Telsa has an uncertain future, much less capability to actually pull off robots.

Cheap and ubiquitous surveillance is the norm in the present.

Everyone carries a little snitch on them. Even if you opt out of using a mobile device, the chances of the person you are talking to having it on them is effectively 100%. And I am nearly certain that one way or another 'they' have voice biometrics on all of us. Thank god we live in a country with strong checks & balances...

Every Tesla is constantly recording, so if anyone has been within 50 feet of a Tesla, they already have your picture.

Between cell phones, IOT doorbells, and incredibly inexpensive security cameras, even a world free from Tesla has cheap and ubiquitous surveillance.

But you're correct, Tesla is yet another among the multitudes with a robust surveillance network

Every starlink station (and probably) tesla, scoop up every mac address they ever see. This is one is unique in that it puts all that data into a single actor's hands.

Of course starlink stations scoop mac addresses. They are in this way equivalent to and on par with every other wifi router.

A Tesla vehicle could also scoop up visible mac addresses, and is equally as capable of doing so as every other wifi-enabled device with closed source firmware.

Android phones have been scooping wifi mac addresses, pairing them with GPS data, and sending that to google for at least 7 years: https://slate.com/technology/2018/06/how-google-uses-wi-fi-n...

Apple probably has an equivalent system.

Privacy-wise, Tesla is shitty but not extraordinarily shitty. Their surveillance capabilities do not differentiate them from among the multitudes. Let's assume maximum maliciousness. Assuming you don't own one, could Tesla track you particularly better than, say, Square? Or Google? Or Palantir? Or Comcast? Or any cell phone company? Or whomever it is that owns the cameras at each traffic light intersection?

Given who is in charge and how much power they have shown to wield over those systems, yes, definitely.

Nothing I have said makes light of those other systems and the grotesque data gathering that they do.

The person in charge is irrelevant. If you think that the other companies I mentioned aren't in the business of selling surveillance on you as well, your head is in the sand. It's the primary business model of several.

Totally disagree on the first part.

Totally agree on the second part.

They were all on stage together, regardless of how they got there. They are all there.

As opposed to every Android phone doing the same?

Continue

if people really think Musk is a Nazi, this would be like literally putting mindless order-following gestapo right in your house.

Surveillance? Shit they could just kill you the moment you were discovered to be some undesirable. We're talking about a humanoid-ish robot, after all. If it can help you with the laundry it can bash your head in, too.

To be fair, we don’t need a new product, a tesla can do the same[1].

With AIs becoming more powerful and expanding to new areas, it makes even more sense to avoid businesses that are consistently user hostile.

I wonder if anti tesla protests and related bad pr will contribute to increased consumer awareness around the topic.

[1]: e.g. it can crash into a will e coyote style wall on autopilot: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IQJL3htsDyQ&t=899s

If there’s one thing about AI, it’s that you cannot avoid it. The idea that individuals can just “opt out” of plastic, sugar, artificial ingredients, factory farms, social media and all the other negative extrnalities the corporations push on us is a fantasy that governments and industry push on individuals to keep us distracted: https://magarshak.com/blog/?p=362

On HN, people hate on Web3 because of its limited upside. But really look at the downside dynamics of a technology! With Web3, you can only ever lose what you voluntarily put in (at great effort and slippage LOL). So that caps the downside. Millions of people who never got a crypto wallet and never sent their money to some shady exchange never lost a penny.

Now compare that to AI. No matter what you do, no matter how far you try to avoid it millions will lose their jobs, get denied loans, be surveiled, possibly arrested for precrime, micromanaged and controlled, practically enslaved in order to survive and reproduce etc.

It won’t even work to retreat into gated communities or grandfathered human-verified accounts because defectors will run bots in their accounts and their neuralink cyborg hookups and meta glasses, to gain an advantage and approach at least some of the advantages of the bots. Not to mention of course that the economic power and efficiency of botless communities will be laughably uncompetitive.

You won’t even be able to move away anywhere to escape it. You can see an early preview of that with the story of Ted Kazinsky — the unabomber (google it). While the guy was clearly a disturbed maniac who sent explosives to people, as a mathematician following things to its logical conclusion he did sort of predict what will happen to everyone when technology reaches a certain point. AI just makes it so that you can’t escape.

If HN cared about AI unlimited downsides like it cared about Web’s lack of large upsides, the sentiment here would be very different. But the time has not come yet. Set an alarm to check back on this comment in exactly 7 years.

> With Web3, you can only ever lose what you voluntarily put in (at great effort and slippage LOL). So that caps the downside.

Nitpick: That's not considering how it it has turbocharged and even commodified certain types of crime, such as ransomware.

On the bright side, at least I'll die with a clean shirt on.

It might even clean up the blood stains. Letting the blood dry would ruin the carpet and furniture

Pretty sure the “deletion” of undesirables is part of the plan, if a little bit further down the line.

I thought they were waiting for ubiquitous AI micro drone technology. Maybe not.

https://www.vcinfodocs.com/weapons-startups

That’s how Skynet wins!