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Comment by paprikanotfound | Hacker News Reader

Doesn't google facilitate all those things? Doesn't internet itself facilitate?

the information is not new. how easy it is to get step by step instructions is new. Try it yourself. Google is good but not instant, step by step good. you need to do your own research that takes time. time that anti-terrorist units use to track you down. now this time factor is very limited you don't need to do research, cross reference materials, sources, etc. LLM does it for you. a research that could take days is done in 1 hour.

> time that anti-terrorist units use to track you down.

Speaking from the perspective of a USian, I wish Federal law enforcement was that hypercompetent. (If they were, perhaps folks would stop to question the ever-broader expansion of 24/7 surveillance of ordinary folks.)

The distressingly-complete Panopticon that has been built over the past several decades [0] makes it really easy for them to get you when they know to search for you, specifically. History (both recent and not-so-recent) has shown that if they don't know who they're looking for, or don't even know that they should be looking for anyone, they're just godawful.

[0] ...and whose continued construction is vociferously cheered on by folks on all sides of all of the aisles...

To play devil's advocate, it's not inconceivable that machine learning may eventually allow well-heeled governments to finally realize the dream of finding needles by building sufficiently large haystacks, or at the very least coerce otherwise unruly citizens into compliance based on the belief that it is able to do so.

> ...or at the very least coerce otherwise unruly citizens into compliance based on the belief that it is able to do so.

I would argue that that day is already here, and has been for quite some time. (What makes this worse is that some agents of the State also believe that they have this capability, which results in profoundly unjust and substantially damaging results.)

> ...it's not inconceivable that machine learning may eventually allow...

Sure. I agree. It may eventually allow. There's no question about that. The thing is that 'cowl' was referring to the situation right now, not the one in some unspecified distant future.

As to law enforcement policy; as we mechanize [0] our policing and law enforcement, we must put additional constraints on the people who police and enforce the laws to keep the harm they can do to uninvolved innocents to a minimum.

Our laws already recognize the need for this: ask yourself why -in the US states that have such laws- nonconsensual audio recording of telephone (and other such) conversations is not permitted, but taking notes by hand is always acceptable. [1]

[0] Electronic machines are machines, too, you know!

[1] "You can't prove that someone took notes by hand, so it's pointless to try to stop it." is not a counterargument... you can't prove that unless you find the notes, just as you can't prove that someone recorded the audio of the conversation without finding the recording.

Seems like the general state of the world is the greatest facilitator for all three.

Facilitation is not an idempotent operation.

What if the LLM made you solve a really complex math equation before it gave you the results? Would that make it ok?

Google and other search engines link (after the AI response and ads) to information hosted somewhere created/published by someone who is usually not Google.

OpenAI et al are creating the information and publishing/delivering it to you. Seems like a more direct facilitation.

Of course, after all knowledge is centralised in an OpenAI deatacenter I'm sure they will be happy to deal fairly with the liabilities /s.

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