One of the guarantees in the Bill of Rights is that we, the people, have a right to be free of unreasonable searches and seizures by the government. If they want to search us or our homes, they need probable cause, as opposed to spying on us just in case we’re up to no good. In the modern world this extends to things like wiretapping phones or searching our email without probable cause.
Like most rules restraining cops, the authorities hate this. In the words of Ed Meese, Ronald Reagan’s attorney general, there’s no point in worrying about the rights of suspects — if they weren’t guilty, they wouldn’t be suspects, right? Wrong. Besides, why should anyone object to people spying on them for the greater good. If you have nothing to hide, what do you have to fear?
Post 9/11, the George W. Bush administration tossed this one in the trash. Massive surveillance of Americans, particularly Muslims (who were also detained without trial in violation of habeas corpus). Infiltration of law-abiding, non-violent left-wing groups on the grounds that well, maybe they might possibly could know something about someone who was up to something violent. When this came out, the devoutly Republican letters to the local paper hit the same note: if you have nothing to hide, why should you care if the government spies on you?
First off, it doesn’t matter whether I have something to hide — I have a right not be spied on. Second, there’s lots of stuff I say on the phone or in email that isn’t criminal but is personal — and I do want to hide that. I’m quite sure the supposed patriots feel the same; they’d scream blue murder if the government were spying on them without cause or even with cause (Republicans prefer to pretend right-wing terror doesn’t exist) — the leopard is supposed to eat other people’s faces!
Third, spying on everyone isn’t productive. It wastes resources and one such program generated tons of false leads that wasted more resources when the government followed up on them. Fourth, having access to spying tools, a number of officials used them to watch on girlfriends, exes, and others for the obvious personal reasons.
This came to mind recently because Bandera TX City Councilor Jeff Flowers had a meltdown recently when the council voted to end its contract with Flock, the controversial security-camera company (some details on Flock here). According to Flowers, nobody has anything to fear unless they’re up to no good! There’s nothing wrong with being watched every second you’re in public! If you’re going to be that anti-progress, let’s ban cellphones and the Internet, you luddites! It makes me wonder if he has some kind of investment/financial ties with Flock, though that’s only a suspicion. I’m sure he’d be happy to let everyone go through his finances to check — after all, if he has nothing to hide, he has nothing to fear, right?
Moving on from that bit of tech to AI — former Google CEO Eric Schmidt was booed at a commencement speech recently for telling graduates that AI is inevitable so they need to get with the program. Don’t want AI running everything? Then use AI, accept AI, “choose to be in the room where these decisions take place.” As one person puts it on BlueSky, “Saying we will be in the room to shape AI decisions flies against the face of how all tech regulation has unfolded in the past 20 years. Which he would know being at Google. These decisions that impact all of us are made by a few men like him. And they like it that way. So disingenuous.”
Case in point, one techbro’s outrage that people oppose his new data center proposal. I’m likewise skeptical Peter Thiel’s new AI for detecting bias in news will be at all unbiased. Only a small number of people will get venture financing for AI startups and as Gizmodo says, most of them will crash and burn.
Certainly AI continues to spread, with even a major city paper, the Charlotte Observer, using AI to turn reporting by humans into an article that humans then review. Speaking as a reporter, I can’t see this doing a lick of good. And it’s a McClatchy paper, so the use is much wider than just the Observer.
AI-generated research summaries make things up. That also happens when lawyers have AI write their legal briefs.
“The post, made by a user called Ill_Car_7351, was advertising exactly what it sounds like: A database of poop images, collected from an AI poop analyzing app that he had launched several years ago. Basically, 25,000 people had been taking images of their poop and uploading them to his app. He’d been collecting, analyzing, and annotating these images and now wanted to sell access to them: “I’ve got 150k+ labeled and classified images of 💩 from roughly 25K different people. Jokes aside, I know there’s a lot of value in it (hard to obtain, useful for ML [machine learning] training, cancer studies etc) but not sure on how to move about it. Feels like I’m sitting on a pile of shi..ny coins but can’t find who wants them.” The poster added that “the images are extremely rare,” and that he was trying to figure out how much money he could sell them for.”
“Developers talk not just about how the AI output is often flawed, but that using AI to get the job done is often a more time consuming, harder, and more frustrating experience because they have to go through the output and fix its mistakes. More concerning, developers who use AI at work report that they feel like they are de-skilling themselves and losing their ability to do their jobs as well as they used to.”
“The world’s largest data center project — backed by Trump allies and bearing his name — is stalled by delays and logistical hurdles that could stop it before it even starts. The latest sign of trouble emerged Friday: CEO Toby Neugebauer abruptly departed. That sent the company’s shares, which already shed 75% in the last six months, plummeting in aftermarket trading.” Not all the news is bad.
