are acclimated to the mental gymnastics required to sustain their pride. Whatever. We shouldn’t waste our energy on that, it’s a losing battle.
But, the ‘peculiar’ institutions are the things we need to probe. A repeat of pre-extermination Holocaust in China is a no go. I hope the examination keeps up, and I hope we retroactively apply this new spirit to some of the trespasses that occurred in Palestine as well.
China, though, owns an Islamic region. So they can't run away from it. They could build a wall, as Israel did, but that just contained the problem. Israel was never able to get large numbers of Arabs to abandon Islam. So Israel has an ongoing headache. China is trying to avoid getting stuck in that deadlock.
It's not the surveillance system that's the big problem. It's that they went all the way to concentration and re-education camps. They're trying to break the hold of Islam. In too brutal a way.
It's pretty much an official propaganda policy of CPC to maximally polarise the conversation, and convert it to "US vs them" format, with "our (imagined) values," and "their values"
With a number of people here for whom failure is not an option, it's a bloody destination, undermining anyone who tries, you will get the society you deserve.
I mean, I do also write to MPs and various offices. What I mean to say is it's very difficult to build a grassroots movement that opposes the establishment, Brexit being the big exception to the rule.
Anyone campaigning for say, digital rights against government surveillance could get cancelled by the media very quickly.
> Anyone campaigning for say, digital rights against government surveillance could get cancelled by the media very quickly.
Oh come on, get cancelled by the media? They might be lazy at times but the media doesn't 'cancel' stuff.
Seems like it's there.
The media doesn't cancel people directly but they do amplify minor Twitter outrage to a global audience and as such, part of the problem. The canonical example is entire articles being written on 1-2 tweets supporting a particular opinion, but ignores thousands of tweets with a different opinions.
You are asking people to be bothered, when their own Western governments were asking them not to for the last 20 years.
These people got very well habituated to the injustice their own countries perpetuate.
Rather the other side of that conflict, really. This complicates things. I have to ask, especially seeing the 'cancel culture' and the suggestion that things have been getting worse for years, which definition of 'western values' you mean.
From where I'm standing, there's never been as much ability to advocate for your POV, including from groups that have historically been brutally oppressed. It's messy, but that's democracy for you. I think it's an instructive contrast with what's going on in China.
Western values can be a big pain in the butt, and yet I wouldn't have it any other way. We're living through a spectacular vindication of exactly Western values, compared to some other ideologies/ethos that have gained traction in the past.
Neither of those groups naturally represent a majority of people, they're just having an outsized megative impact on society by being loud.
While Soviet Union had centralized unidirectional brainwashing, US now has bipolar, decentralized brainwashing. Not quite the same but also not quite that different.
If anything it's all those "western values" clashing together in a rather unfortunate way, exposing our society's inability to deal with free speech amplified by technology, corrupt politicians, greedy billionaires, and consolidated media empires.
This sucks, and it's not just messy, the whole thing is failing at the seams with no hope in sight.
No such dogwhistle signal was intended here, at all. "Western values" was meant as shorthand for democracy and democratic ideals. Related tangent: it bothers me that the far right attempts to conflate patriotism with nationalism.
HRC was a principal driver of the Trans Pacific Partnership. I've heard claims that it was about containing China but they've always come with no citations. My general understanding was that the TPP would have made it easier to outsource to China even more, harmonizing (at least on paper) IP law to allow more outsourcing of things like programming, radiology, CAD, IT, accounting, paralegal, etc., which could have been a final nail in the coffin of the US middle class. These are among the last upwardly mobile middle class jobs that remain in the United States. While it's true that US manufacturing remains a large component of GDP, automation and efficiency gains have made it a declining contributor to employment.
I categorically cannot vote for Trump because he is a racist and is associated with fascists (categorical blacklist in my mind) and is personally constitutionally unfit to be president, but I fear that Biden will return us to a course of pretending China is a friendly nation. Like the last election where I unhappily voted against Trump (not "for" HRC), there is no good choice.
The motive for our China policy is of course the same as the motive for looking the other way at Saudi human rights abuses and their role in 9/11: money. Had Hitler found a way to line American pockets, I wonder if that holocaust thing would have mattered.
I've seen hopeful signs that standing up to China is now a bipartisan position, but 5 years ago it certainly wasn't.
International Trade Treaties were meant to do so earlier but wound up botched by including too many outright special interests forcing deal breakers. Beyond even state level interests into irrelevant "noisy minority" ones like trying to enforce location name branding onto new world which used it for centuries as implicitly "in the style of Parma".
The IP strategy ones often missed that it wasn't stealing - they sent the plans over themselves to save money. Even without illicit third shifts or counterfitting per se they would fundamentally learn enough to compete on knock offs. If the IP was actually precious to them they would have never sent it abroad to manufacture as the percentage saved wouldn't be worth it.
In my opinion what is spoken about IP in general and trade with China beyond "it is cheap/has high industrial concentration advantages" are comfortable lies to ease anxiety of the status quo as opposed to recognizing a nuanced and messy strategic situation of many actors which doesn't fit into a TED talk let alone a sound bite.
I don't think it was missed, in whole or in nuance, by anyone paying attention, but bringing attention to it was met with accusations of racism, and those were partisan.
Not that I'm chill with the Right, either: the "markets can do no wrong" philosophy leads to an enormous blind spot. Greedy optimizers fall apart when sub-components need to coordinate. When an adversary realizes they can just pay the hand to shoot the foot, suddenly the system finds itself with a destroyed industrial base but can't understand what just happened because the explanation lies in the blind spot. That's an even bigger problem than easily co-opted social justice causes.
There are 1.8 million Palestinians in Gaza.
OP was just pointing out that Palestinians are also imprisoned and in fact are a larger group.
To become prisoners, one would have to consider Palestinians to not be members of a separate country to Israel, but rather 2nd class citizens forced into a sort of apartheid.
The Chinese government is literally putting Uighurs in box cars and shipping them to camps.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaza_Strip https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xinjiang#Human_rights
In a resource-constrained, cut-throat competetive economy where everything is seen as a zero-sum deal, the average man will never hesitate to root for less-for-others if it guarantees more-for-me.
Where people's measure of worth is what one owns rather than what one does or how one lives, such a decadence is but a mere natural happenstance.
The eastern scriptures depict this in an allegorical way - a time in the world where there's no evil (satya yuga, pure and natural), followed by a time where the world is deviating towards order (treta yuga), followed by a time in the world where the balance of dharma (righteousness) tilts slightly towards adharma (wickedness or everything opposite of righteous) which was Dwaparayuga, followed by the age where righteousness is nowhere to be found (Kali yuga which is where we are now) This being a cycle and the cycle continues forever and ever. A refresh will happen - how soon or later, nobody seems to know!
AI is a race that absolutely must be won by good actors rather than totalitarian states.
I'm sure people will misinterpret what I am trying to say. But, it is framed as a "democracy or tyranny" question. I believe that although the authoritarianism is quite horrific in some ways, in some respects there are actually advantages. Which, if you are still reading, is not to suggest in any way that it is the correct path, but maybe is a hint that our current "democratic system" may not be quite what it is cracked up to be either.
Again, in no way suggesting we should get closer to a closed system, but I feel like honest evaluation will see very significant deficiencies with western governments such as the United States. For example, looking at the extreme political divide in the country sometimes makes government seem like a joke.
I personally believe that the best and maybe the only way to move forward constructively is to be realistic about the flaws in both extremely divergent views (east and west) and think of a totally new shared philosophy and way for government to operate..
But most likely that will not happen, and I also personally believe that another world war may be stimulated by poor technical adjustment to global accounting collapse (along with the complete failure of cultural and political integration). I think if this occurs then it will prove that humans are not fit to control the planet, and hope that we will soon have competent and (one can hope benign) but much more sophisticated AIs that we can pass the torch of evolution to.
Developments like these will just turn that up to 11
What occurs after?
Palantir, on the other hand, has a direct role in this process of concentrating undesirables.
That is like saying "In the dark future of unrestrained capitalism will sell ads to sex slaves chained in the basement - where they have no money or freedom." It might tug at heart strings but it makes so little sense it sounds like an outright parody of such sentiments.
With such a government, any future wouldn’t be desirable. Imagine such government in charge of unemployment benefits, health services, the military, anything really: it’s grim in any case.
Moreover, universal basic income is universal, by definition. If a government denies it to some particular citizens according to some criteria, it is not universal anymore. It becomes an income provided to anyone who is in favor of the government, which is a very different thing. So, if universal basic income existed, even the Chinese government would have to give it to everyone... or otherwise give it another name.
Not because I support it, but because in the circumstances in question the implication that they should have been treated as "full people" (in the only place 3/5 applied) is the pro slavery position.
Of course the slaves should have had freedom. Of course they should have had the vote. But they had zero of either of those. Increasing the power of the society that enslaves by 3/5 the number of slaves isn't treating them as 3/5 of a person! Morally speaking the number should have been zero (or negative!) if it had to be a question at all.
That’s why you don’t negotiate with terrorists. Sooner or later, they will leverage their position into a better deal at your table, or they will find a better deal at a different table, one which may render any leverage against them moot.
To the degree that increasing that fraction from 3/5 would raise the taxes paid by slave holders, it is not "pro slavery".
Having said that, IIUC, the restriction only applied to "direct taxes" whereas the bulk of US Federal Government revenue at the time was from tariffs and excise, and in any case was a much smaller portion of GDP than today (although to some degree that extends to representation as well, as a limitation of the power being controlled).
My general point stands that the great injustice was all the ways we were treating people as 0/5th of a person, not that we could have taxed some states a little more or given them a bit more power.
The likelihood of universal basic income being completely strings free is very low. You get convicted of some felony, you lose it, you are guilty of domestic violence you lose it, you say something very un-PC you lose it. And you may say, yeah, so what, those are bad people. But it would be like “hate speech”. Hate speech in the 90s was one thing, today it means someone disagrees with you on policy.
UBI gives government a lever to control people by threatening to reduce or stop payments as a form of punishment.
I've never seen anyone point that out before.
The most likely outcome, which happens with many other kinds of government programs, would be for Congress to delegate significant authority over UBI to some regulatory bureaucracy in the executive branch.
Similar to the way the IRS, EPA, and FDA work, there would be some department of UBI with broad discretion over how the law is interpreted, the ability create additional regulations and fine people who do not obey them, etc.
You can't solve this problem with code. It's a political problem.
Any group trying to take it away once people have it will find out it won't go well.
You are perhaps imaging a scenario where UBi is provided by a NGO?
Medicare has worked pretty well for the elderly for years. Old people and their families don’t lose everything for routine care anymore. Until it comes time for long term nursing home type care.
Everyone else is one car accident or cancer diagnosis away from ruin.
Further, no everyone is not one car accident or cancer diagnosis away from ruin, have been involved personally with both this is a false statement
If you are unable to work, you’re unable to maintain coverage in many circumstances. Many many people will be terminated within days or weeks of being out of work.
I used to setup Medicaid enrollment systems as a consultant — big counties have contractors to liquidate the assets of sick people driven into Medicaid every day.
Ok, but that in no way means it is "good", you seem to operate under the flawed belief that universality == good, when it can be universally bad
>has access to many types of care that requires private insurance for anyone else.
That is clearly false, as an example when my parents got on medicare they had to find new providers and new doctors as their long time doctors did not accept medicare at all largely due to the substandard payments they would receive.
It is false to say the medicare offers the exact same access as private payers. There are many many many doctors in private practice that do not accept medicare, you almost exclusively have to enter a large health network for it to except medicare largely because those health networks have the ability to increase the prices on their non-medicare patients to make up of the loss they experience by accepting medicare and/or they end up with a HUGE patient / doctor work load for medicare patients requiring them to schedule appointments months or some times a year or more in advance
To highlight medicare as model we should all have shows either A) your ignorance of medicare or b) your willingness to accept a standard of care far lower than what we have today in private medical treatment
>>big counties have contractors to liquidate the assets of sick people driven into Medicaid every day.
it is ironic that you talk about people being on illness away from ruin in the private system when you understand and know that if you end up with a illness bad enough the government will seize all of your assets to pay for that care. Does not seem like a vary fair system to me but I am sure you do not believe in private property either most socialist do not
When my dad had a stroke, requiring extensive hospitalization and rehabilitation, the biggest expense that they faced for the hospitalization and rehab phase was ambulance/ambulette service. They were fortunate to have had the means for private supplements for things like homecare and physical therapy beyond that Medicare, private insurance and family could accomodate. Most folks do not.
> it is ironic that you talk about people being on illness away from ruin in the private system when you understand and know that if you end up with a illness bad enough the government will seize all of your assets to pay for that care. Does not seem like a vary fair system to me but I am sure you do not believe in private property either most socialist do not
I've spent most of my career in finance, so I doubt that I would fit in well in socialist circles. I would agree with you that the system that requires people of modest means to either self finance care that costs $300-700/day, or become indigent to receive Medicaid social benefits is fundamentally unfair and arguably cruel. Ultimately it's draining the wealth of the nation away, and will impact the earnings potential of our fellow capitalists - how will consumers buy my products if 60% of their cashflow is rent/health/transportation?
My employer can fire me for any or no reason and no notice and I’d be left with a short COBRA runway of suddenly-expensive healthcare, which I now can’t afford because I was just fired.
My employer can (and does) change my insurance provider, add or remove benefits, and I have zero say over that process. I certainly can’t vote for a new CEO or request a different provider from my company. Take it or leave it.
My health and well-being is tied up with the same entity that tells me what to do for 8 hours a day. That doesn’t feel like “freedom” to me.
Universal healthcare as a concept is not by itself related to authoritarianism. Indeed, guaranteeing healthcare (whether it be state-run like the UK or all-private like Germany) and paying for it through tax revenue rather than through employment subsidy is a feature of many Western democracies.
You can thank government for that as well, as Price Controls from WWII, and ongoing regulations and tax burdens are the leading reasons employment and healthcare are linked in the way they are.
>>Universal healthcare as a concept is not by itself related to authoritarianism.
If you do not believe that is authoritarianism then I shutter to think what it would take for you to recognize an authoritarian system
>> Indeed, guaranteeing healthcare (whether it be state-run like the UK or all-private like Germany) and paying for it through tax revenue rather than through employment subsidy is a feature of many Western democracies.
That is a false dilemma, I support neither system nor is employer provided vs government provided the only choice we have as a society
Using the Authoritarian nations (though I am sure your going to disagree describing them as authoritarian) of the UK and Germany to support your position is not going to win me over.
I support individual liberty, and individual rights, and generally only Negative forms of right.
the UK, Germany, and most of the EU have adopted a position of Collective rights, and a whole host of Positive rights which are Authoritarian in nature. Sure they are not NK or China, but simply because they are not full on Totalitarian regime's does not make them libertarian either