AI and Trust
schneier.com
schneier.com
On the contrary, the recent batch of small large-models (<=13B) have broken away from corporate control. You can download a LLaMA or Mistral and run it on your computer, but you can't do the same with Google or Meta. A fine-tuned small large-model is often as good as GPT4 on that specific task, but also private and not manipulated. If you need you can remove prior conditioning and realign the model as you like. The are easy to access, for example ollama is a simple way to get running.
Yes, at the same time there will be good and bad AIs, basically your AI assistant against everything else on the internet. Your AI will run from your own machine, acting as a local sandbox and a filter between outside and inside. The new firewall, or ad-block will be your local AI model. But the tides are turning, privacy has its moment again. With generative text and image models you can cut the cord completely and be free, browsing an AI-internet made just for you.
Saying that there's open-source models so AI privacy is not an issue is like saying that Google's not a privacy problem because self-hosted email exists.
Most people install apps through an app store.
Yes, and maybe with some kind of "telemetry" to help the developers or other users ;)
I'm not sure about this at all. It looks like a clumsy, difficult interface to me. The easiest interface wouldn't require multiple rounds of back-and-forth to get the results you're seeking.
Of course small LLMs will still be commercialized, similar to how many startups, apps and other internet offerings now run on formally open source frameworks or libraries, but this means nothing for the consumer and how likely they are to run into predatory and dark AI patterns.
I have to strongly disagree -- most people get emails from others running their own email services. This doesn't mean the average consumer is running an email server. However, if email was just served by mega-corporations, well, it really wouldn't be email anymore.
And I'm not talking about spam. Legitimate email people want to get, is being constantly sent by small, independent organizations with their own email servers.
One can hope for a similar possible future with LLMs. Consumers won't necessarily be the ones in charge of operating them -- but it would be very, very good if LLMs were able to be easily operated by small, independent organizations, hobbyists, etc.
The issue is not "all AI will be controlled by...," it is "meaningfully scaled and applied AI will be deployed by..."
You can today use Blender and other OSS to render exquisite 4K or higher projection-ready animation, etc etc.; but that does not give you access to distribution or marketing or any of the other consolidated multi-modal resources of Disney.
The analogy is weak however in as much as the "synergies" in Schneier's assertion are much, much stronger. We already have ubiquitous surveillance. We already have stochastic mind control (sentiment steering, if you prefer) coupled to it.
What ML/AI and LLM do for an existing oligopoly is render its advantages largely unassailable. Whatever advances come in automated reasoning—at large scale-will naturally, inevitably, indeed necessarily (per fiduciary requirements wrt shareholder interest), be exerted to secure and grow monopoly powers.
In the model of contemporary American capitalism, that translates directly into "enhancing and consolidating regulatory capture," i.e. de facto "control" of governance via determination of public discourse and electability.
None of this is conspiracy theory, it's not just open-book but crowed and championed, not least in insider circles discussing AI and its applications, such as gather here. It's just not the public face of AI.
There is however indeed going to be a period of potential for black swan disequilibrium, however; private application of AI may give early movers advantage in domains that may destabilize the existing power landscape. Which isn't so much an argument against Schneier, as an extension of the risk surface.
> "[...] [AI] will act trustworthy, but it will not be trustworthy. We won’t know how they are trained. We won’t know their secret instructions. We won’t know their biases, either accidental or deliberate. [...]"
I agree that this is true with standard deployments of the generative AI models, but we can instead reframe networks as a direct connection between the observed/known data and new predictions, and to tightly constrain predictions against the known labels. In this way, we can have controllable oversight of biases, out-of-distribution errors, and more broadly, a clear relation to the task-specific training data.
That is to say, I believe the concerns in the essay are valid in that they reflect one possible path in the current fork in the road, but it is not inevitable, given the potential of reliable, on-device, personal AI.
Its going to be challenging to detect AI intent when it is sharded across many sessions by a malicious AI or bad actors utilizing AI. To illustrate this, we can look at TikTok, where the algorithmic ranking of content in user feeds, possibly driven by AI, is shaping public opinion. However, we should also consider the possibility of a more subtle campaign that gradually molds AI responses and conversations over time.
This could be be gradually introducing biased information or subtly framing certain ideas in a particular way. Over time, this could influence how the AI interacts with users and impacts the perception of different topics or issues.
It will take narrowly scoped, highly tuned single-purpose AI to detect and address this threat, but I doubt the private sector has a profit motive for developing that tech. Here's where legislation, particularly tort law, should be stepping in - to create a financial incentive.
So maybe our attempts at regulation shouldn't even start with AI. We should start by regulating the surveillance and manipulation that already exists. And if we as a society can't manage even that, then our chances of successfully regulating AI are pretty slim.
Promise Theory goes well beyond trust, by first understanding that promises are not obligations (promises in Promise Theory are intentions made known to an audience, and carries no implied notions of compliance), and that it is easier to reason systems of autonomous agents that can determine their own trust locally, with the limited information that they have. Promise theory applies to any set of autonomous agents, both machines and humans.
Back when this was formulated, we didn't have machines capable of being fully autonomous. In promise theory, "autonomous agent" had a specific definition, that is, something that is capable of making its own promises as well as determine for itself, the trustworthyness of promises from other agents. How such an agent goes about this is private, and not known to any other agent. Machines were actually proxies for human agents, with the engineers, designers, and owners making the promises to other humans.
AI that is fully capable of being autonomous agents under the definition of promise theory would be making its own intention known, and not necessarily as a proxy for humans. Yet, because we live in a world of obligations, promises, and we haven't wrapped our heads around the idea of fully autonomous AIs, we will still try to understand issues of trust and safety in terms of the promises humans make to each other. Sometimes that means not being clear in that something is meant as a proxy.
For example, in Schneier's essay: "... we need trustworthy AI. AI whose behavior, limitations, and training are understood. AI whose biases are understood, and corrected for. AI whose goals are understood. That won’t secretly betray your trust to someone else."
Analyzing that with Promise Theory reveals some insights. He is suggesting AIs are created in a way that should be understood, but that would mean they are proxies for human agents, not as an autonomous agents capable of making promises in its own right.
In some sense, corporations are already a kind of entity that has the properties we are considering. They are proxies for human agents. What is interesting is that they are a many-to-one kind of abstraction where they are proxying many human agents.
It is curious to consider that most powerful AIs will be under the control of corporations (for the foreseeable future). That means they will be proxying multiple human agents. In some sense, AI will become the most effective A&R man that ever was for every conceivable contract.
Current consumer-oriented AI (LLM's and image generators) act as untrustworthy hint generators and unreliable creative tools that sometimes can generate acceptable results under human supervision. Failure rates are high enough that users should be able to see for themselves that little trust can be placed in them, if they actually use them.
We can play at talking to characters in video games while knowing they're not real, and the same can be true for AI characters. Entertainment is big.
Frustrating as they can be, tools that often fail us can still be quite useful, as long as the error rate isn't too high. Search engines still work as long as you can find what you're looking for with a bit of effort, perhaps by revising your query.
We can think of shopping as a search that often has a high failure rate. Maybe you have to try a lot of shoes to find ones that fit? Often, we rely on generous return policies. That's a form of trust, too, but it's a rather limited amount. Things don't have to work reliably when there are reasonable ways to recover from failures.
Often we rely on things until they break, and then we fix or replace them. It's not good that cell phones have very limited lifespans, but it seems to be acceptable, given how much we get out of using them.
> There are areas in society where trustworthiness is of paramount importance, even more than usual. Doctors, lawyers, accountants…these are all trusted agents. They need extraordinary access to our information and ourselves to do their jobs, and so they have additional legal responsibilities to act in our best interests. They have fiduciary responsibility to their clients.
> We need the same sort of thing for our data.
IMO this is equally applicable to "non-AI" software. Modern corporate-controlled software does not have "fiduciary responsibility to [its] clients", and you can see the results of this everywhere. Even in physical products that consumers presumably own the software that controls those products frequently acts _against_ the interests of the device owner when those interests conflict with the interests of the company that wrote the software.
Schneier says:
> It’s not even an open-source model that the public is free to examine and modify.
But, to me at least, that's exactly what the following paraphrase describes:
> A public model is a model built by the public for the public. It requires political accountability, not just market accountability. This means openness and transparency paired with a responsiveness to public demands. It should also be available for anyone to build on top of. This means universal access. And a foundation for a free market in AI innovations.
Two of the Free Software Foundation's four freedoms encapsulate this goal quite nicely:
> Freedom 1: The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
> [...]
> Freedom 3: The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others. By doing this you can give the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
The problem is that, as it stands, most people do not have practical access to freedoms 1 or 3, and therefore most software you interact with, even software running on devices that you supposedly own, does not "do your computing as you wish", but rather, does your computing as the software authors wish.
Perhaps AI will exacerbate this problem further due to the psychological differences Schneier outlines in the article, but it's hardly a new problem.
I'm not sure thats right. Taxi drivers used to be paid mainly in cash, and a driver sitting on a pile of cash is a robbery target. Uber arrived shortly after ecommerce became pervasive; I've never taken an Uber ride, but I'm assuming that payment is nearly always electronic.
Doesn't your point support the quote? Taxi driving was dangerous because of cash and being a robbery target, and Uber changed that.
So basically Uber, not general progress, was what changed things to electronic payments etc.
Before any wise guys come in here and claim that you could order cabs to a location by phone before uber, I would like to point out that they frequently failed to arrive and you had no way of knowing whether or not they would arrive until you gave up waiting for them, so while you could theoretically do this is was terribly unreliable and often a big mistake.
In the ancient days, sure. But at least in the areas I go to, cabs have been accepting payment by card a long time before Uber came around.
I'm glad Uber fucked them to shreds. Now, of course, they're all polite and have credit card machines.
100% always, but I've heard that cash tips are becoming common.
Humans are evolutionarily primed both to trust and to distrust other humans depending on context.
It might actually be easier to flip the bit and distrust the creepy uncanny valley personal assistant than it is to "distrust" a faceless service that purports to be an objective tool.
I think a significant factor of individual trust is someone's technical knowledge of how their systems or tools work, shown by how some software engineers actively limit their children's exposure to tech versus a lot of mothers letting the internet babysit their kids. Apparently we can't rely on that knowledge being widespread (yet).
A much more terrifying problem is the misuse of AI by terrorists, or aggressive states and military. Or even the danger of humanity losing control of an advanced AI system which doesn't have our best interest in mind. This could spell our disempowerment, or even our end.
It is not clear what could be done about this problem. Passing laws against it is not a likely solution. The game theory here is simply not in our favor. It rewards the most reckless state actors with wealth and power, until it is too late.
At least in the US do you have any idea how long that battle took and how directly the tobacco companies lied to everyone and paid off politicians? Tobacco setup the handbook for corporations lying to their users in long expensive battles. If AI turns out to be highly dangerous we'll all be long dead as the corporate lawyers fill draw it out in court for decades.
The 'we can regulate this' argument relies on heavy, heavy discounting of the past, often paired with heavy discounting of the future. We did not successfully regulate tobacco; we failed, millions suffered and died from manufactured ignorance. We did not successfully regulate the fossil fuel industry; we again, massively failed.
But if you, in the present day, sit comfortably, did not personally did not get lung disease, have not endured the past, present, and future harms of fossil fuels — and in fact have benefited — it is easy to be optimistic about regulation.
1. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/22/opinion/openai-sam-altman...
We’re still dealing with most of the same politicians that were there in the late 80s. The anti-labor, pro-corporatist congress, if you will.
Maybe it’ll always be the same, but as the congress demographics changes, appeals to history don’t seem as strong.
Factually, no we aren't; the average tenure of serving members in each House of Congress is under 10 years. It would have to be close to double what it is, even if everyone else was sworn in today, if we were dealing with most of the same members as even the very end of the 1980s.
EDIT: I suspect this impression comes from the fact that outliers both are more likely to be in leadership and, independent of leadership, get more media attention because they are outliers, as well as because they have had more time to build up their own media operations and to have opposing media build up a narrative around them.
If you've served less than ten years your impact is likely limited. The politicians who have the most influence are the ones who have been there the longest.
The current Speaker of the House, the highest ranking position in Congress and the second in line of Presidential succession, has been in Congress for 6 years.
Except for the President Pro Tem of the Senate, which traditionally goes to the longest-serving member of the majority party, most positions of authority or influence just require the support of either the majority or minority party caucus; longevity is correlated with that, but not a requirement in itself.
"If we are victorious in one more battle like this, we shall be utterly ruined."
It is a conspiracy theory of course (and therefore wrong, of course), but some people are of the opinion that somewhere within the vast unknown/unknowable mechanisms of government, there are forces that deliberately slice the population up into various opposing mini-ideological camps so as to keep their attention focused on their fellow citizens rather than their government.
It could be simple emergence, or something else, but it is physically possible to wonder what the truth of the matter is, despite it typically not being metaphysically possible.
> The game theory here is simply not in our favor. It rewards the most reckless state actors with wealth and power, until it is too late.
There are many games being played simultaneously: some seen, most not. And there is also the realm of potentiality: actions we could take, but consistently "choose" to not (which could be substantially a consequence of various other "conspiracy theories", like teaching humans to use and process language in a flawed manner, or think in a flawed manner).
What you are talking about is called polling or marketing. It’s structural, not a conspiracy. It’s inherent to most all statistical analysis, and everyone uses statistics.
It is physically possible for a media campaign to be launched to increase the amount of discussion of such topics, which gets the public fired up and arguing with each other, leaving them less attention to pay attention to things like the issues surrounding Occupy Wall Street. Whether this actually happened is an epistemological matter, but it is not polling, and it is not mere marketing, though one could frame it as a kind of marketing: "here are some things to fight over, plebs....are you interested in doing so?".
And this is just one instance. And, defending a claim of nonexistence is essentially impossible, especially when the matter is largely subjective.
Why try to explain what is going on in a way that is unprovable and sounds slightly unhinged? There are structural reasons that can be proven to exist (e.g. engagement metrics) which explain the phenomenon. Occam’s razor.
Why people do the things they do is a good question. For example: why do you speak as if you are omniscient, and perfectly rational, simultaneously? I appreciate that is the norm of the culture we grew up in, but then so was racism ~20 years ago.
Figure that one out and maybe you will be on your way to figuring out your question, and perhaps a large swath of the other outstanding mysteries of "reality".
Can I get some Meme Magic (or radio silence) now? ;)
Which in some cases results in self-fulfilling prophecies like the "footloose church" which believes that dancing is driving young people away from the church instead of the church's own behavior.
For example, most people think in True/False binary: a proposition is either True, or False. If it is an extraordinary proposition, then it "requires" extraordinary evidence, and if "no" extraordinary evidence is available, then it "is" False. "LITERALLY" FLAWLESS "LOGIC" FOR THE WIN!
But if one's thinking is less simplistic (there are various superior gradients above this default approach), the situation "is" (appears, thus "is") very different.
This can easily be realized if the topic of discussion was abstract: psychology, logical fallacies, etc....but if the topic of discussion is an object level, ~"culture war" topic, this knowledge becomes inaccessible to the mind (similar to when a ChatGPT session becomes too long and the initial context (knowledge) has moved out of the active context window).
Humans are extremely interesting, I highly recommend studying their behavior, especially the behavior of the relatively more intelligent ones.
1. The danger of AI is they confuse humans to trust them as friends instead of as services.
2. The corporations running those services are incentivized to capitalize on that confusion.
3. Government is obligated to regulate the corporations running AI services, not necessarily AI itself.
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As a counter you could frame point 2 to be:
The corporations running those services are incentivized to make/host competitive AI products.
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This is from Ben's take from Stratechery: ( https://stratechery.com/2023/openais-misalignment-and-micros... )
1. Capital cost of AI only feasible by FAANG level players.
2. For Microsoft et. al., "winning" means being the defacto host for AI products- own the marketplace AI services are run on.
3. Humans are only going to provide monthly recurring revenue to products that provide value.
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Jippity is not my friend, it's a tool I use to do knowledge work faster. Google Photos isn't trying to trick me, it's providing a magic eraser so I keep buying Pixel phones.
High inference cost means MSFT charges a high tax through Azure.
That high cost means services running AI inference are going to require a ton of revenue in a highly competitive market.
Value-add services will outcompete scams/low-value services.
How much money would someone be willing to spend to capture Elon entering his eX-Twitter password?
Traent has showed how to run entire ML pipelines on blockchain
When you really trust someone rather than simply predict someone there is a special characteristic to what you are doing. Trust is both stricter and looser than prediction. You can trust someone to eventually learn from their mistakes but you can also trust that although they will make mistakes they won't drag you down with them.
Most of the people you consider friends are predictable and therefore safe. A friend who goes off script is quickly no longer safe and therefore no longer a friend. Family is not inherently safe but your trust model evolves as you share your trials.
Don't expect things from people you want to get closer to, but accept them when they defy your expectations.
It's not anymore. Surveys show that people nowadays trust businesses more than they trust the governments, in a major shift (https://www.edelman.com/trust/2023/trust-barometer)
We need trust because we want the world around us to be more predictable, to follow rules. We trust corporations because they do a better job at forcing people to follow rules than the government does.
This is not a change brought about with AI, it changed BEFORE it. (And just because an AI speaks humanly, doesnt mean we will trust it, we have evolved very elaborate reflexes of social trust throughout the history of our species)
When those kinds of trusts start breaking down, the world can get very scary, very quickly.
This is quite deep in the social stack, so at this point we just "pretend"[1] it's true.
[1] I use "pretend colloquially: it's actually not even on the radar most of the time, unless one works in marketing, "public relations", etc.
That's not how I read "interpersonal trust"; I read it as the kind of trust you might confer on a natural person that you know well.
The collapse in trust of governments is due to lobbyist bribing politicians. And corrupt politicians. And media controlled by a few billionaires who benefit from that distrust.
I’m pretty sure it’s for 2 reasons: 1) politicians are slick hair car salesman types that have no shame, 2) government being incompetent.
Re 2, if the government could do the things they promised to do, things they charge us for, California high speed rail for example, then people would trust them as much as big business. I can sue a big business, but thanks to incentives I rarely have to. The government on the other hand has lost more lawsuits, screwed over more people, and destroyed the environment to a much greater extent than any single business could manage to do. They use their monopoly on violence to avoid accountability, and waste public funds on their own lifelong political careers, frittering public money away on their own selfish partisan squabbles. Businesses are rarely too big to fail, and therefor cannot behave with impunity. There are only 2 parties. Imagine a world with only 2 corporations!
Schneier is right. Social trust is the central issue of the times. We need to figure out how to rebuild it. IHMO, one place to start might be getting money out of politics. It was a choice to call showering money on politicians, "free speech" instead of corruption.
This is not really a partisan thing. "You can't trust the police" is hardly right-wing. Anti-vax started in the anti-GMO anti-corporate homeopathic organic food subculture. Most of the recent criticism of the courts has been from the left (e.g. outrage over Dobbs).
> IHMO, one place to start might be getting money out of politics. It was a choice to call showering money on politicians, "free speech" instead of corruption.
There is no getting money out of politics. Money is power and power is politics. Notice that most of the criticism of "money in politics" comes from the media, because money is a source of power that competes with media ownership for political influence. "All organizations can influence politics" is not actually worse than "only Fox News, Comcast and Google can influence politics."
What we're really suffering from is an erosion of checks and balances. Capturing enough of the government to enact self-serving legislation was meant to be hard, but we kept chipping away at it because people wanted to do their new law, without considering that the systems preventing it were doing something important.
If you want to restore trust in institutions, you need to structurally constrain those institutions from being crooked.
Remove the SEC, the FBI, defund the IRS and the DOJ. And a member of congress is refusing to appoint any leaders of our military. Ostensibly due to a disagreement over abortion, but many believe it is retaliation for the military refusing to support an attempted coup a few years ago. Also there is discrediting all trust in voting and democracy itself after losing a national election (even though the administration's own Attorney General could find no meaningful evidence supporting it following his own nationwide investigation). And then there is the meme of the deep state, namely shorthand than anyone who is a civil servant and not a political appointee is not to be trusted. And I'll stop there as anything else start to get pretty political.
Are there items where the left is against trust in society? Absolutory. You called out a few (specifically the police), and the makeup of the courts. As well as you left out forms of de facto power the left typically opposes like board rooms and lending (vs de jure power listed above).
But to say that both sides/parties are against trust in American society in my opinion is either a false argument, or tunnel vision in news sources.
There is still no comparison between the two and the level of distrust in all aspects of society the right has been consistently seeding into broader society.
> Remove the SEC, the FBI, defund the IRS and the DOJ.
There is negligible chance of actually eliminating these federal agencies, and even if that was the position of the entire party, you're just talking about a policy position.
If you brought in James Madison and he said that we shouldn't have a federal IRS because the government programs it funds are the role of the states, that wouldn't be any evidence that he is opposed to institutions, it's just a question of which institution should serve that role.
> And a member of congress is refusing to appoint any leaders of our military. Ostensibly due to a disagreement over abortion, but many believe it is retaliation for the military refusing to support an attempted coup a few years ago.
Which wouldn't work. If you were trying to retaliate against some specific military leaders, you can't do it by refusing to appoint some entirely different ones. If you were trying to retaliate against a bureaucracy as a whole, the way to do it is to reduce their budget.
Meanwhile we have the obvious motive that opportunistic politicians will do anything they think will get them on television regardless of whether it otherwise makes any sense or serves any purpose.
> Also there is discrediting all trust in voting and democracy itself after losing a national election (even though the administration's own Attorney General could find no meaningful evidence supporting it following his own nationwide investigation).
For this to fit your argument they would have had to do this with the purpose of discrediting the voting system. The most obvious motive for that would be to bolster support for their proposals for in-person voting requirements and voter ID etc.
Maybe they have an ulterior motive for wanting these things, but it's hard to argue that they wouldn't increase trust in the voting system. Election security experts broadly agree that optical scan paper ballots are more secure than purely electronic voting systems.
> And then there is the meme of the deep state, namely shorthand than anyone who is a civil servant and not a political appointee is not to be trusted.
This is fundamentally an argument about democracy.
Local governments commonly have separate elected offices for the board of education, the constabulary, the comptroller, even the dogcatcher. Because the US federal government was envisioned to be small and limited in scope, the only elected positions are the general legislature and the Presidential ticket.
Leaving the entirety of the administrative state to unelected officials was never the intention and it's hardly an unreasonable position to be critical of the consequences.
> But to say that both sides/parties are against trust in American society in my opinion is either a false argument, or tunnel vision in news sources.
In general if you think that one party is dramatically worse than the other, it's because of your news sources. The parties agree with each other on almost everything and most of the points of contention are drenched with hyperbole.
These are not angels and demons, they're human politicians representing different constituencies.
> We trust many thousands of times a day. Society can’t function without
> it.
The obvious problem with this is that you sometimes just have to “trust” something because there is no other alternative. And he comes to the same conclusion some hundred words later:
> There is something we haven’t discussed when it comes to trust:
> power. Sometimes we have no choice but to trust someone or something
> because they are powerful.
So sometimes you are trusting the waiter and sometimes you are trusting the corrupt Mexican law enforcer... so what use does this freaking concept (as described here) have?
Funnily enough I have found that the concept of Trust is useful to remind process nerds that obsess over minutiae and rules and details that, umm actually, we do in fact in reality get by with a lot of implicit and unstated rules; we don’t need to formalize goddamn everything. But for some reason he goes in the opposite direction and argues that umm actually this “larger” trust is completely defined by explicit rules and regulations. sigh
> And we do it all the time. With governments. With organizations. With
> systems of all kinds. And especially with corporations.
> We might think of them as friends, when they are actually
> services. Corporations are not moral; they are precisely as immoral as
> the law and their reputations let them get away with.
Did I need Schneier to tell me that corporations are not my friend? For some reason I am at a loss as to why I would need to be told this. Or why anyone would.
> You will default to thinking of it as a friend. You will speak to it in
> natural language, and it will respond in kind.
At this point you realize that this whole article is a hypothetical about your own very personal future relationships (because he thinks it is personal) with AI. And you’re being lectured about how your own social psyche works by a computer nerd security expert. Ok?
> It’s government that provides the underlying mechanisms for the social
> trust essential to society. Think about contract law. Or laws about
> property, or laws protecting your personal safety. Or any of the health
> and safety codes that let you board a plane, eat at a restaurant, or buy
> a pharmaceutical without worry.
Talk about category error? Or rather being confused about causation?
“Think about laws about property.” Indeed, crucial and fundamental to capitalist states—and a few paragraphs ago he compared capitalism to the “paper-clip machine” (and rightly so).
The more I think about it, the more this Trust chant feels like left-liberal authoritarianism. Look at his own definition up to this point. You acquiesce to power? Well that’s still trust! (You click Accept to the terms-of-use every time because you know that there is no alternative? Trust!)
As long as there aren’t riots in the street, we the People Trust. Lead us into the future, Mitch McConnel.
Look, I get it: he’s making a normative statement, not necessarily a descriptive one. This speech is basically a monologue that he as a benevolent technocrat is either going to present to elected representatives in whatever forum that Harvard graduates etc. speak officially to people with power because they are some kind of subject matter expert. He’s saying that if he bangs his hand on table enough times then hopefully the representatives will enact some specific policies that regulate The AI.
But it misrepresents both kinds of societies:
- The US has low trust in the federal government. And this isn’t unfounded; it isn’t some Alex Jones “conspiracy theory” that the government is not “we the people”
- Societies with a high trust in the government: I live in one. But the Trust chanters just love to boldly assert that societies like mine (however they are) are such and such because they have high trust. No! Technocrats would just love for it to be that case that prosperity and a well-functioning society is born of “trusting” the smart people in charge, staying in your lane, and letting them run the show. But people trust the government because of a whole century-long history of things like labor organizing and democratization. See, Trust is not created by someone top-down chanting that Corporations are your friends, or that we just need to let the Government regulate more; Trust is created by the whole of society.
You have clearly gleaned some of the critique that I was trying to go for. So you can spare me the “actually”.
I am not terribly impressed by left-liberal technocrats. That’s the pet-peeve seedling whence my whole screed.
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These articles from Schneier are so incredibly NYT-reader pedestrian.
We trust many thousands of times a day. Society can’t function without it.
The obvious problem with this is that you sometimes just have to “trust” something because there is no other alternative. And he comes to the same conclusion some hundred words later:
There is something we haven’t discussed when it comes to trust: power. Sometimes we have no choice but to trust someone or something because they are powerful.
So sometimes you are trusting the waiter and sometimes you are trusting the corrupt Mexican law enforcer... so what use does this freaking concept (as described here) have?
Funnily enough I have found that the concept of Trust is useful to remind process nerds that obsess over minutiae and rules and details that, umm actually, we do in fact in reality get by with a lot of implicit and unstated rules; we don’t need to formalize goddamn everything. But for some reason he goes in the opposite direction and argues that umm actually this “larger” trust is completely defined by explicit rules and regulations. sigh
And we do it all the time. With governments. With organizations. With systems of all kinds. And especially with corporations. We might think of them as friends, when they are actually services. Corporations are not moral; they are precisely as immoral as the law and their reputations let them get away with.
Did I need Schneier to tell me that corporations are not my friend? For some reason I am at a loss as to why I would need to be told this. Or why anyone would.
You will default to thinking of it as a friend. You will speak to it in natural language, and it will respond in kind.
At this point you realize that this whole article is a hypothetical about your own very personal future relationships (because he thinks it is personal) with AI. And you’re being lectured about how your own social psyche works by a computer nerd security expert. Ok?
It’s government that provides the underlying mechanisms for the social trust essential to society. Think about contract law. Or laws about property, or laws protecting your personal safety. Or any of the health and safety codes that let you board a plane, eat at a restaurant, or buy a pharmaceutical without worry.
Talk about category error? Or rather being confused about causation?
“Think about laws about property.” Indeed, crucial and fundamental to capitalist states—and a few paragraphs ago he compared capitalism to the “paper-clip machine” (and rightly so).
The more I think about it, the more this Trust chant feels like left-liberal authoritarianism. Look at his own definition up to this point. You acquiesce to power? Well that’s still trust! (You click Accept to the terms-of-use every time because you know that there is no alternative? Trust!)
As long as there aren’t riots in the street, we the People Trust. Lead us into the future, Mitch McConnel.
Look, I get it: he’s making a normative statement, not necessarily a descriptive one. This speech is basically a monologue that he as a benevolent technocrat is either going to present to elected representatives in whatever forum that Harvard graduates etc. speak officially to people with power because they are some kind of subject matter expert. He’s saying that if he bangs his hand on table enough times then hopefully the representatives will enact some specific policies that regulate The AI.
But it misrepresents both kinds of societies:
- The US has low trust in the federal government. And this isn’t unfounded; it isn’t some Alex Jones “conspiracy theory” that the government is not “we the people”
- Societies with a high trust in the government: I live in one. But the Trust chanters just love to boldly assert that societies like mine (however they are) are such and such because they have high trust. No! Technocrats would just love for it to be that case that prosperity and a well-functioning society is born of “trusting” the smart people in charge, staying in your lane, and letting them run the show. But people trust the government because of a whole century-long history of things like labor organizing and democratization. See, Trust is not created by someone top-down chanting that Corporations are your friends, or that we just need to let the Government regulate more; Trust is created by the whole of society.