A concept of an AI personal assistant

indiehackers.com

9 points·matyas··4 comments

Wrote a little concept for an AI assistant. What do you think?

I think any potential benefit for having an AI assistant would immediately be offset by the problems, scale, and impact the collection of that data would engender on your life.

Its a short step from a simple assistant to having a spy that watches you every hour of every day, and may not just watch but also interfere in non-alerting ways.

What happens when the company monetizes without proper disclosure where it develops a model of you, and then alert the authority when you deviate from said model for enhanced surveillance or harassment. Government would be a guaranteed customer. Dictators and other authoritarians would love it. China already does a lot of this with their social credit framework.

Free speech, that's gone. Privacy, gone. Future gone. The perverse incentives that inevitably lead to exploitation and enslavement over time are pretty horrifying.

Its the shortest of steps to Orwell.

That is why control is so important. Just like Wordpress took over the web design landscape, an open source model you control at home is important in countering the specter of the big bro ai.

In some areas like this one, control is just an illusion.

You can certainly do things to reduce and risk manage the downsides, but you can only ever do so against scenarios you have dreamt up and spent time confirm and validating that your solution works. Its an endless amount of work that isn't sustainable.

The only way to ensure the data collected can't be used against you now or in the future, (i.e. isn't stolen in some way), is to not collect it in the first place.

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