
Everything Is Going Deep: ‘The Age of Surveillance Capitalism’ - _euvw
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/29/opinion/artificial-intelligence-surveillance.html
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randomacct3847
I’m most worried about the rise of Fintech apps enabled by APIs like Plaid.
The media seems more worried about 10-year old Facebook likes being sold than
a perpetual real time feed of bank transaction data ending up in the wrong
hands or in the hands of a nefarious developer.

For the record, I’m highly critical of Plaid and hope the tech media catches
on soon. They do not require developers to communicate which permissions they
are asking for when onboarding new customers (I don’t even think that is an
option even if developers wanted to) and there’s no central UI for a end
customer to review permissions you’ve granted across developers and revoke
them. I don’t think they have any requirements to encrypt this data on the
developer side and have no idea how they audit developers to make sure they
are using various endpoints without violation of their developer terms.

~~~
mooreds
> a perpetual real time feed of bank transaction data.

Jeez that does sound terrifying. I mean I guess that's already here in my
credit cards databases, but at least (in the USA) I have some legal
protections.

~~~
acct1771
Like what? Dollars to doughnuts, Facebook already has your purchase data from
your card company.

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nabla9
Shoshana Zuboff is one of those people that make me upset when I discover
them. Why didn't I hear about them and their books books much earlier? Is it
only because she is not marketing her books well enough?

The Age of the Smart Machine (1988) is truly visionary and well written.

edit:

I'm currently reading The Age of Surveillance Capitalism.

The book has well developed concepts like 'behavioral surplus and
'instrumentarianism'. There are also clever terms like 'radical indifference',
'observation without witness', 'equivalence without equality'. They are just
plain insightful. I can instantly recognize them as something I could not
conceptualize before.

~~~
chobeat
This kind of books go through different channels than the ones that are
followed by the engineers. Engineers pick up this stuff when it ends up in the
mainstream but they don't really participate that much in the tech critique
world.

~~~
phry
somewhat unfortunate vicious cycle it seems like, engineers either don't
consider the ramifications of what they build or are willing to handwave it
away, until it all starts to come back around

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mark_l_watson
I manage a deep learning team but I have some reservations about the
technology. IMO deep learning is best for optimizing back end systems and not
good for systems that ‘touch’ people: deciding to loan money, automated
sentencing of criminals, targeted marketing from personal information, etc.

For me, the problems are lack of explainability and possible bias.

There are many great applications for deep learning and AI in general but some
guard rails must be in place for public good.

~~~
Pharmakon
Being able to shrug and say “the algorithm did it,” is almost certainly seen
as a killer feature for any authoritarian, soulless megacorp and others.
Instead of having to take responsibility for decisions, they just point at the
box they programmed to act a certain way, and blame it. Unless a lot more
people understand GIGO, this is going to stick around.

~~~
fzeroracer
Exactly, this is easily one of the scariest things to see happening. Examples
like Google's recommendation algorithm pushing people towards more and more
extreme content (or even bot created content) signals to me that we're headed
down a very dark road.

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xondono
IMHO, “deep” is just the new “smart”. People are just doing the same thing
they were doing but bigger and better, but when you are building a new company
you need to use the adjective of the times.

We have had “smart”-everything, it already sounds tired, hence
“deep”—everything, let’s see how long it lasts..

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bitL
I've recently realized how trivial is to detect suspicious activities on real-
time video feeds just by tracking human poses, and how this is an almost
completely solved problem now (basically it can count on incremental
improvement of accuracy of models that are used inside). I have doubts this
would in any way "democratize AI", but instead might end up as a powerful
weapon of oppression. No wonder most of the papers on this topic originate
from China.

~~~
leib
Walk without rythm and it won't attract the surveillance state

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60654
> "That’s why the adjective that so many people are affixing to all of these
> new capabilities to convey their awesome power is “deep.”"

One of the best pieces of academic marketing was calling this set of
techniques "deep" learning. The word is so rich with connotations, it
immediately brings to mind all the synonyms: profound, complex, arcane, etc.
It makes people ascribe _far_ more complexity to the system than it actually
has.

When in reality, it's just a "massively multi-layered and multi-stage"
network. But that doesn't sound nearly as profound, and doesn't allow
journalists to spin wild tales.

~~~
kingkawn
People will nearly always opt for the language that conveys the most meaning,
even if doing so outstrips the underlying phenomena being named, since the
point of language is to convey meaning

~~~
60654
That doesn't mean the meaning has to be precise or truthful. Poetry,
metaphors, marketing, implication, white lies - they all rely on meaning being
multifaceted, and bringing things to mind without actually saying them
explicitly.

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PanGalactic
If you don't live in China, you can start by not carrying a smartphone around
all the time and disabling javascript. Just saying...

~~~
mr_custard
At least use the NoScript plugin and opt-in to only the JS you need.

~~~
0xADEADBEE
I ditched NoScript when I realised that it wasn't blocking inline JS. I landed
on uBlock with Advanced Mode, which allows quick toggling of inline, 1st-3rd
party and a few other things. uMatrix deserves an honourable mention also;
it's been illuminating to see the sheer scale of trackers that are loaded on
certain pages.

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ilovecaching
I wonder if it’s time for software engineers to form our own union or guild to
combat misusing our profession in corrupt and immoral ways. We would have
immense power as a group, but on our own we’re all beholden to our employers
which makes us complicit in doing work without thought to the long term
societal damage we do.

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nixpulvis
Deep Learning could in fact enable the next Deep State. Not that I love
repurposing madness of today.

~~~
cranky_coder
What does “the next Deep State” even mean? What do the words “deep state” even
mean in this context?

~~~
nabla9
It means state within a state. Origin of the term is in 1990s Turkey.
Military, police and justice system were upholding national interests and
acting independently from the government.

Deep State is a form of clandestine government made up of hidden or covert
networks of power operating independently of a nation's political leadership,
in pursuit of their own agenda and goals.

~~~
anigbrowl
_upholding national interests_

'national interest' seems like a highly moveable feast.

~~~
boomboomsubban
Not particularly. As they were in control of the state, their goals were
considered the national interest. It may not have reflected the will of the
population or government, but that's often the case with national interests.

~~~
anigbrowl
That seems like a really bad definition.

~~~
boomboomsubban
The concept of "national interests" has been in use for about five hundred
years now. What issue do you have with it?

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samstave
I posed the following to @Dang a few days ago with respect to what one would
possibly think is, at minimum, as responsibility of YC (and the greater VC/SV
population) to acknowledge -- though I don't see this happening any time soon:

\----

 __ _[How can we]_ __Find a way to have a serious objective talk with the
greater community on the extraordinarily global reaching issues of the impact
of Silicon Valley on society, community, culture as a whole.

Look at what we have to just emerge in the last 1.5 decades alone from
"unicorns" in silicon valley:

* ___US policy seemingly being set /disrupted via twitter_ __

* __ _Mental health studies coming out on the negative impact of Facebook_ __

* __ _Election manipulation through ad-powered platforms such as Google and FB_ __

* __ _Massive cultural dialogue and political revolutions being fueled through twitter_ __

* __ _Assassinations being corroborated through Apple an watch_ __

* __ _Global spying and surveillance conducted through all our connected technology_ __

Just to name a few of the globally impactful issues of our day which directly
stem from the efforts of Silicon Valley in specific and the tech industry in
general.

As the preeminent VC company in the minds of any young entrepreneur who wants
to build the Next Big Thing, I would pose that YC actually has a social
responsibility to, at a minimum, foster a conversation on these issues in a
meaningful, serious and deep manner.

What are the consequences of MASSIVE success of a company?

\----

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radarsat1
The article makes me wonder if the author is aware of the technical meaning of
"deep" in the context of the term "deep learning." Not that I disagree with
the article, these things tend to take on a life of their own and that's just
how it goes with language and culture.. but at least in the case of machine
learning "deep" is not just an arbitrary terminology to sound fancy, but
refers to a series of breakthroughs allowing incredible training performance
on multi-layered neural networks; where "deep" specifically contrasts these
results with prior state of the art in 3-layered networks. And presumably this
use of the term is at the source of several of these other "hyped" uses of it,
perhaps with the exception of "deep state", so it's frustrating to see it
thrown into the same basket.

~~~
_Schizotypy
The word "deep" came way before deep learning, and can mean different things
in different contexts

~~~
radarsat1
But one of the contexts provided in the article is "deep learning", that is
what I am responding to. My point being that he lumps "deep" in as a hyped up
term, trying to make connections across "different things in different
contexts" as you say, ignoring the fact that it has a technical meaning.

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user764743
The term 'surveillance capitalism' has become rather misleading, especially
since Snowden pretty much showed the whole thing wasn't either all about
terrorism or capitalism but control. It is forgetting about the relationship
between big tech and the state, which today sometimes mean the same thing.

~~~
phry
capitalism IS control, at the most basic level control of private property
ensured by the state

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PanGalactic
You can start by not carrying your smartphone around with you and turning off
javascript.

~~~
anigbrowl
That's just swapping one set of disadvantages for another.

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filoeleven
The Intercept has published an interview with the author, and I found it to be
compelling enough to immediately start reading the book.

> You’re not technically the product, she explains over the course of several
> hundred tense pages, because you’re something even more degrading: an input
> for the real product, predictions about your future sold to the highest
> bidder so that this future can be altered.

> it’s clear that surveillance capitalists have discovered that the most
> predictive sources of data are when they come in and intervene in our lives,
> in our real-time actions, to shape our action in a certain direction that
> aligns with the kind of outcomes they want to guarantee to their customers.

[https://theintercept.com/2019/02/02/shoshana-zuboff-age-
of-s...](https://theintercept.com/2019/02/02/shoshana-zuboff-age-of-
surveillance-capitalism/)

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buboard
if surveillance capitalism was so successful, you would expect the overall ad
spending to have spiked recently , since people claim to have found the holy
grail that turns ads directly into profits. But it hasn't.

~~~
_emacsomancer_
And they can sell information to your insurance company etc. It doesn't have
to be only about targetting you with ads. Information about you can be
valuable in other ways.

~~~
Nasrudith
And it doesn't even have to be useful to the companies although it certainly
helps. They just need to /think/ it is useful to sell it. Theranos raked in
lots of money before it was revealed to be a lie.

Capitalism and values are fundamentally a means of resource allocation - if
everyone is wrong about what really matters that means it is valued even if
its true utility is nill or negative.

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rblion
Now I want to eat a deep dish pizza to not think about this.

