Knowing more about AI makes people less open to having it in their lives

Is it just me? Doesn’t this feel like the more natural way to frame this? There’s something about the title that feels like people are being encouraged to know less about it.

I’d be interested if anyone has insight into the mental/ linguistic mechanics of this.

Go away Europol. We already have enough problems to deal with around Big Tech right now without also having to worry about European police states demanding them to do away with any semblance of user privacy.

“When we have a search warrant and we are in front of a house and the door is locked, and you know that the criminal is inside of the house, the population will not accept that you cannot enter.”

If you already know they’re a criminal (i.e. they’re already convicted), why do you need their messages? Or are you referring to suspects as criminals? Also, likening digital communications to actual, physical, living individuals is some “You Wouldn’t Download a Car”-level fear-mongering.

So what are you referring to, then? Inflation-adjusted wage growth?

Purchasing power, which was not shit in the 90s compared to today. That’s what really matters; what can you get with the money you have.

You’re ascribing way too much rationality to the average voter here.

I think you’re ascribing too little. The average voter is not a political philosopher, but they’re also not comatose. They understand simple economic principles like tax cuts being given to others and not to them, or subsidies for certain industries and not others, or the lack of government action to curb rising prices, etc. They may not have all the proper labels to describe what they’re seeing vs what they want to see (and indeed, the US has spent so long demonizing Socialism and propagandizing Capitalism that most can’t describe either properly), but polling proves that most Americans (hilariously, even most Republicans) don’t want cutthroat neoliberal everyone-for-themselves economic policies.

Bold of you to assume there’s more to come, in light of recent events.

I think that Trump would love to install himself as a dictator, and maybe he will, but even dictators keep controlled elections going for the appearance of legitimacy. He’s already 78, and no other Republicans have managed to replicate his popularity among GOP voters. One way or another (unless the US government literally dissolves, which is my preference tbh) we’ll be dealing with a post-Trump US government sooner or later.

We’ll see how long it takes for the government to put a stop to US companies actively data-mining, profiling, and discriminating against our citizenry. I’d say we need a Chinese company to come in and do it, but clearly they’d just ban that one company instead of the actual problematic actions, and allow US companies to continue exploiting us.

bull market

The stock market is not the economy. The economy on the ground has not been bullish. The US stock market doing well benefits the wealth-holders, not workers.

people primarily care about their own life, and just aren’t motivated by big abstract concepts

I agree, which is why the DNC’s attempt to allow a leftward shift only in its social policies has fallen largely flat with connecting with voters. It’s a sort of Rainbow-Politics, if you will. Voters see that they’re not actually moving Leftwards on economic policies that would help their own lives.

Sadly, it seems the DNC is taking this as a message that the Leftward shift on social issues was the problem, rather than the lack of economic change. Sanders has been talking about exactly this ever since election day, but the DNC leadership is already signaling they don’t believe that or care. I am worried we’re in for several Presidential election losses before they all die out or get the message.

Passion isn’t felt towards everything equally, it’s specific, and Democrats can’t figure out how to make people passionate about their candidates without compromising on their leaders’ neoliberal economic policies and their so-called “rules based order” of American hegemony, so they keep losing. Obama ran as a populist candidate, and he blew away previous numbers even though he turned out to be a staunch neoliberal. Biden barely managed to eke out a win in 2020 (“Despite his relatively comfortable 74 vote margin in the Electoral College, Biden only won the decisive states of Wisconsin, Georgia and Arizona by a combined 43,000 votes.”), and it was only because he was coming straight out of Trump’s term. Harris had 2 months to try to turn around Biden’s dumpster fire of a campaign, and she made too many missteps.

Ultimately, candidates have to earn votes, and the DNC’s anti-populism and pro-neoliberalism clearly aren’t doing it for people. Maybe in the '90s when people’s salaries were booming, Clinton was able to win on it, but we’re not in that economy, and most Millennials and younger have only seen recessions and stagnation. Even after Trump, we’re in for more losses if Democrats only allow for Progressive social policies, and not economic or political ones.

The fact that Congress could come together so rapidly and so unanimously to do something so stupid, at a time when our country is falling apart, says so much about their priorities. They work for the Capitalist class, not us.

I hate to link to Reddit (and I’m too old to know how to get to the original video), but this also seems pretty relevant: https://www.reddit.com/r/TikTokCringe/comments/1i302rf/if_tiktok_being_banned_doesnt_radicalize_you_as/

In the beginning, sure. But all the TikTok users actively choosing Chinese alternatives would seem to disagree with that, now.

You’re argument is basically that you should have the right to to ruin yourself.

Look, I agree with you that TikTok is bad, but… YES, freedom means the ability to choose, good or bad.

If you want someone to blame for this, blame the US government for allowing US tech companies to become so predatory and gross that young people literally prefer a foreign product that may be profiling them. It’s not like data collection and censorship isn’t rife on Xitter or FB, and the reality for most Americans is that the US government has more ability to use their data to directly harm them than the CCP does. No one is worried that the Chinese government is going to show up in Alabama with CPS in tow because a teen revealed they’re trans online.

Starting into the article, I got the impression that it was heading for a “centralization ultimately better” argument, so I’m glad it concludes on decentralization and federation’s advantages.

There are no issues that exist on federated and distributed channels as individual nodes that don’t also exist on centralized ones, differences only emerge when you try to treat or exercise control over distributed systems as a group. Facebook is completely centralized, but they still have to deal with third party content making its way onto their platform via bots, API posts, integrations, ads, etc. The big difference is that with a centralized platform, you have a Single Point of Failure, and that’s bad all-around.

There is literally no advantage to a centralized platform that I can think of (though I’m sure that people less opposed to authority/ hierarchy would disagree).

Wasn’t part of the point that the mindset necessary to create Iron Man would inevitably lead to Ultron?

Automation to increase power (productivity) beyond what humans alone could do -> Iron Man -> Cutting out humans once they are the chokepoint/ limiter in power (productivity) -> Ultron

Companies want automation because they don’t want human limits on productivity to restrict their profits. That mindset is the problem. If we accept that mindset as a valid business operating model, it will never not lead to wanting to remove humans as much as possible.

Turns out the Luddites were right, and the company-owned factory automation was a scheme to dilute worker pay and value. That we’re now fighting not to have workers cut out of the equation entirely kind of proves that it was in fact a slope we’ve slipped down.

The person quoted in the OP who said

I’m probably being too hopeful

I’m probably being too hopeful

They are. Trump likes to make statements that he thinks sound “strong”, and that’s all that “and it will not be good, frankly, for anyone” was. He didn’t actually have any intention or meaning behind it, he’s just pandering to his faux-masculine base who like hearing threats made because threatening people is “manly” in their minds.

businesses it says work with China’s military

So for the battery company, is the work… selling them batteries? Like, is this list supposed to be a list of companies actually directly performing military work for the CCP, or just vendors?

Also, unless they’re in violation of e.g. the ban on use of forced Uyghur labor in Xinjiang (like tons of US companies have been caught being), why would they be sanctioned? We’re not at war with China, nor actively sanctioning their military just for existing.

Exactly, this will go in my ‘cool tech I don’t use’ pile immediately. :P

For those interested, the reason it’s not the same as a backdoor is that the result of the computation done on HE data is itself still encrypted and readable only by the original owner. So you can effectively offload the work of a certain analysis to a server that you don’t actually trust with your keys.

Do iPhones have a BYOK system for people to supply their own keypairs? Or is their OS open-source so that people can see how the keys are being handled? Because if not, it just sounds like all it takes to break this is for Apple’s OS that it controls to ship the private keys that it generated up to its servers?

Where there’s object detection there’s csam detection.

This is not true at all. A model has to be trained to detect specific things. It does not automatically inherit the ability to detect CSAM just because it can detect other objects. The method it previously used for CSAM image detection (perceptual hashing) was killed for bad privacy implementation, and the article specifically notes that

Tsai argues Apple’s approach is even less private than its abandoned CSAM scanning plan “because it applies to non-iCloud photos and uploads information about all photos, not just ones with suspicious neural hashes.”

So even images that the local detection model doesn’t match to CSAM would be being uploaded to their servers.

Apple killed it’s last version in August 2023 because it didn’t respect privacy.

It was also not that good.

I would be interested to see what lines you read between, because “identifying landmarks and points of interest” doesn’t sound like anything capable of identifying CSAM. I think you’re giving a big corporation a bunch of credit there is no reason to suspect it is owed, for an excuse they never professed.

It allows processing data without decrypting it, which is great in terms of preventing someone else from snooping on it, but doesn’t change that Apple is retaining the ability to analyze the data content, which is the actual issue here.