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Comment by starpilot | Hacker News Reader

I read that book in high school too.

It's relevant.

Yup, because this time it is facial recognition technology. What if it is mind-reading technology in 20 years time? If you don't draw the line in cement instead of sand at some point such as now with facial recognition technology, it will be redrawn over and over and over again.

Given that several the hacker community here familiar with dystopian future literature accepts this as inevitable in many comments, suggests that a slippery slope argument is not in the least bit far fetched.

If here there are people are accepting, then in other areas of society there are people actively arguing in favor of using facial recognition technology everywhere. Those same people will probably be arguing for equivalent of telescreens once something akin to them are invented.

There exist algorithms for estimating emotion from facial video. The accuracy is kind of hit or miss, but it's enough for "he's experiencing anxiety during the security search, he must be a terrorist."

Or as they say in Eurasia, "behaving abnormally":

  http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4464298

Once you can download an isotope separator or a plague kit, privacy concerns become moot. The societies not running under total AI supervision will simply go extinct. So the question is what kind of supervised society do you want?

  Isotope seperator - plague kit

I assume this is downloading nuclear bombs or viruses? And that means that we need AI to monitor us constantly in case some idiot kills everyone?

Yes. If your household fabricator can make arbitrary machinery, you can say "Make me a uranium-235 enricher."

Any sci-fi book recommendations where I can read about this sort of thing?

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