Agreed. can we just live in a world where we can have a little bit of privacy. I'm OK using a card to pay for a journey, if that means it takes me a few seconds longer to take it out of my wallet.

Alot of this kind of technology is implemented without your consent, take facial recognition in airports. You have to go through the process with no easy alternative.

The comment 'if you have nothing to hide, then you have nothing to worry about' is so old and such a weak argument. People have fought for years to defend the freedoms of people and it is being thrown away and disregarded by corporations and governments.

How quaint. Extrapolate 100 years into the future... we live in a zoo ruled by AI and very few people if anyone in charge. No one can escape or make any meaningful choices of any consequence. Maybe they will partially be in a hive mind and maybe not.

And along the way, we were always saying “ooh, this will be used against us someday”. Well of course all this will be built and “used against us”. How you gonna stop progress?

As an individual, I can decide to not work on such things. Didn't Google employees take a stand against something similar? and Google had to backtrack.

I not only understand this sentiment but also live myself by these rules. But for every person who refuses to work on this type of tech there are hundreds ready to fill the gap and happy to defend and gaslight critics.

We've been playing this game since decades[1] and the pace has been accelerating (and keeps on doing so). There is no way to stop this because the state always plays the long game, and the odds are rigged against us.

[1] Jacques Ellul "The Technological Society" (pdf) https://archive.org/details/JacquesEllulTheTechnologicalSoci...

[2] James C. Scott "The Art of Not being Governed" (pdf) https://libcom.org/files/Art.pdf

[3] James C. Scott "Seeing Like a State" https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300078152/seeing-state / pdf: https://libcom.org/files/Seeing%20Like%20a%20State%20-%20Jam...

I will always upvote James C. Scott. More people on this site should read his stuff

Agree. I haven’t read all of Seeing Like a State yet, but it does contain quite a few hints about how to protect yourself from the power of states.

For example, states like to make their subjects “legible” to the state in specific ways, so deliberately becoming illegible is a defense mechanism.

Personally, I have been enjoying that the facial mask has surely been making facial recognition more challenging, though of course this is short-lived.

Not only have we been playing this game for decades, because of the ratcheting effect of so many privacy infringements, it's almost impossible to go back to a happier time.

If someone else works on it, then it will still happen. And what then?

Often there's a talent penalty to morally questionable projects.

companies are perfectly capable of compartmentalizing information and also adapt/evolve their messaging so it never looks as bad from the inside. this works for both very large companies and start-ups.

And rational, smart employees can still be gamed with the simplest of tricks, e.g. "What the Thinker thinks, the Prover will prove." -- Robert Anton Wilson https://www.seriouswonder.com/raw-what-the-thinker-thinks-th...

That just means they're crude and oppressive as opposed to smooth and oppressive. If you're expecting the market to fix this problem, it won't.

It depends on how you frame the "morally questionable projects".

There's no talent shortage for 5G.

I see no talent shortage for special forces that go in foreign countries to maim and kill all in the name of freedom and democracy.

Of course it will happen. It's like atomic energy, some physicists decided to not work on it and some did work on it. There's nothing we can do about it.

AI can’t even drive a car in the snow, I’d give it more than a 100 years before I’m in a zoo made by one.