What really gets to me is how big tech isn't even pretending anymore to serve society. They clearly feel superior to the rest of us and entitled to rule.
What a strange thing to say. Why would they? Do you have their interest at heart? Do you have the average persons interest at heart? Again: Why would you? That's by definition not how interests work. And that is roughly fine (albeit a kinder universe would be nice).
Even if I have no one's best interest but my own at heart, I can't do anywhere close to as much damage to society at large as a trillion dollar corporation. Also, corporations aren't people, and it's silly to compare individuals to massive organizations.
There's definitely people who blindly praise and romanticize China and ignore how dystopian all the monitoring systems there are, there is essentially no privacy. Even chat apps are infiltrated or Chinese run in some way, shape, or form.
If you frame it this way in your mind you will be surprised when people pick surveillance over public disorder. If you don't like that world (I don't either) you can't bury your head in the sand about the problems it is solving, you need a "No, but... " framing where you give answers that actually work.
There is a ground-level appeal of the China-style panopticon because it delivers public order and clean streets. Larry didn't just buy his way to digital dictator by bribing the right people, it answers a question in a way other people are avoiding, because answering it requires a lot of work and uncomfortable tradeoffs.
every time this comes up I feel it's worth reminding people that this already happened before in American history - 1890's and the robber baron industrialists that monopolized everything.
And of course, the best behavior will be the behavior that poses zero threat to the people in power. What a great future we have ahead of us, my colleagues.
And that's what the Larry Ellisons of the world want.
One of the bigger lies ever told is that free-market economies help democratize nations. They don't. If they did, we would have made massive investments in Eastern Europe after the fall of the Marxist-Leninist governments there. Instead we decided to invest in China and, later, Vietnam, among others. These are two very non-democratic nations.
Why did we do that, especially after the Tiananmen Square Massacre? Because it better fit the needs of capital. The last thing they wanted was to set up shop in a bunch of countries where the people had organized against authoritarian regimes for change. If they can get rid of the likes of Ceaușescu and Honecker despite their brutality, they could certainly do things like strike for better working conditions and a greater share of their employers' earnings.
Ellison's just another in a long line of guys with far too much money and far too little empathy. If you get out-of-line in a way that financially or politically inconveniences him, he wants you dealt with as severely as possible. China does that, and now he wants that in the US and other Western countries.
It's subjective. When I was a kid, "best behavior" didn't include assaulting law enforcement and smearing feces on the walls of Congress, but these days that behavior is acceptable, even officially celebrated.
It is often commented how people who know they are recorded behave a certain way what is not commented on is how people who know they are recording other people behave. When you see your screen and you know you are recording them it creates this "power trip" it's feeling some of us know and love, but when we truly know it we don't love it anymore it's almost like a drug the high feels good the consequences are for others but that little guilt that lingers we don't like that. Now scale it at the size of an organization, the power trip with other people feel even more better, and the consequences ... well
I think when we look back in 10-20 years, mass nearly universal surveillance will be seen as one of the largest social impacts of AI, or perhaps the largest.
We have barely scratched the surface, and I don't think most people have thought it through.
I guess I appreciate Ellison is educating people about what's going on...
If anyone managed to stick around through the later, lesser seasons of HBO’s Westworld, they were rewarded with a shockingly plausible view of the world Ellison is describing.
And at a time when most of the computing technology required still seemed like sci-fi. I remember kind of chuckling at the idea that the machine intelligence had made and saved a recording of a random conversation Aaron Paul’s character had with his mother in a diner a decade prior.
I have never been a privacy zealot, but it seems inevitable barring major political action that the panopticon will emerge comprehensive, actionable, and cheap.
Sounds pretty bad, but what’s the context? We should be skeptical of a quote out of context with some dogpile parallels without any other context. When did he say it? Where did he say it?
Most people are not, indeed. So this is the crux of religion: the "god" watches you, and will punish or reward you. Now social media and governments takes over that role.
If they were just recording and it required human labor to interpret it would merely be a traditional regime of totalitarian repression. But the tech allows real time interpretation. Imagine that a stalwart racist or antiracist gets to decide what behavior constitutes hate, and to dispatch enforcement before you can finish rolling your eyes. This is what makes me fear Ilya Sutskever's warning of infinitely stable dictatorships.
Sometimes I wonder, if we were actually allowed to engage in the consensual drugs and sex that constitutes 95% of the activity people want to "get away with", would our societal response to infringements on our privacy be even weaker than it currently is?
You can’t have mass immigration, mainly economic migrants from the third world, unboxed funded police forces, and a legal system built for high trust, highly educated, fairly homogeneous populace at the same time and expect things to be all happy days.
Look how well it worked for cops! I'm not suggesting we get rid of their bodycams, but it's easily gamed.
It's one thing to be rich and enjoy the luxuries afforded by that, but to buy dominance over the very lives of others is when the angry mob retaliation is entirely justifiable.
Exactly, cops can impose force on you and their jobs requires them to do it. If they wouldn't have body cams, it would be hard to see if coercion was justified or not. Surveilling powerless folks works in the other direction. It only serves to make them easier to discipline and teaches them that deviations from approved behaviour will be deterministically punished. And I also don't believe anyone is currently paid to act on their best behaviour as a simple citizen. Although this kind of monitoring works quite well for children under 6, you don't want paternalistic institutions, since you will never outgrow them.
From what I've seen it goes both ways with bodycam footage. The cops often have to put up with seriously dangerous stupid people and cops on power trips are video'd abusing people. Not that I am defending Ellison. Sadly the rich will always be able to buy their way out of most any bad situation except screwing over richer people.
He forgot to mention we'll need 1000 more data centers and 3000 new prisons to manage the chaos. So confused by this billionaire behavior with wanting to control society.
