[DrewADesign]

> I tried talking to my children about leaving as clean of a footprint on the internet as one can in anticipation of future people/systems taking that into consideration.

I don’t think you’re wrong, but the fact that people consider it inevitable we’ll all have an immutable social acceptance grade that includes everything from teenage shitposts to things you said after a loved one died, or getting diagnosed with cancer, makes me regret putting even a moment of my professional energies towards advancing tech in the US.

[monksy]

I think he's wrong and I'm willing to say that. The ability for people to move beyond the fundamental attribution error is well known and takes major resources to correct that. For anyone that posts a comment, assuming you want to have easy attribution later is that you must future proof your words. That is not possible and it is extremely suppressive to express yourself.

For example: "Ellen Page is fantastic in the Umbrella Academy TV show" Innocent, accurate, support, and positive in 2019.

Same comment read after 1 Dec 2020 (Transition coming out): Insensitive, demeaning, in accurate.

[JohnMakin]

> That is not possible and it is extremely suppressive to express yourself.

Also for the fact that you cannot predict how future powers will view past comments - for instance, certain benign political views 20 years ago could become "terroristic speech" tomorrow.

I operate by a simple, general rule - I don't often say anything online I wouldn't say directly to someone's face in real life.

[antonvs]

> Same comment read after 1 Dec 2020 (Transition coming out): Insensitive, demeaning, in accurate.

I genuinely don't understand this. Are you sure you're not imagining possible offenses against some non-existent standard?

[DrewADesign]

I think it’s naive to assume the private companies selling these services will know, let alone care, let alone disclose when their black box models botch things like this. The companies currently purporting to provide this exact service to HR departments for hiring decisions clearly didn’t let that stop them.

[comex]

Not even the most extreme LGBT activist would accuse people who used the name Ellen Page in 2019 of having somehow been insensitive for failing to have a crystal ball. That is as absurd as it sounds. At most someone might be asked to change the name if they’re actively republishing the material in question.

Your point may be more valid when it comes to political attitudes, in cases where the issues were known at the time but the Overton window has shifted since.

[Nevermark]

That we identify social media as "tech" is very strange.

Yes, they have a lot of servers. But that isn't their core innovation. Their core innovations are the constant expansion of unpermissioned surveillance, the integration of dossiers, correlating people's circumstances, behavior and psychology. And incentivizing the creation of addictive content (good, bad, and dreck) with the massive profits they obtain when they can use that as the delivery vector for intrusively "personalized" manipulation, on behest of the highest bidder, no matter how sketchy, grifty or dishonest.

Unpremissioned (or dark patterned, deceptive, surreptitious, or coercive permissioned) surveillance should be illegal. It is digital stalking. Used as leverage against us, and to manipulate us, via major systems spread across the internet.

And the fact that this funds infinite pages of addicting (as an extremely convenient substitute for boredom) content, not doing anyone or society any good, is a mental health, and society health concern.

Tech scaling up conflicts of interest, is not really tech. Its personal information warfare.

[DrewADesign]

I didn’t say I hated technology, generally— I said I hate what the industry has morphed into in the US. What is or isn’t tech is immaterial. All of the odious things you listed are things that the ‘tech industry’ does, largely unquestioned, these days. Frankly, it’s sickening.

[cucumber3732842]

A huge amount of western society and the way we run institutions is based on pretending everything meets some quasi victorian moral standard and is all proper, everyone consents to and supports how everything runs and everything is fine and dandy when that is very much not the case and people put up with a lot of it because they have no better option.

In light of that what I see happening in the short term is that every institution will start screwing people based on information that basically doesn't matter since that's kind of what they're already set up to do with that information but don't except in exceptional cases since those are the cases in which that information makes it back to them.

Imagine some business owner opening a new location, some social worker renewing their license, some civil engineer creating plans on someone's behalf. All those people need to deal with institutions that in the "normal" case pretend to not have large discretionary components in order to get the public to put up with them, but do in practice have such ability. Now say those institutions pay for some LLM based "who am I dealing with" service that finds everyone's pseudonymous posts and whatnot.

Well, all of these people wind up getting given the run around because even though they do fine work that meets the rules, knowing how the sausage is made has made them jaded and given them opinions that make the institutions they have to deal with want to screw them. The business owner gets given the run around because it turns out he believes the institutions he's seeking permission from are a corrupt racket who's members ought to be hung from the overpass. The social worker gets denied because their career has turned them into a "defund it all and when faced with real consequences most of these people will shape up" type. The civil engineer's plans get rejected and he has to go around in circles because he's been posting about how in light of what corporations with good funding can get approved and the impact thereof it's unconscionable the stuff they try and enforce upon individuals and engineers ought to pencil whip anything that isn't clearly F-ed up.

And so, all these people have to waste time and probably a low five digit sum of money fighting the BS. This would be fine perhaps if these people's conduct was so egregious it made it back to the institutions on it's own (like say some doctor who's preaching quackery on youtube may get his license yanked if he amasses such a following the board hears about it, that's the kind of stuff institutional discretion was set up for) but no real good social interest is served having an LLM dig up petty dirt on everyone. However, the LLM service peddlers stand to make a buck. The institutions stand to make a buck while washing their hands of responsibility. The lawyers who'll fight on wronged parties behalf stand to make a buck. And in the process they can all pretend like society somehow benefits from this enhanced scrutiny when in fact they're just making mountains out of mole hills.