Comment by jrochkind1 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jrochkind1 | Hacker News Reader

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I'd like more people to talk about AI and surveillance. I think that is going to be one of it's biggest impacts on society(ies).

We are a decade or two in to having massive video coverage, such that you are probably on someone's camera much of your day in the world, and video feeds that are increasingly cloud hosted.

But nobody could possibly watch all that video. Even cameras specifically controlled by the police, it had already outstripped the ability to have humans monitoring it. At best you could refer to it when you had reason to think there'd be something on it, and even that was hugely expensive to human time.

Enter AI. "Find where Joe Schmoe was at 3:30pm yesterday and show me the video" "Give me a written summary of all the cars which crossed into the city from east to west yesterday afternoon." "Give me the names of everyone who entered the convenience store at 2323 Monument St last week." "Give me a written summary of Sue Brown's known activities in November."

The total surveillance society is coming.

I think it will be the biggest impact AI has on society in retrospect. I, for one, am not looking forward to it.

I think you're describing technology that has existed for 15+ years and is already pretty accurate. It's not even necessarily "AI"/ML. For example, I think OpenALPR (automated license plate recognition) is all "classical" computer vision. The most accurate facial/gait/etc. recognition is most likely ML-based with a state-of-the-art model, admittedly, and perhaps the threshold of accuracy for large-scale usefulness was only crossed recently.

The guard rails IMHO are not technological but who owns the cameras/video storage backend, when/if a warrant is needed, and the criteria for granting one.

The difference is that AI makes annotating/combing through all that data much more feasible.

Can you explain what you mean? The queries in jrochkind1 are not something I'd expect AI (LLMs, I assume) to be necessary for. Too simple and factual. (Maybe just the last one would be where interpretation kicks in—knowing what to emphasize in a summary, describing actions.) Did you have something else in mind?

If you have a bunch of surveillance footage, the bottleneck is your analysts' ability to comb through it. You can sit LLMs on top of faster object detection/identification algorithms to create narratives across your surveillance net that are easy to query, can be overlaid on timelines, etc.

That's fair, but I think it's a significant step beyond the queries jrochkind1 was describing. (I also don't trust LLMs to do it accurately but maybe that part will change.)

> I'd like more people to talk about AI and surveillance. I think that is going to be one of it's biggest impacts on society(ies).

We lost that fight when literally no one fought back against LPR. LPR cameras were later enabled for facial rec. That data is actually super easy to trace. No LLMs necessary.

Funny story, in my city, when we moved to ticketless public transport, a few people were worried about surveilance. "Police wont have access to the data" they said. The first request for data from the police came < 7 days into the systems operation, and an arrest was made on that basis. Its basically impossible to travel near, by any means, any major metro, and not be tracked and deanonymised later.

Now if you have no understanding of history or politics, this might not shock you. But I find it hard to imagine a popular uprising, even a peaceable one, being effective in this environment.

Actually LLMs introducing a compounding 3% error in reviewing and collating this data might be the best thing to ever happen.

I think the cost of inference will massively reduce the possible benefits AND harms of the AI society. Even now, it's practically impossible to get ChatGPT to actually hard-parse a document instead of just reading the metadata (nor does it currently have any mechanism for truly watching a video).

That metadata has to come from somewhere; and the processes that create it also create heat, delay and expense.

I find it truly strange that people hold both positions simultaneously

- AI is good enough to do "bad" things as to scare us

- AI is also bad enough to do "good" things as to be undesireable otherwise

There's a difference in quality needed for bad things vs good.

If I'm trying to oppress a minority group, I don't really care about false positives or false negatives. If it's mostly harming the people I want to harm, it's good enough.

If I'm trying to save sick people, the I care whether it's telling me the right things or not - administering the wrong drugs because the machine misdiagnosed someone could be fatal, or worse.

Edit: so a technology can simultaneously be good enough to be used for evil, while not being good enough to be used for good.

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