Comment by cmrdporcupine | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cmrdporcupine | Hacker News Reader

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Was expressing this fear to my wife and kids the other day. Ubiquitous cameras everywhere (like in the UK for many years) and other surveillance technology has always been a concern but had scaling limits -- but when you combine it now with the cheap ease of machine learning technologies we have a serious problem.

And then consider drones, mobile devices. And then mass disinformation and/or disruption via LLMs.

As a long time advocate of old school mass action, and a believe in active protest movements as part of a healthy democracy, I have a strong feeling of unease. I've had it since about 9/11, but it's now really bad.

e.g. if you know, with certainty, that heading out to a protest could lead to your instant termination from your job because a drone passed over and took a photo and identified all 100,000 people in the crowd instantly.. would you still go?

Or if having been identified, some malevolent actor could just turn around and mass produce fake content from you and others in the crowd, to discredit you?

Shivers.

AI also has the potential to detect your every unique tic in a way that humans would be incapable of doing. You could be masked but your gait and other body movements will give you away, or at least place you in a statistically likely pool of suspects.

"Walk without rhythm and it won't attract the worm."

Anti Walking recognition techniques have been under development for decades though..

https://youtu.be/iV2ViNJFZC8?feature=shared

> e.g. if you know, with certainty, that heading out to a protest could lead to your instant termination from your job because a drone passed over and took a photo and identified all 100,000 people in the crowd instantly.. would you still go

The funny thing is that most people see this as a feature rather than a bug. Before the 2024 election the policies of most surveillance platforms roughly matched the culture of upper-middle-class Californians, so the argument was "if abusive technology is used to shut down opinions I don't like, I don't see a problem with that". Good luck explaining why such an attitude is a problem.

"If guns are used to shut down crime, I don't see a problem with that."

Is kind of a cogent argument.

In this philosophically exaggerated isomorphism, you seem to be implying that either criminals and crime fighters should both be equally armed or that crime is largely subjective and therefore enforcement is wrong.

It seems like you're ultimately arguing for anarchy (nobody should have abusive technology -- guns), and therefore no institutions are worth protecting with force. It seems equivalent to believing that everyone will respect the commons in the tragedy of the commons without an enforcing mechanism.

Regardless of how you answer, you have run headlong into the paradox of tolerance, and the problem of what to do when people violate the social contract (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_contract), which is at the very core of what this country was founded on.

What "opinions I don't like" are you referring to? It's also worth reflecting on that you're writing on a platform where shutting down opinions you don't like is a major part of it, in order moderate extremism and promote curiosity.

Many events we celebrate as major achievements can be traced back to a group of people consciously violating the social contract, and succeeding to establish more rights for themselves using force.

I honestly don't know how to answer, because if you think long enough, you'll come to the conclusion that all rules are arbitrary, and everything could be questioned. Yet at the same time in practice we can agree on at least some basic principles of how the society should function. It's just incredibly difficult to formulate these principles in a manner that would be useful for logical reasoning.

I think what actually irked me was that many people say they believe in freedom of speech, but actually define it as "seeing others agree with me". I think that Reddit's "unpopular opinion" community is prime example of such attitude, where people say they value unpopular opinions, but actually promote popular ones.

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