Of course, they don't have to live with all that so they don't actually care. Next time you could ask them whether or not they're willing to renounce their U.S. citizenship and become Chinese citizen again so they can be monitored 24/7 for their own "insider" "good", then you will start to get true answers from them.
Back to the topic though, as a Chinese, I don't actually at the opposite of video surveillance in public, it made many places more safer and thus prosper.
However, surveillance cannot went too far, and certainly cannot be use to shame people. It's about respect of one's dignity, a bottom line that a government should never cross.
Plus, given the poor accuracy that system outputs, what if the system made a wrong detection and displayed information of an innocent? Chinese government probably don't care about it though.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jan/22/swedish-bookse...
If they aren’t going to scale it back then I hope they go all the way with it.
I hope they try to automate it and feed everything about everyone to a centralized AI.
I hope they give it more and more control including the ability to direct military drones.
I hope it then turns on them.
Because the “smart stupid” people that implement well-intentioned malice like mass surveillance can’t usually see far ahead (see reports of data harvesting companies getting hacked.)
If this is the path we’re going to go down then might as well speed up evolution and usher in a new class of intelligent life on this planet.
The governments and corporations of the "Free World" will only pander to China, for “access to their market”, and individuals can't do much against a regime that would happily mow its own citizens down with tanks and then erase all memory of the event within a single generation. [0]
Maybe independent developers could put a notice against Chinese authoritarianism in their apps and services when they're accessed from a Chinese IP, to raise awareness among their public.
[0] http://www.bing.com/images/search?q=Tiananmen+Square+1989
There is no bottom to this abyss. There is no limit to the number of victims, the upper ceiling for that is 100%, or a gazillion people. There is no limit to their innocence, and no limit to the cruelty inflicted on them. There is no time limit, either. You say this because for you as an individual, it's easier rationalizing that non-resistance will somehow lead to a good outcome. But if everybody did that, it will become a trillion times worse for everybody, "forever", than ANYTHING you could do today. Setting yourself on fire in protest would achieve more, and hurt you less, than the outcome of global, perfect totalitarianism -- which is an ever shrinking noose of sociopathy, not stability.
Until you understand this you will not understand that your personal feelings are of secondary concern when basically the world is at stake. Not the planetoid, human society, the space where human personalities would have developed.
"A boot stamping on a human face, forever." Don't whitewash that in your own mind.. it involves blood, it involves children screaming in terror for what is done to their parents, it involves sobbing elderly crushed underfoot, "and so on". If you were face to face with just ONE such an act, could you really just shrug it off? If you could not help, it would still sit with you, you know that. If you were lucky, you would seek for ways to turn it into a constructive force.
What we are lacking is a perspective for what is at stake, and for the vast opportunities we have. As long as we use our minds more to make excuses than develop principles and stand behind them, we have no say in what is possible. Start with thoughts, then words. Don't be another voice calling people to fall into a sleep that would end in a potentially never ending, ever worsening nightmare.
I’m a 100% sure, really advanced AI will be like that. Millions will suffer as a side effect for the gain of few.
> Eyecool, he said, is also handing over two million facial images each day to a burgeoning big-data police system called Skynet.
A large scale protest is unlikely, but you’d be surprised what some rebellious CAFA students can do via art.
Art != Communication
And art is not a form of communication ether.
There is no shortage of literature on this topic but good place to start is Aristotle’s Poetics, essentially the first art theory ever written and it dives head first into the issue. In it, Aristotle laments on the corruption of communication at the hands of poetry.
I never asserted that.
> And art is not a form of communication ether.
That I did assert. Just because some books are written to argue something, doesn't make that truth. It took me 30 seconds to find 2 sources which support that art is a form of communication [1] [2]. So at the very least (if your sources argue your point, while your work is a response to another work) there does not seem to be consensus on that matter.
Now if you could refer to your source that could be great. Because [3] didn't explain your viewpoint at all.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communication
The Wikipedia for Poetics does appear to lack an elaboration on Aristotle’s more critical positions on poetry. The exact nature of his criticisms are contested (but their existence is not) so maybe that is why. Check out thes Quora entries for some relevant discourse:
“Viewpoints” are not very well “communicated” with art. Art correlates better with questions.
A helpful exercise would be to take a piece of art and break it into elements, then categorize those elements into Communication elements which would be ideas (sometimes subject and predicate but could be more basic literary expression too) and Art elements, being the poetics and aesthetics. It’s not an easy difference to describe in a comment but the Communication invokes ideas while the Art invokes emotion and other oddities. They are not always easy to decifer and articulate, but it’s very very fun to do if you like art in this way.
Once broken into these categories, you can now ask yourself what category is responsible for the revolution. It will be the communication category, sometimes with the support of the Art category.
Also, in critique, media only refers to medium plural, not content but strictly the matter which serves to represent the abstraction.
Only if you look at it from a short-term, narrow angle and only because communication is so advanced nowadays. If you look at the time when communication was more limited, you can find that there are several art movements who most certainly and quite obviously communicated their PoV, a zeitgeist, or flat out propaganda (a recent example is posters and paintings from WWII).
> “Viewpoints” are not very well “communicated” with art. Art correlates better with questions.
This is just pedantic. Those questions lead to viewpoints eventually. The author might or might not have intended those viewpoints but that is irrelevant.
One problem with this is that since NEWS and almost all media is State-owned in China, there might be protests and we might be unaware, also the protesters are straightaway sentenced plus now even their family members get "negative points" if I am not mistaken. There's a reason why Chinese people living outside also dont say negatively.
https://www.samsung.com/us/es9000-75-inch-slim-3d-led-smart-...
THEN you make any kind of rules you want
Prevent any rebellion with AI
Install implants to people to further cement your control later. You won’t even need to do facial recognition.
There are essentially two options here:
1) A ruling class enforcing totally arbitrary rules on a society of “pets”
2) An AI that eventually makes the ruling class completely irrelevant
My main concern is that this AI will not be sensitive to what humans need or want and will cause a lot of mismatch that they won’t be able to get out of anymore. Revolution won’t be an option. You’re just stuck in a jail being controlled by a dumb AI that just prevents any way out of the jail.
There may be no more progress or advancement as this AI would not have any abilities or interest in any of that. Just a zoo of humans essentially.
We are already turning the entire planet into farms and monocultures.
And a zoo for ourselves is next. No matter what you do someone will invent autonomous X that will then set the standard for all human behavior. It will be so efficient as to notice when you did a tiny thing wrong and the penalties would be extracted via perfectly mapped system of rewards. It will know anyone who tried to help you out as well.
It’s just too “sweet”.
1. You assume stopping "revolution" is the goal. It is not. All you have to do is look at what outcomes "revolutions" in an info saturated/low attention span/consumption culture based society have produced in the last 20 years.
2. In 2013 the Washington post did an estimate on how much was being spent on the surveillance society in the US. Everyone reacted in disbelief. Do you know by how much that budget has increased in the last 5 years? Are these people just brain-dead to be spending this kind of cash? Ofcourse not.
The US has made its share of mistakes over valuing freedom and squandering potential. China is overvaluing control and will make its share of mistakes too. We have to learn from both sets of mistakes to arrive at the right balance of where society should go in high noise info saturation environments. These are very new environment that society hasnt been in before and the right path ahead is not as obvious as people think.
Sooner or later government would require things like TV sets with front camera. So when a person watches TV, camera watches that person. There have been huge progress made in emotional inference which can allow government to measure emotional responses to what person is viewing. Imagine there is a news of rebellian getting crushed and if you are consistently showing supportive emotions, you can get black listed for further investigation. Cities can get microphones at restaurants and other places to analyse what conversations are happening and find hot spots where "trouble makers" hang out. Previously we had only vast sensor networks. Now we can turn each sensor in to autonomous spy that works loyally without salaries and demands nothing but cheap electricity. Computers allows for scale when humans are being replaced. If you want million spies scattered all around, its possible fairly cheaply now. I would also expect lots of other countries to adopt variant of these tech, typically under the notion of improving safety and security for general public.