
Yoshua Bengio Worries About China's Use of AI - imraj96
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-02-02/deep-learning-godfather-bengio-worries-about-china-s-use-of-ai
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porpoisely
I agree with his sentiment that technological improvements lead to further
concentration of wealth and power which is bad for people in general.
Considering that wealth and power control governments, how does he envision
governments offseting this trend of power/wealth accumulation?

At least here in the US, we are following europe and china in less freedom,
greater government control and stronger centralized power/data/etc. I doubt
canada is any better in this regard.

So where does he see government stepping in when it's in the government's
self-interest and it's in the self-interest of the elite s to centralize even
further and continue to accumulate wealth/power?

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bilbo0s
The issue is that government has to have a good _reason_ to step in. What are
the issues that cannot be resolved by simply passing a law? (Which in and of
itself is an interesting solution, as it requires strong central authority to
enforce the new law in any case.)

Anyway, I think that's what techies have not outlined sufficiently. We need
some _clearly_ aggrieved class. Slaves for instance. No one had to write
extremely complex explanations of how slaves might have been aggrieved. The
government stepped in, and when they did it wasn't pretty. A more contemporary
example that involved the tech companies were the revenge porn victims. No one
had to explain in all these overly technical terms how revenge porn victims
were aggrieved. Government stepped in, and they brought the hammer. A lot of
people sitting in prison now for revenge porn and a lot more on their way.

That's what we need, a way to explain that _everyone_ is hurt without writing
out some doctoral thesis on economics that sounds like the Unabomber's
Manifesto. Like slavery or civil rights, it should be simple enough a concept
that your average teacher and preacher can talk about it in plain english and
have it make sense.

It's not really that we techies have bad ideas necessarily ... I mean, it
_might_ be that but that wouldn't matter anyway ... because the real problem
is that we just don't present our ideas in a plain, clear manner that every
one from the Chief Justice to the homeless guy can understand.

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porpoisely
The government didn't step in to end slavery because slaves were the
"aggrieved class". The government stepped in because northern industrialists
want to industrialize the entire nation and expand to the pacific. The
southern elites wanted to protect an agrarian slave system. It wealthy elites
looking to generate wealth via industrialization and factory farms vs wealthy
elites looking to generate wealth via plantations and slaves.

As for your revenge porn example, I agree that it was right for the government
to step in. But the government and the elites had nothing to lose by stepping
in. It was no skin off their backs. My point is how are we going to get change
when it's in the government and the elites interest to stay the course?

People don't generate change. Elites do. It's been that way from the american
revolution to the civil war to civil rights.

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bigmonads
See also: DoD's online propaganda-at-scale research, and the AI techniques
behind [https://www.darpa.mil/program/social-media-in-strategic-
comm...](https://www.darpa.mil/program/social-media-in-strategic-
communication)

One of the key focal points of the DoD's research is the identification of the
topology of social networks and the flow of trust, information, and rumors.
The topology and the chokepoints across it which information is distributed
are leverage point where ideas can be contended, disrupted, replaced,
challenged or seeded. Doing this at scale requires minimal human operation -
only enough to convince the targetted population and narrative centers that
the propaganda content is legitimate social traffic - and also information
systems to infer microculture so that the information programming can be fit
inside the moral, judgemental, human, religious and social (e.g. politeness)
parameters from large quantities of communication surveillance.

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mark_l_watson
I liked his calling out the importance of commons for data. I especially like
Common Crawl as a source of high quality web data, and I recently organized a
meetup for Ocean Protocol which is a non-profit organization for sharing data.

Although Facebook and Google have some obvious problems with privacy, they
also do a great service by open sourcing (with patent rights when using some
of their open source deep learning projects) some tools that I really depend
on for my work.

For the public commons, the public good, there is some strategy for leveraging
open source and sharing data that respects privacy, and allows individuals and
organizations to create valuable machine learning and AI applications. The are
a lot of constraints: privacy, encouraging innovation, allowing fair profit
from innovation without killing competition, etc.

In the past I found useful Lawrence Lessig‘s work on legal frameworks like the
Creative Commons (I was the featured creative commoner for a few weeks, a long
time ago; and, I have released all my recent books with a Creative Commons
license even though I also sell copies). I think we need carefully thought out
extensions to the Creative Commons licenses and ideas to cover data sharing to
promote innovation and some room to earn a profit.

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Cacti
During the mid GOP primaries, Trump was starting to pull ahead, to the
disbelief of nearly everyone. Newt Gingrich was on TV at that point and asked
about the likelihood of Trump actually capturing the nomination, and he said,
I think very astutely, "well, who is going to stop him?"

The same lesson applies here in terms of the nightmare of a surveillance that
China is building out today: who is going to stop them? The people don't have
the legal ability to do much about it, and have few individual rights, so
there is almost no political or legal barrier here for China's government to
do whatever it wants with its people. There is no real economic barrier any
more because their economy is simply too large and, dare I say, diversified.
There is no real technological barrier either on the hardware side or the
software side, nor are the costs particularly prohibitive. China's neighbors
are no real barrier either since they have little comparable military strength
(short of US involvement and a general world war), and they all depend too
much on China's economy anyway. And "the West" can't do much except scream and
shout for much of the same reasons.

In short, there is really nothing that is stopping the Chinese government from
rolling out the first, real, honest-to-god, 1984-style police surveillance
state, and the potential capabilities are, frankly, terrifying. Those not
involved in machine learning these days may not be able to appreciate it, but
the tech is there for pretty much anything you can think of (as far as wide
scale automated surveillance, tracking, etc. right down to the individual
level at nearly every minute of the day at nearly any point in the country).
It exists _already_, it's just a matter of investment capability and political
will to make it happen, and China has both of those in spades.

We're talking surveillance of the individual via face tracking, but we're also
talking about gait tracking, the tracking of facial expressions (and inference
from there to emotion and thoughts), of eye tracking, picking up on little
hesitations in body language, of the ability to tracking individuals vehicles,
of tracking people as they enter a subway and then exit somewhere else
entirely, of tracking of every financial transaction, of your network and cell
usage, your power usage. Cameras, drones, and whatever else that will have the
resolution to pick up on the text of what you're reading and carrying, of
little patterns of evidence on your person. THe amount of enthusiasm you
express at a political event or public sports event. Not just the content of
your voice, but the tone, and what can be inferred from that. What you're
reading, what you're clicking on, how long your mouse hovers over an image.
And in all of these things, new inferences will be able to be made that
weren't possible before, like estimates on your inner thought process, of
intent, of you're long-term threat or lack thereof, all the things that you
can currently hide away in private.

It's fucking crazy, and the tech for it, at least at the fundamental level,
it's already here.

China will be the first state in history to actually pull off an actual
1984-style surveillance state, and to the detriment of every normal person
there, and the eventual determinant to billions more once they start
normalizing and exporting it.

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duxup
The question also is... can they feed all the data they get into an
intelligence system that allows them to do the same in other countries?

As they profile everyone in China, can they do the same elsewhere?

The sheer amount of data, poorly protected, or just up for sale data out there
in other countries make it seem like they could do the same for "everyone
else" just to perhaps a lesser extent.

Perhaps a requirement for even doing business with China would be
participating ....

~~~
Cacti
It's a good question, and the answer is very likely "yes". I have no doubt
they will be to export these systems to other politically- or economically- or
militarily- friendly countries, once they've developed the datasets and
trained the models and such.

They could probably even do it as a lease, and keep the most important stuff
(key parts of algorithms, training datasets) at home--Surveillance As A
Service!

ANd yes, if their economic continues to grow like this, your observation is a
great one--there wouldn't be much stopping them from requiring participation
in such leases as a condition on economic or military support.

