Re:A spambot became the second most powerful member of an It...
by brey on Tuesday August 05, 2014 @04:08PM
(#8139051)
Agreed. Related to this, there's a school of thought which says the ability for us to break laws which don't yet reflect updated social mores is key to preventing society stagnating, to force change in those laws.
Let's suppose 1960s civil rights campaigners had had their protests and civil disobedience clamped down on with the ruthless efficiency of what you could imagine policing becoming in a few decades -- if the firehose-wielding cops had also been able to know with perfect intelligence who was planning to break the law, and had been able to easily crush any nascent rebellion against the laws of the time, which we now recognise to be wrong. How easily would we have seen change under those circumstances?
Re:A spambot became the second most powerful member of an It...
by yogabzzz on Tuesday August 05, 2014 @08:47PM
(#8140369)
And you don't think the dissidents wouldn't use technology to circumvent the law enforcement bots? You don't seem to understand how brittle, rigid and flawed most/all of these algorithms are. With the right knowledge you can get around pretty much any technical system. Also, just a single person with that knowledge and the ability to implement it is a danger to the bloated, slow government(s) that might seek to use such a system.
Re:A spambot became the second most powerful member of an It...
by JoeAltmaier on Tuesday August 05, 2014 @04:09PM
(#8139056)
By voting? Civil disobedience isn't the only path to changing laws; it just speeds it up sometimes.
Re:A spambot became the second most powerful member of an It...
by vdaniuk on Tuesday August 05, 2014 @04:37PM
(#8139254)
Voting is playing by the rules of the system. The world is changing too fast now to use that a reliable strategy.
Re:A spambot became the second most powerful member of an It...
by JoeAltmaier on Tuesday August 05, 2014 @04:55PM
(#8139362)
Civil disobedience doesn't do anything permanent, unless it results in changes in law.
For example, if I exceed the speed limit on a highway for just 5 seconds, I doubt anyone would notice. In fact, the law enforcement is pretty vague about speed limits at the moment.
If I leave my car in a parking lot for a minute without paying, I rely on the fact that a human watching isn't going to be that super efficient as to give me a ticket right away.
But that's only the beginning. There is so much information that a computer network can cross correlate about everyone, including probabilistic assessments about their identity, etc. This can of course be used by businesses (http://www.forbes.com/fdc/welcome_mjx.shtml) or governments to try to do pre-crime (http://www.theverge.com/2014/2/19/5419854/the-minority-repor...).
But again, this is just the beginning. Right now we have a certain threshold for the quality of evidence against someone in a courtroom. With computers being able to come up with dozens of plausible "stories that will stick", anyone can be threatened as the jury (at least in the first few years) won't be able to tell the difference. We already have http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction providing admissible evidence in court. With big-data software more sophisticated than https://www.palantir.com/ , those with the machines on their side will have powerful legal weapons that they can wield against anyone.
But even this is just the beginning. We expect a certain quality of output from humans in all areas of life. Being able to match and surpass human output is one thing (http://www.popsci.com/article/technology/algorithm-recognize...) ... but the relentless ability to continually search through a space towards a goal, and instantaneously leverage gains to produce more gains, may begin to overcome any strategic human systems, whether by individuals or entire countries. A computer network could figure out how to infiltrate a social network, topple a regime, completely dilute everyone's trust even in one another, and so forth. The smarter computers get, the more they will be able to overcome the systems we've set up including the biological systems of morality and trust from hundreds of thousands of years of evolution.
In fact if you think this is fantasy, consider that the NSA and other agencies already have rudimentary versions of this, that can only be made more powerful with big data crunching and bots: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140224/17054826340/new-s...
So what's next for us as a species?