AI Mass Surveillance Megathread

[LordFall]

This seems to be a growing talking point so I figured we might as well talk about it. 

Flock cameras are the first big one to become mainstream but it's popping up in other forms. There are CloudRunner cameras being installed on the US Consulate in Toronto and Synagogues around Ontario.

I'm gonna go against the grain here and say I think it's both an inevitable trend but also good for society. You need police to be able to enforce the law and stop crimes. Individual criminals and organized criminal organizations have been running rampant these past few years. Leo made a great point in the libertarianism video that one of the main purposes of a nation state is to hold monopoly on violence and use it to ensure the safety of its citizens. 

Now the obvious question to ask is what do you do when the government itself is acting like an organized criminal organization!?

That's a bit harder to deal with. Rule of law should apply both to the masses, to the elected officials and to the shadowy elites. I really liked the journalists that went to surveil Flock headquarters themselves and Flock was weirded out and offended, what hypocritical buffoons lmao. 

I think ultimately the utopian vision would be to have an AI model that surveils basically everyone and has a threshold of error that is basically foolproof and only reports criminal activity for a human to review when it meets a certain threshold. That model should be open sourced and distributed on the internet so that people can verify that its weights are actually impartial. 

It would then also be used to surveil and judge the elites and humanity would live happily ever after. Is the philosophical idea at least. Curious on counters to this idea or in general thoughts on the mass surveillance wave that's about to ramp up further due to the AI surveillance tech now available for police agencies globally. 

Edited yesterday at 04:01 PM by LordFall

[Basman]

Almost first thing they used it for was stalking their exes. It's too much power at one's finger tips. It's too abusable and humans are too fallible.

Mass surveillance is treating the general populace as suspect as opposed to democratic citizen. Especially during a time of public distrust, there needs to be a democratic support, which I don't think you'll find much of currently.

[Hayato]

"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." - Benjamin Franklin

[LordFall]

16 hours ago, Basman said:

Almost first thing they used it for was stalking their exes. It's too much power at one's finger tips. It's too abusable and humans are too fallible.

Mass surveillance is treating the general populace as suspect as opposed to democratic citizen. Especially during a time of public distrust, there needs to be a democratic support, which I don't think you'll find much of currently.

They don't really keep a tally of how many criminals it actually helped stop though, I assume that it's far more than the random cop that stalked his ex. The technology also worked as intended, it had an accountability mechanism built in so that the cop was audited for his abuse of power and reprimanded.

2 hours ago, Hayato said:

"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." - Benjamin Franklin

Got it so apart from random quotes, what do you believe on the subject? 

If you really believe in this quote how far are you willing to take it? Is a seatbelt taking up your essential liberty? What about the right to carry swords, not that long ago that was your right. Are you a gun activist, should more people be encouraged to open carry?

I haven't researched Franklin much but it could also be said that his philosophy and the way he helped create the United States led to the many abuses of power that the US has been guilty of throughout its history. On top of the lax constitution that now puts them in the constitutional crisis that resulted in appointing a pedophile as their head of state. 

Edit: Also as I looked it up your quote literally backs up my point. He said this quote in regards to wanting to tax the rich Penn family to fund frontier defence in 1755 and the Penn family tried to bribe the assembly against it and he told them to not be cowards and take the easy money would be giving up their essential liberty.  

Edited 7 hours ago by LordFall

[Hayato]

It is not a random quote, it directly addresses what you’re saying. The Assembly refused to give up a permanent right for a temporary solution.

The USA has laws against pedophilia, have they prevented people like Jeffrey Epstein? No, he was the one doing the recording. Surveillance and enforcement are two different things. The USA Constitution isn’t lax it is just largely ignored.

Belts, swords and guns do not gather information about you.

AI is not unbiased, neither the data it is being trained on, nor the humans programming it. The AI surveillance utopia is just a modern 1984.

Who determines the critical threshold for a crime? You? Me? What is a threshold crime: joking about politicians online, wearing a hoodie at night, having more than 1 dog?

The people running the surveillance technology are not some unbiased angels that care about the truth. There are many ways they can use the information gathered against the people. Dynamic pricing comes to mind.

Surveillance only treats symptoms. If you really want to prevent crime, remove the cause. The cause for most conflicts is people just trying to survive. Guarantee their survival (housing, food, medicine, clothes) and most conflict disappears.

Edited 5 hours ago by Hayato

[LordFall]

2 hours ago, Hayato said:

Surveillance only treats symptoms. If you really want to prevent crime, remove the cause. The cause for most conflicts is people just trying to survive. Guarantee their survival (housing, food, medicine, clothes) and most conflict disappears.

You're wrong. If there are no consequences many will keep pushing for far more than they need for survival. Why do rich people commit crimes? Thus why I also agree with your point that the elites need to be policed as much as the masses. That was my idea with the AI system that assesses the actions of every human on earth and reports them when they fit a certain criminal threshold.

2 hours ago, Hayato said:

Who determines the critical threshold for a crime? You? Me? What is a threshold crime: joking about politicians online, wearing a hoodie at night, having more than 1 dog?

Who determines what constitutes a crime today? Criminology has been a field for a couple hundred years now, we are still figuring out how to run a proper society. It's a fair point. Some perspectives around it seem more valid than others. 

Knowing that you are surveilled makes crime way less likely though. That's why police foot patrols are effective. If you know that there are three cameras on every street block and you want to mug someone but all the friends you have that have robbed someone went to jail for it; you will be way less likely to try it.

If a couple of your boys got a few free thousand $$$ by robbing people and got away with it then fuck it why not give it a shot? 

This is kinda the plot of Death Note and Psycho-pass btw, they both explore how one tries to achieve a crime-less society. Great shows to watch if you haven't already. 

Edited 3 hours ago by LordFall