I know this is going to sound like hyperbole, and I apologize, but I believe that the networked computer is a bigger danger to mankind than nuclear weapons. We are completely destroying the innate quality that we've had as humans since we came out of the trees - anonymity and privacy.
I'm not saying technology is bad; I'm no Luddite. But we are entering places in our societal structures that we've never been before even in the strictest police states. Maybe it's grumpy old guy day again, but I do not feel that this is going to turn out well over the long run.
ADD: Of all the things I thought 20 years ago that I might be concerned about in the 2010s, "swarms of flying robots able to watch and record my every move" was not one of them. The future is not only stranger than you imagine; it is stranger than you can imagine. And that's just robotic drone surveillance. There's a dozen other networked technology devices that are much more worrying.
I'm going to have to disagree with the idea that anonymity and privacy are innate qualities that we've had as humans since we came out of the trees.
I think those are actually innate qualities of civilization not of the human species in general. If you think about it, the savage more or less lived his whole life in the "public eye" of his tribe/village. It was civilization that finally afforded him some privacy.
And that's what I find so troubling about the panopticon society. It somehow feels extremely uncivilized. To the point of savagery.
We've always been social creatures and when we came out of the trees did we really have anonymity and privacy? Village life has been the norm for most of your history and I believe that anonymity and privacy aren't the norm in village life. Am I wrong?
It seems to me that only since mass urbanization has there been anonymity and privacy and we begin to revert back to the historical mean. Although at a much grander scale. Is it the scale that is the danger? In the past one could leave the village for another location (in theory) and get away from stigma. Maybe now it is much harder.
Of course now there is much more information and many more instances of instant fame. Perhaps the noise will be anonymize us except to the powers that be.
When you see the video below, it's easy to imagine how likely that future will be if citizens don't care about what their Government is doing and simply let them pass all the bad laws, without any major outrage:
We've already seen how advanced western Governments think about stuff like this (in UK, but also in US) - "when it's easy and cheap enough to apply mass-surveillance of all forms of communications, why not do it?". So they'll do it even if it's unconstitutional, once the technology becomes cheap enough and people still don't react to these moves en mass.
There will be new technologies in the future that will simply be irresistible to the Governments that can implement them nation-wide. It's the population's job to be very vigilant about it and make sure they don't abuse them (or use them at all).
Perhaps people will get clued in and protest. I'm hoping for a grassroots org to use handheld devices and, in aggregate, constantly monitor all police and lawmakers, posting their every move online.
I must strongly disagree with you. It sounds like you have already given up.
On this forum someone posted a way to visualize factorizations of numbers in Haskell. Quickly someone put up a javascript version. Soon I expect someone will turn it to a webapp that makes it possible for anyone to use and if lucky may go 'viral'. The power of networks is in that kind of recursive mashup. This is a toy now but hopefully is a sign of things to come. Consider that in a way, google and stackoverflow are caches for experience. Memoizing experience to increase efficiency. In a very real sense the ease of networks and communication results in a non trivial increase in the intelligence of the society.
We hope that there will be a whole group of researchers willing to take the different parts of this process [(e.g. model organisms, high throughput omics technologies, drug development and repurposing, cellular and stem cell research)] and produce enough data so that it will become a whole new line of research. Like the small amounts of giving inherent in crowdfunding, we think many experts, each contributing a small amount of research, can accomplish much in aggregate. Crowdsourced research may enable new advancements that were not possible before.
Also worth pointing out is that while the specific instance of drones was not foremost in the list of dystopian worries, a surveillance society has existed as a worry since at least the 1940's. But despite the worries of Orwell and Huxley society is not near as bad as they expected. Indeed on average things are better for most people. From the average poor European to the average African.
It is easier to focus on the bad aspects of a thing and worry on the worst possible outcome. Indeed that is the nature of humanity for that Type of error is least costly from an evolutionary perspective. But networks are a tool. A tool which gives more than it takes, A good thing.
Information is power. Anything that increases the fluidity of its flow and its abundance is on the side of freedom. While it is true that everyone will be watched. It is also true that everyone will be watched, it will be ever harder for political leaders to deceive. The answer is not to stifle information flow but to make tools that make it possible to be hidden in plain site. Push decentralization, Encryption, clothing, tattoos, camera detection, IR accessories or private camera detecting-IR emitting drones. Action is the answer not worrying and lamenting. A Good thing can only be illegal if the governed quietly succumb to the inevitability of its occurrence.
That's federal level. State and local police are already shopping and some are already working with local military bases to use theirs.
All warrantless, no oversight. The mission creep is going to be scary.
They'll have to find a way to justify their incredible expense for the 99% of time they would be idle, so imagine the equal to speeding ticket quotas that will emerge.
I was at a law enforcement show this week and drones were the big new thing. Most were either quadcopters with GoPros while others looked like mini helicopters with PTZ cameras strapped to them.
Better funded departments are starting to test them out, but the demand from local police still isn't quite there. They require obtaining a special FAA license and lots of training, which makes the sales cycles on drones long and unattractive to vendors selling one at a time to local PDs.
Still though, their pitch is: "A helicopter flight cost is $450/hr. A drone is $14." Saving PDs the cost of flying a drone to/over an accident scene is more the draw than snooping into buildings.
"Noel Sharkey is Professor of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, and Professor of Public Engagement at the University of Sheffield. He holds a Doctorate in Experimental Psychology and a Doctorate of Science, and lectures extensively across academic disciplines, including engineering, philosophy, psychology, cognitive science, linguistics, artificial intelligence and computer science. In addition to having published well over a hundred academic articles and books, Sharkey has worked closely with policy makers and the military to create awareness about the limitations of AI and the dangers of automated warfare."
I was watching a documentary the other day about border smuggling - surely it's only a matter of time before drones are used for that, in which case what hope has domestic law enforcement got if they don't go down the same path.
Smugglers have used submarines. Law enforcement has already "no hope", and that is entirely by design. If you want LE and criminals to be equal then you end up in a country run by criminals.
The scariest thing about drones is that if both sides have drones, the winning strategy would seem to be in having millions of cheap drones directed by the sort of algorithms currently used in high frequency trading. Putting humans in the decision making loop for all of those just slows them down and vastly increases the expense and manpower requirements.
There's very, very little work going on with AI in drones. We're not there yet. We're still working on getting the sensors right and dealing with datalinks. The vast majority are remotely piloted, some are remotely directed (point and click to location, the drone maneuvers to get there), all are controlled by humans.
This "robot drone aircraft freakout" sounds as silly to me as an aerospace engineer as worries about malicious hackers shutting down the US power grid sound to you.
DanielBMarkham|13 years ago
I'm not saying technology is bad; I'm no Luddite. But we are entering places in our societal structures that we've never been before even in the strictest police states. Maybe it's grumpy old guy day again, but I do not feel that this is going to turn out well over the long run.
ADD: Of all the things I thought 20 years ago that I might be concerned about in the 2010s, "swarms of flying robots able to watch and record my every move" was not one of them. The future is not only stranger than you imagine; it is stranger than you can imagine. And that's just robotic drone surveillance. There's a dozen other networked technology devices that are much more worrying.
noonespecial|13 years ago
I think those are actually innate qualities of civilization not of the human species in general. If you think about it, the savage more or less lived his whole life in the "public eye" of his tribe/village. It was civilization that finally afforded him some privacy.
And that's what I find so troubling about the panopticon society. It somehow feels extremely uncivilized. To the point of savagery.
yequalsx|13 years ago
It seems to me that only since mass urbanization has there been anonymity and privacy and we begin to revert back to the historical mean. Although at a much grander scale. Is it the scale that is the danger? In the past one could leave the village for another location (in theory) and get away from stigma. Maybe now it is much harder.
Of course now there is much more information and many more instances of instant fame. Perhaps the noise will be anonymize us except to the powers that be.
mtgx|13 years ago
http://falkvinge.net/2012/10/05/plurality-an-amazing-short-f...
We've already seen how advanced western Governments think about stuff like this (in UK, but also in US) - "when it's easy and cheap enough to apply mass-surveillance of all forms of communications, why not do it?". So they'll do it even if it's unconstitutional, once the technology becomes cheap enough and people still don't react to these moves en mass.
There will be new technologies in the future that will simply be irresistible to the Governments that can implement them nation-wide. It's the population's job to be very vigilant about it and make sure they don't abuse them (or use them at all).
pi18n|13 years ago
godbolev|13 years ago
Dn_Ab|13 years ago
On this forum someone posted a way to visualize factorizations of numbers in Haskell. Quickly someone put up a javascript version. Soon I expect someone will turn it to a webapp that makes it possible for anyone to use and if lucky may go 'viral'. The power of networks is in that kind of recursive mashup. This is a toy now but hopefully is a sign of things to come. Consider that in a way, google and stackoverflow are caches for experience. Memoizing experience to increase efficiency. In a very real sense the ease of networks and communication results in a non trivial increase in the intelligence of the society.
We hope that there will be a whole group of researchers willing to take the different parts of this process [(e.g. model organisms, high throughput omics technologies, drug development and repurposing, cellular and stem cell research)] and produce enough data so that it will become a whole new line of research. Like the small amounts of giving inherent in crowdfunding, we think many experts, each contributing a small amount of research, can accomplish much in aggregate. Crowdsourced research may enable new advancements that were not possible before.
http://www.genomesunzipped.org/2012/07/guest-post-jimmy-lin-...
Also worth pointing out is that while the specific instance of drones was not foremost in the list of dystopian worries, a surveillance society has existed as a worry since at least the 1940's. But despite the worries of Orwell and Huxley society is not near as bad as they expected. Indeed on average things are better for most people. From the average poor European to the average African.
It is easier to focus on the bad aspects of a thing and worry on the worst possible outcome. Indeed that is the nature of humanity for that Type of error is least costly from an evolutionary perspective. But networks are a tool. A tool which gives more than it takes, A good thing.
Information is power. Anything that increases the fluidity of its flow and its abundance is on the side of freedom. While it is true that everyone will be watched. It is also true that everyone will be watched, it will be ever harder for political leaders to deceive. The answer is not to stifle information flow but to make tools that make it possible to be hidden in plain site. Push decentralization, Encryption, clothing, tattoos, camera detection, IR accessories or private camera detecting-IR emitting drones. Action is the answer not worrying and lamenting. A Good thing can only be illegal if the governed quietly succumb to the inevitability of its occurrence.
ck2|13 years ago
All warrantless, no oversight. The mission creep is going to be scary.
They'll have to find a way to justify their incredible expense for the 99% of time they would be idle, so imagine the equal to speeding ticket quotas that will emerge.
telecuda|13 years ago
Better funded departments are starting to test them out, but the demand from local police still isn't quite there. They require obtaining a special FAA license and lots of training, which makes the sales cycles on drones long and unattractive to vendors selling one at a time to local PDs.
Still though, their pitch is: "A helicopter flight cost is $450/hr. A drone is $14." Saving PDs the cost of flying a drone to/over an accident scene is more the draw than snooping into buildings.
kmfrk|13 years ago
It's in light of that that I have to wonder whether drones should just be vilified altogther.
bdunbar|13 years ago
Good question. I can see uses for drones. I know guys who will personally benefit from automation like this.
I say take a hard stand against them: no drones, period.
Because 'give them an inch they'll take a mile' is why.
vectorbunny|13 years ago
http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/print/6600
From the teaser:
"Noel Sharkey is Professor of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, and Professor of Public Engagement at the University of Sheffield. He holds a Doctorate in Experimental Psychology and a Doctorate of Science, and lectures extensively across academic disciplines, including engineering, philosophy, psychology, cognitive science, linguistics, artificial intelligence and computer science. In addition to having published well over a hundred academic articles and books, Sharkey has worked closely with policy makers and the military to create awareness about the limitations of AI and the dangers of automated warfare."
sturadnidge|13 years ago
revelation|13 years ago
mobweb|13 years ago
Found it: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4415508
gnaritas|13 years ago
fourmii|13 years ago
http://www.theage.com.au/technology/technology-news/drone-fi...
secure|13 years ago
ktizo|13 years ago
starpilot|13 years ago
This "robot drone aircraft freakout" sounds as silly to me as an aerospace engineer as worries about malicious hackers shutting down the US power grid sound to you.
ktizo|13 years ago