You didn't expect the application you developed called "Skynet" that has an eye of sauron as it's logo to be used by the military? Sorry, I don't believe you.
I only made a prototype of the torment nexus as illustrative satire, I didn't think someone would actually ship it to production! All satire is dual use.
Part of the reason we're seeing objectionable government action now is because we militarized law enforcement tasks and equipment in the post-9/11 era.
I would expect any invading forces would need to be surveilled by planes or satellites, or perhaps drones, since they would immediately destroy something like flock cameras.
What’s more likely is that an aspiring dictator illegally uses the military for domestic police operations, then military and police use is the same thing.
I don't think the author is suggesting we shouldn't build useful things. He's saying to the people who built the military system that they shouldn't be doing that.
It's the last step that's the problem, not the people who built all the things they stand on. Otherwise we'd be suggesting that no one build a database engine or a digital camera or a computer ever again in case they're used to build evil tech.
Generally, yes. Most telemetry systems in software are not producing enough actionable insight to justify the privacy invasion. Spying on your customers on an opt-out basis just in case you one day come up with a use for that data is a widespread practice but clearly unethical, and leaves you (or whoever acquires your employer) in the position of being tempted to use the data for worse things than just deciding what bugs and features to prioritize.
Yes. Telemetry is anti-social at best, authoritarian at worst. We have built industries on "the user won't tell us what they want so we have to spy on them so we can build what they want" and then instead of building what they want, building the thing that extracts the most money out of their users (probably not what the user wanted!)
I don't think the article is saying don't build a payload-agnostic telemetry engine. The specific examples cited are that it's probably legitimate to have a vehicle registration database (with the caveat that even that could be abused), but not a database of sexual orientations or religious affiliations.
I think there's a distinction between creating generic info-gathering technology that helps them gather their own data from their own users, and you gathering data that the government can then ask (force) you to hand over.
Keeping it within game dev, I will say that telemetry and bug report tooling looks really cool. Big fan of it grabbing build info directly from the session that the user was playing. Feeling kinda inspired to build something similar for the studio I work at now.
Do you actually object to countries having standing armies with ranged area weaponry?
This isn't what the article is talking about at all. It never says don't build military technology. It says don't build things like a database of who in the country is and isn't gay and what religion everyone practices, for fear a future bigoted administration might use it to target those people. If your government is turning howitzers on you, that's less a police state and more a civil war.
I don't know what you do against that, but it's a different situation. There is precedent in the US with the Army being used to round up and forcibly displace native populations, but that really seems to be the kind of thing that requires a political solution, not prevention of any possibility. If we didn't have an Army at all, then secession would have succeeded, there would still be chattel slavery, and one of the hostile European colonial powers likely would have simply conquered the west itself and killed all the natives anyway.
All technology can be weaponized. It can also be de-weaponized.
One of my favorite late-night thought experiments, is "what would it take to turn an AK47 or an AR15 into a water pump?" .. the possibilities are endless. "How could a tank be turned into a bicycle factory?", another great one worth the effort to think about.
The only difference between peaceful technology and a weapon is the intention of the user. The very real spiritual intention.
De-weaponization starts with the human being. Those who think weapons are necessary must always take lesser priority than those who invent technology to make the lives of their fellow human beings better. There are so many examples of the tool-makers winning harder and at greater scale than the bomb-manufacturer. We wouldn't be here now if the balance was the other way - our world is however threatened by having this scale weighed heavily, by those who think murder is the solution to anything.
It's a spirit thing. Not spiritu-al, a spirit thing. What is the spirit of the designer? If they want to help humanity, it will be difficult technology to weaponize (although not impossible). It will be easy to de-weaponize, also.
We need to focus more on the spirit of help, and less on hurt.
Imagine if those F35 mounting pylons were used to drop field-portable water-purification systems directly where they are needed most.
Imagine if they could be used to drop a copy of archive.org, anywhere in the world, in any language.
Imagine if those ships were being used to bring power to the villages that need it most. Instead of glide bombs, we have glide libraries. Instead of cluster munitions, we instead drop cluster medical kits!
Oh, the glory to be had by those who would do this - the allies in the poor and weak of the world to be found! Imagine this happening, changing the intention from hate and fear, to respect and love.
All it takes is the spirit, a bit of imagination, and any and all technology can be de-weaponized.
It is the warrior narcissist who stands in the way of this. Disarm them too - smash their mirror: Drop books, not bombs!
> Imagine if those F35 mounting pylons were used to drop field-portable water-purification systems directly where they are needed most.
Except we can (and do!) accomplish that with much simpler airplanes. The staggering costs and complexities of an F35 (the thrust:weight, maneuverability, and stealth) don't make sense for any "peaceful" application.
> Those who think weapons are necessary must always take lesser priority than those who invent technology to make the lives of their fellow human beings better.
And then a group that prioritizes weapons over human-life-improving-tools kills the group that prioritizes life and takes your resources.
This is like the larger group version of suicide by cop.
We've been playing this game for as long as human beings have existed.
There have always been a greater group of humans which de-weaponize (make peace) than those who make war. Always. The evidence is very clear: there are far, far, far more humans in the world not-killing each other than there are, killing each other.
>And then a group that prioritizes weapons over human-life-improving-tools kills the group that prioritizes life and takes your resources
Only for as long as those who make peace, don't pay attention to the prioritization of weapons - and that group of warrior narcissists whose identity is more important than human life must never be allowed to be bigger than the group who make peace - as is happening today at a pace far too great - because otherwise, we all die.
>We've been playing this game for as long as human beings have existed.
Yes, humans have been making peace at far greater scale than those limited few who make war. You just don't see them because a) you have your own warrior narcissist mirror obscuring your view, and b) those people are not narcissists, and are living human lives instead of primping their warrior narcissist identities...
> There have always been a greater group of humans which de-weaponize (make peace) than those who make war. Always.
What are you talking about? We're in the most peaceful period in human history by every objective measure and we spend almost a trillion dollars annually on defense. "Always" is objectively incorrect by basically every measure you use.
> Only for as long as those who make peace, don't pay attention to the prioritization of weapons - and that group of warrior narcissists whose identity is more important than human life must never be allowed to be bigger than the group who make peace - as is happening today at a pace far too great - because otherwise, we all die.
Word salad.
> Yes, humans have been making peace at far greater scale than those limited few who make war. You just don't see them because a) you have your own warrior narcissist mirror obscuring your view, and b) those people are not narcissists, and are living human lives instead of primping their warrior narcissist identities...
Other comments have pointed out this: how are you going to stop the "warrior narcissist" if you disarmed/de-weaponized the peace-makers? Even if de-weaponize after you erase all the current "warrior narcissists", how will you prevent new ones from rising up and re-weaponizing? Surely, you know that war is not the default state, so this isn't a theoretical.
Also, I think your description of "warrior narcissists" as a shallow description of the spirit of these people. You mentioned something about "identity" in later comments, and I cannot help but wonder what do you mean by that. I don't think Putin's main motive is his self-image, nor do I think Israel's leadership is murdering Palestine's populace to appear heroic.
It would also help to not assume the motives of people criticizing your ideas by presuming them to be "warrior narcissists" themselves. Elevate the discussion, not downgrade it.
I'll always appreciate the spirit of pacifism and collaboration, but your comments seem quixotic, and not in a good way.
The police state exists entirely to maintain its own identity - and thus control - over that of its subjects. It is a warrior - controlling the lives of others or killing them - and it is doing it narcissistically, to maintain its own image of itself.
All current war theaters are the result of a police state and these police states only function because of technology.
The subject is de-weaponization of technology.
First, you separate the technology from the person using it correctly - i.e. not to create a police state.
Then, the person using it incorrectly in a police state.
In this case, the person you don't want to have using technology to murder/do harm/violate the actual human rights of others, is the warrior narcissist.
So, as a technologist, I do not let my technology be used by someone who is only going to use it on others, for actual war-fighting/warrior purposes, for the purposes of protecting or promoting their identity over the life of others.
Because that is what good technology is - something which gives all users, equal rights. An equal, new identity, with each new form of technology.
So, de-weaponization means, disconnecting the user from using technology in destructive ways.
Constructive ways are easier, such as I demonstrated with extreme prejudice, such as the notion of the pink F35, dropping cluster medical supplies, water desalination pods instead of child-maiming fertilizer bombs, or indeed - fertilizer in the right place, with emergency seed-bombs for a 3 month re-supply of the landscape, food-wise, etc.
All current war theaters are the result of a police state and these police states only function because of technology.
These are parables I'm dramatizing, with intent. I do know there is no chance in hell of turning off all the weapons - I for sure know that there is a way to use technology to make sure a police state doesn't happen in the first place. (Because I've been doing exactly that with technology for decades.)
Putin is an identity of someone you don't actually know, but yet, you think you know the warrior narcissism in Putin - but it is actually the identity, not the individual, that I am talking about. I rate Putin among all the other war criminals of the world - they are there, because they have the technological might of their people - or indeed the ignorance of their people in spite of this might, or indeed even collective agreement on scale, to perpetuate that identity.
And lest it not be clear, I find that in order to be a good pacifist, you have to allow for new identity, always. It is the use of technological power to gain mass identity and exploit it for war, which I am specifically calling the playground of the warrior narcissist. Those who would murder to maintain their own identity.
Drop books not bombs, is legitimately the simplest pacifist view I can express. I see far, far more peace to be had in the world with the concept of dropping a complete archive.org gardening section from the pink F35, you know .. "turning the pistol into a pump" ...
>It would also help to not assume the motives of people criticizing your ideas by presuming them to be "warrior narcissists" themselves. Elevate the discussion, not downgrade it.
Apropos quixotic.
You might notice that I am manifesting the very thing I am resisting.
That is by design. For every excuse for murdering 'those people over there', I have and can spot a greedy instance of technological mis-use. There is no longer any good, legitimate reason for war - technologically. It happens, because technologists don't confront the warriors.
So I'm targeting warrior narcissism intentionally, and yes in a way guaranteed to create a cloud of smoke on the horizon, because .. after all .. dang himself, could prove the value of my point by switching me off right now.
What is this word salad? "Spirit?" Intention? Disarm the "warrior narcissist?"
Good luck - this flies in the face of the entirety of human history.
> "what would it take to turn an AK47 or an AR15 into a water pump?"
As someone who has manufactured these from billet: why would you do this? (hence "word salad") Why does one thing at all relate to the other? Why not just manufacture a pump from the same raw resources? Why not both?
> Those who think weapons are necessary must always take lesser priority than those who invent technology to make the lives of their fellow human beings better.
Did the Allies in WWII not "make the lives of their fellow human beings better" using violence? Why didn't they just ask mean old Hitler: "Hey, be nice! Have a good spirit!"? The world has finite resources, inherently making anything often denies those resources (your time, actual materials, etc.) to other causes. "Better" is subjective.
> There are so many examples of the tool-makers winning harder and at greater scale than the bomb-manufacturer.
These organizations are often one in the same.
> We wouldn't be here now if the balance was the other way
The balance is already the other way regardless of your citation-free assertion. You're using the internet to proliferate this tripe - famously a DARPA invention.
> Imagine if those F35 mounting pylons were used to drop field-portable water-purification systems directly where they are needed most.
Why is a high-performance stealth aircraft required for this? Why does one thing have anything to do with the other? What peaceful purpose does stealth capability serve?
> Imagine if those ships were being used to bring power to the villages that need it most.
With what? Words? Precisely how do you non-violently disarm someone who is willing and demonstrated to use violence to prevent you from disarming them?
Again, the world's resources are finite, and control of these resources inherently requires violence.
Your ability to spread these "ideas" are rooted in violence: taxation, freedom generally. Freedom isn't free, and the price is paid in blood.
There's a real problem with governments that invade other countries and attack civilians, and we're in a particularly hot time right now. That gives many current examples, though: should Ukraine prioritize manufacturing water pumps? Or do they mostly need weapons to fight back in the war?
I get that folks don't like war. I hate war. I've seen much more evidence that deterrence produces peace more readily than disarmament. On the flip side, more destructive weapons may be used more rarely, but they kill more people when they are used.
I'm not sure what the optimal approach is, but it almost certainly requires nations to arm themselves in case they are attacked. "Provide for the common defense" was not specified idly.
Ukraine should prioritize making peaceful relationships, as should the Russians and Americans and British - and the rest of the world should be making sure they do so.
That they have not made that priority, choosing instead to prioritize their nations' collective warrior narcissist identities rather than valuing the human life of each, is why those nations are on the brink of destroying each other.
Warrior narcissism is infectious and contagious and insidious. You can see it at an individual scale and you can see it at nation scales, too. The solution is to smash the mirror: deny any and all of the identities involved their right to their own identities, until they see, underneath it all, the true value of human life.
There is no American/Russian/Ukrainian/British identity worth more than the human lives in each state. There is no Israeli/Palestinian identity worth more than the human lives in either state.
The fact that one identity is held as more valuable/important/special than the other, is what gives each the justification (not right) to murder the other.
If the rest of the world had shunned the Russians and the Ukrainians and the British and the Americans at equivalent levels until their identities were no longer of any perceived value, the conflict would not have perpetuated. The fact that Russians clung to the identities of the Russian-speaking humans in the Donbas, the fact that Ukraine nationalist identity took higher priority over respect for human life, the fact that Americans gloat over their own cultural identity of warriors, as do the Brits - is why we have the conflict.
>I've seen much more evidence that deterrence produces peace more readily than disarmament.
Bullshit. Deterrence did not stop a single human life being murdered in any of the current conflicts. "Deterrence" is just warrior narcissist speak for "I've got my mirror, it's bigger than <theirs>, and that is all that matters".
> Ukraine should prioritize making peaceful relationships
Ok, let's steel man this thing. Russia is not going to be peaceful regardless of your idealism - this isn't a disputable fact. Now, how does Ukraine "prioritize making peaceful relationships?"
Specifically, what concrete actions should Ukraine take to prevent violent incursion by an outside actor? No word salad: if you are the benevolent dictator of Ukraine today, what do you do? Counting on third parties to "shun" is out, it's not an effective option (and it arguably already happened with sanctions, but still.)
> Deterrence did not stop a single human life being murdered in any of the current conflicts.
What would Ukraine look like absent any donated war materiel from third parties? Why does Russia not own Kiev in that scenario?
"Prioritize making peaceful relationships" is entirely unhelpful along the lines of saying "Do the work". The way you're writing so dismissively of other people's analysis of this topic demands that you provide something far more specific than you are. As it is, you're writing seems completely divorced from reality.
clearly people have a responsibility to sit down and think long and hard and try to rule out as much as possible the negatives of any tech or ideas they share with other people. Or at least give it a cursory thought or find someone with that mindset to tamp those issues down. Absolutely before even considering a funding step or presentation to anyone outside of a very small trusted group. Ideas take fire way too quickly now not to be cautious.
>How do you make sure a police state doesn't happen?
There is no way to be sure, all one person can do most of the time is make a personal effort and hope it is not overwhelmed by storm-trooper ambitions and communist-dictator tactics.
When I look at Flock, it is so sad. It's been 30 full years since I got my early webcams when they were made by Intel and were still expensive business machines intended for teleconferencing over dial-up. Without really needing the internet of course.
It didn't take long before I was using one for observing my fledgling company's parking lot 24/7, and on more than half my CRT monitor you could see every car that drove by on my street, which was almost constant during the daytime. This was 99% of the action compared to visitors who pulled in.
It didn't take that long before I could remotely call in to the cam plugged into the front office PC through dial-up networking in Windows 95, and when I got a smartphone in 2001 I no longer needed a remote laptop most of the time as long as I was OK with the small screen of the flip-phone form factor. Rather than leaving the spare land-line available for calling directly in, alternatively it was also possible to log into an ISP over dial-up from my company, then keep the line tied up so I (or anyone really) could have access over the internet.
When broadband internet came around it made a really big difference since the stream was not as compressed, and motion not nearly as blurry and jerky. It was nice having the choice between a private remote connection to my front office PC over direct dial-up whenever I wanted, as well as enjoying the faster speed of the public internet plenty of the time too.
Anyway it didn't take long to realize that if webcams ever really catch on, then our local law enforcement would be highly interested in what could be done if they could freely observe them like I was doing looking at my own stream. I didn't know anybody else that had a webcam at first, but for protection of my own building all I would have to do is give the law my IP address and they could pick up the stream no differently than I was. They already knew my location and I had an excellent relationship with all the first responders. Naturally nothing was encrypted back then so that wasn't even a consideration, there was really nothing confidential on my stream to begin with.
I really thought about it long and hard and it took quite a while trying to examine all the possibilities. There were a few obvious downsides regarding privacy which needed much further consideration, so I could not in good conscience pull the trigger until that had been justified very deeply.
I didn't expect to hesitate that long but it really did take more than a year to conclude without a doubt that the negatives outweighed the positives, but that was only in the short run. In the long run the virtually unlimited downsides could only accumulate in excess of the possible upsides, and it was a big unknown how scattered cams could be used to compromise general privacy. Eventually had to realize such a cam network would be more easily used in a predatory way rather than for protection from predators, regardless of who was watching or recording. At significant scale it seemed like it could very well become exponentially dystopian.
No big deal, if you're not capable of thinking of something overwhelmingly positive to base your business on, I understand.
At least I didn't pioneer it, and I assume a lot of other early webcam owners gradually engaged in some of the same thought processes or it would have gotten a lot worse a lot sooner. I sure did talk to a lot of them, as webcams got more popular over time. Most of them were on laptops though and very seldom were aimed at a public space.
There are so many worthwhile things to do which don't amount to spying on Americans.
How do you not consider all Americans spies, given the way our devices work and constantly hoover everything? Perhaps most Americans aren't approached to sell the data they essentially collect 24/7 on everything around them, assuming even just a smart phone (not to mention cars, music, nest-like devices, iot, yadda yadda), but it is one hell of a mesh.
I think that's a good observation because people are really doing it to themselves.
Most of our electronics hasn't been American for quite some time now, so there is that. It really is made in, and for, less freedom & liberty loving countries, with the USA becoming more like collateral damage each decade.
It wasn't really this bad until Facebook came along whose sole mission ended up trying to monopolize PII as much as possible. And if not that at least put billions of dollars to work changing peoples' habits to neglect their own privacy anyway even if they end up on other platforms.
If privacy wasn't so valuable in a fundamental way, they wouldn't have been able to get as rich as they did by monetizing its removal.
It might actually be wise [1] to create a new, slightly less permissioned license for open source wherein the open is defined as anything that isn’t in a kill or surveillance chain or, more broadly, for military use…
That wouldn't be open source. OSI includes the clause "No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor"[0] for its definition of open source. Famously, the JSON license[1] has a clause "The Software shall be used for Good, not Evil," so the Free Software Foundation considers it nonfree.[2]
Arguably, any such clauses - similar to attempt for "non commercial" licenses would do more harm than good.
If you actually wanted to respect such a license,you would have to endlessly argue what is dual use technology for example, the same as people argue if advertisements on project website or tangentially related donations make the thing "commercial"?
While at the same time, any "bad guys" will just ignore both.
The idea that a defense manufacturer would be stopped by this is too funny. The code won't be auditable by you so how will you know? Secondly even if you did find out the most you'd get is a payout. Thirdly if you believe that missile aren't running GNU/Linux I have a bridge to sell you.
I've contemplated writing an email to RMS asking him how he feels about the use of GNU software in military and surveillance systems and if he could do it over if he would do things differently to alllow users to put a clause in their OSS licenses that forbid such things.
This line of reason is one I find appealing but somewhat untimely. If I'm grokking the deeper message it's that "limiting licensed use in these creative ways opens the door to potentially evil chicanery" -- i.e. you start limiting licenses to non-police activities and then some corporation goes "great! now that we can do that our licenses now limit usage to only endeavors that boil your firstborn and undermine our competition".
Problem is in era de la grift we've sort of realized that they never needed permission - there's no precedent to set anymore.
Call that "deeper message" A1. He's got arguments A1 and A2, and goes "if P, then A1(P) implies C; and if ¬P, then A2(¬P) implies C; therefore C". But we can just as easily go "if ¬P, then A1(¬P) implies ¬C" (as you did); "and if P, then A2(P) implies ¬C; therefore ¬C". Logical arguments don't let you do this: the arguments are pure rhetoric.
Quite a lot of Richard Stallman's arguments are pure rhetoric, actually. And, I mean, I guess it worked, in that the GPL and FSF ended up being quite influential; but the trouble with building a philosophy on rhetoric is that people start to believe that rhetoric – including you –, and it erodes and replaces the foundations of their beliefs, so it'll all come crashing down sooner or later.
I don't really think we need to engage with the rhetoric on an intellectual level, since it's obviously wrong: far better to read philosophers whose reasoning is sound, or to come up with your own ideas.
Sorry, but you must be way smarter than me or something because that made no sense. Not that I don't understand what that notation is supposed to mean, but that I'm not seeing the connective tissue here. It's also a little weird to come at me based on the 'erosion of my foundation of beliefs', considering how orthogonal that is to the topic of legal precedent and contracts.
For what it's worth, what I do believe is that our system of law was a good idea at one point but is totally ineffectual in the current context - that's my point about an era of grifters. Didn't get that one from stallman, measured that on the eyeball mark I.
This is the first time my poor communication skills have been interpreted as a sign of my superior intelligence. I think I'm ready to become a professional expert consultant!
I was abstracting Richard Stallman's argument to its (il)logical structure: P and ¬P are whether the license restriction is enforceable, etcetera. "Erosion" was talking about people who, seeing free software as a good idea, begin to adhere to Stallmanite orthodoxy (which is, largely, philosophically-unsound): that was not aimed at you, but at Richard Stallman himself (the Ur-Stallmanite, we could say). I saw this as generalising your criticism. I didn't notice you were making a broader point about the law, so this was somewhat of a supercalifragilisticexpialidocious non-sequitur; thanks for clarifying your point.
Why do you want the people risking their lives to protect your freedom to have worse artillery? I don't understand this thinking at all. If my country is going to shoot something, I want them to be able to control what actually gets hit. I swear, people take borderline religious stances on things to the point that they no longer make sense.
Many wars are simply what you’d expect from violent leaders who realize they can order other people into combat for them. But some wars really are for the greater good. There are definitely militaries that I want to see win, and militaries that I want to see lose.
I realize I don’t have any code that would be of any use to any military. If I did, I don’t see how I could write a license to allow the use of my code by only people I agree with.
You can write whatever you want in a license, including something as vague as “you can only use this code if I agree with your moral stances”. (For expediency, it might be worth enumerating the cases.)
The OSI might disapprove, but you don’t have to listen to them.
The only thing that protects my freedom is active peace-making at levels greater than active war-making.
We are all under a great deal of threat precisely because borderline religious warrior narcissism has taken precedence over emphatic, unstoppable peace-making.
The USA has been bombing people into oblivion "protecting peace", for decades now. Is the world safer now?
No, it very definitely is not.
>Why do you want the people risking their lives ..
I want people risking their lives to make great peace. That is not happening at the scale that it should be.
Instead, the lazy, less noble warrior narcissist, has the world by the nose. The only difference between an utter criminal and a war fighter is a very, very thin line of paper which makes murder in one case illegal and in another case, legal. This paper is tattered and torn and covered in the muck of the victims, held high by the victors to justify their crime.
However, we see today the fallacy of this condition.
If your country is going to shoot something, I want to be damn sure it has done everything ethically, technologically, and administratively possible to have first made peace, at all costs.
That is simply not evident in any of the current world conflicts.
Instead of engaging in foreign cultures, we in the West march in lock-step behind those who have deemed foreign cultures inferior and worthy of nothing but destruction and despair.
I want to see the warrior narcissist who profit from this condition, disarmed and made irrelevant. The only way that happens is if human life takes precedence over human identity.
No humans identity is worth more than another humans life.
Risk your life for true peace this way: Before you murder, abandon yourself!
> Why do you want the people risking their lives to protect your freedom to have worse artillery?
Hi. Veteran here. I protected his freedoms to do just that. You asking this question in that way insults veterans, whether you intended it or not. People using this line of thinking usually only care about veterans when it can win them arguments, and do not care any other time.
> I don't understand this thinking at all
Then, instead of asking questions with inflammatory language, you should humble yourself and ask respectfully so you can understand.
> Why do you want the people risking their lives to protect your freedom to have worse artillery
If better artillery is being built on open source tech then everyone has better artillery. Not just the people "protecting you" but also the people trying to kill those people
I'm going to assume that you're an American, speaking from an Americentric point of view and I'd like to take this as an opportunity to discuss the fact that Hacker News is a website that is available to people around the world. Many of those people are not American citizens and do not have the same relationship with the US military and government that you do.
Only Americans want to defend their country? I'm Swedish, did my military service, and generally agree that I would want our defence forces to have the best weapons available.
This isn't a gotcha or 'try' it's a critique about how US defaultism overwhelms conversations on this site and how it is detrimental to the conversation at hand.
I'm not disputing that one of the links from the comment that gmerc made came from a US military domain, but that's moot. A licence against military use covers every army, not the one you happen to identify with.
As an aside, I'm curious what nationality user gmerc is. If they're the person in the video that they linked to it sounds like they're German?
And this isn't being nitpicky -- it's really important in the context of this discussion. People from certain countries more than others seem to lack this concept of civic hygiene and clam up when the discussion comes up.
We should push past that awkwardness and keep having these discussions about concepts like civic hygiene. It's important.
I doubt this is enforceable. Are you going to sue a government secret program because they used some open source code in a way that violates some weird clause?
Yes, citizens should sue the government when the government takes actions which are grounds for suit. The government sure will come after your money if you do things they say you shouldn't, and what's good for the goose is good for the gander.
You won't know, they'll say it's for national security so licenses don't matter, and then if you keep going they'll make sure your life is a living hell and your bank accounts closed.
I'm begging tech bros to understand that abusive governments _do not care about abusing you_
On the other hand, it may be worth publicly and unambiguously stating a position even if unenforceable. This seems to be what most modern protest movements are based on. For instance, how many software repos "stand with Ukraine", even though they won't make an impact on frontline military reality?
Ah yes, they're carpet bombing people and indiscriminately killing fighters, adults and children, but they're going to be stopped because... the software they use is two clause GPL.
The other rule here is that you cannot avoid politics if you want to create a better world. If you want the freedom to develop technology without worrying it will be used by a police state, you need to put in the work to make sure a police state doesn't happen - you cannot ignore politics and just "focus on technology."
On the other hand, a few heuristics will get you pretty far:
Don't build technology that interacts with people in ways they did't consent to. Don't build skinner boxes. Let the user decide who gets whatever data they generate while using the thing. Let the user control how it will work, insofar as it doesn't contradict the other heuristics.
These are political principles, but they're pretty basic. You don't have to keep up to date with the news, just check in with your morals once in a while.
Yeah, there’s definitely good design principles, but as others have pointed out, it’s extremely difficult to build technologies that are not trivially dual-use.
And, to be clear, I’m not saying “politics” as in “did you hear what Trump said?” I’m saying politics as in “what is your city council doing, how are your neighbors doing, and what are the consequences of your work and economic choices and who’s paying them.” Most of the news is a circus; that stuff is not.
I'd call it a bug. If we don't fix it, I think that our habit of creating incentives towards outcomes that nobody actually wants will eventually kill us.
Seems like most popular mainstream platforms violate many of those heuristics. Google, Facebook, maybe even hacker news probably, does things with your data you likely never consented to. Do we decide who gets whatever date we generate on those platforms?
I like some platforms do give us choice over our data but rarely do they not have our data be a component of the product. OpenAI, and anthropic for example use our data for "analytic purposes" which is broad enough that we compromise our agency over our data.
So what do you do when the majority of the systems you use on a daily basis to function in a normal life, require you (or atleast the majority of the populace) to compromise on morals? Do you know its expensive rise-wise, cost-wise, socially etc to check in with you morals in that kind of environment. I'm just curious your thoughts on this or if I'm misreading it. edit: And I'm not all doom gloom, I have hope and desire and trust in a future where morals aren't compromised in this way - I just see it as coming with a higher up-front cost and being aware that the most common environments around you systematically actively oppose you.
> So what do you do when the majority of the systems you use on a daily basis to function in a normal life, require you (or atleast the majority of the populace) to compromise on morals?
You replace those systems, one by one, with systems that don't. You figure out who is doing the work that makes that possible, and you figure out how to ensure they're supported while they do that work. You educate your friends and family that doing so as well is an investment in their future safety. Consider contributing to systems that help, consider damaging systems that harm. Fix a graphene OS bug. Shame a Palantir employee. Donate to Signal. Put a bag over a flock camera. Break somebody's pervert glasses (that is, supposing they're using them without consent of the people around them). There are a million ways to resist, some easy, some hard, some risky, some safe. Find something that jives with your tolerances and your skills and take action.
I had been a bit naive and gullible in the past, and resisted and several times was unable to gauge the actual risk and had severe negative repercussions for being the one who did what was right. I think thats the biggest challenge here stopping most people from resisting: it isn't always clear what risk one is taking on, and from there the impact of it isn't all that clear.
I wonder why risk has become so unclear and uncertain, while impact feels so low. Do you have any thoughts on that?
And in regards to educating others - assuming I have been able to find and articulate the high-enough impact and low-enough risk opportunities to others, how do you balance the lack of priority by your friends and family? Or maybe that sweet spot of risk-impact and finding opportunities first that fit their risk tolerance's, is the hardest part, and articulating it from there may land differently than other opportunities friends/family have received. Edit: I don't know why I have resistance to trying to educate others - there's a fine line between education and trying to convince/influence another to take your desired action. That then starts to feel like holier-than-though or a "I know better than you whats good for you" type of attitude which meets resistance.
The comment you replied to doesn't imply the users are immoral, but the creators. They're saying that we shouldn't build such systems. I, personally, also believe we should resist using them as much as possible, instead of rewarding them by using them. But, obviously, that may be easier or harder for any given individual situation. So be it; just avoid as much as you can tolerate if you agree that these things shouldn't exist the way they are.
How do you make sure a police state doesn't happen? Block traffic? Tweet? Cut off ties with friends and family that don't share your political beliefs?
Of course you can avoid politics. Just be a good person. Vote for who you think is the best candidate at the time. And move on with your life.
Ironically the people most involved in politics don't have their own house in order. They're often mentally ill, over educated, underemployed and without meaningful ties in their life (e.g. family, real life community, etc).
There are a lot of answers to this, but since we're likely coders in here, there's a software design answer worth pointing out.
Watch how police states behave. What tools do they use? Typically, it's roots of trust. They take down sites by tampering with their domain name. They MITM web traffic by compelling certificate authorities to do unstrustworthy things. They spy on cell phones by mimicking external authorities that the phones are wired to trust explicitly and without input from the user. They insert devices into ISP infrastructure which users tend to assume is neutral.
So if we want to prevent this: Don't tolerate roots of trust that the user cannot configure. Use a threat model that includes nation states. Don't design with the assumption that trusted third parties will remain trustworthy. Think about how to protect your users privacy. Prefer peer-to-peer where possible, because your server may at one point become compromised and harm the users. Think about how they can protect themselves if that happens. Give them control over whether to install updates. Publish your API so users can make unauthorized clients if they don't trust yours. Prefer repeatable builds, and check hashes to spot malware. Review contributions and be wary of binary blobs that may have hidden use cases.
Mostly this is just sound engineering. It means doing your job well, which is not always the same as doing the job the shareholders asked for. They invested so they could have leverage, so ask yourself ahead of time if those are the same kinds of levers that police states want to pull. Shoot them down in the design phase if possible, sabotage them after the fact if necessary.
By being durably involved in your community and by being aware of and not ignoring the consequences of your actions, of the policies you advocate for, the actions of the politicians you endorse, etc. By not just voting once and moving on.
What are you talking about? Should you hound co-workers that don't work for you? Leave pamphlets on cars with bad bumper stickers? Subscribe to the New Yorker?
If you're interested in politics you should read it, but you should not let it affect your life in any meaningful way.
You're being needlessly antagonistic and it makes me think you haven't actually explored local options. Let's start elsewhere: what sort of civic engagement are you involved with? Have you ever submitted a FOIA request? Been to a community advocacy group?
Everybody should submit FOIAs. If that makes me an advocate for public records, then sure, I'm an advocate.
And of course those things count, but it's arguably only focused on your immediate surroundings. I've done some pretty significant cleanup of parks in my area. It's very rewarding.
Are you interested in being less antagonistic about basic civics?
Politics affects your life in basically every way you could possibly think of, regardless of your apathy towards it.
When you’re apathetic, these decisions don’t just disappear. You implicitly delegate them to everyone else. Now, knowing what you know about most people, does that sound like a wise idea?
It’s sort of like saying “I don’t care where we eat” in your friend group, and then they choose sushi and you hate fish. Whoops.
> Block traffic? Tweet? Cut off ties with friends and family that don't share your political beliefs?
All of the above.
Get involved with political organisations, NGOs, volunteering groups, go to protests and network with people there. So that when the government starts doing something that approaches a police state, you, your group, and many other groups of people will be out there ready to make their will known. Block roads, burn tires, occupy squares, remove cameras, etc. Is is easy? Not at all. Can you do it alone? No. Is it worth doing to avoid living in a police state? Yes.
Take a look at Russia if you want an example of what widespread political apathy leads to.
There's nothing that could convince me to do the opposite of what a proponent of a policy is advocating for than inconveniencing me to that extend.
If someone blocks traffic because of [topic], I don't think "gee maybe we are overly-dependent on oil", but the reverse. Most people are the same.
If I see someone defiling a public space, I am more accepting to more authoritative means to restore order.
If someone cuts ties with me because of their political beliefs, I am further convinced they are part of a cult. Because that's essentially what cults advocate for.
You can believe what you want, but you should not be deluded to think you're changing anyone's mind by behaving this way.
Politics in the broadest sense is just any decision-making process where a single decision affects multiple people and those people don't all agree on which decision should be made.
An conscientious objection is definitely a right you have as a professional, but it's a neutral action, you refuse to do something, and you let someone else do it. If you really are against it, you actively do something about it, like presenting a law or making a criminal complaint.
That said, they are both compatible, you can refuse to do something, and make efforts so that nobody does it.
But I think the the latter is the actual core security model of our society, and refusals aren't really effective to the point that I wouldn't worry much about it and just focus on compartimentalizing and executing on my duties. Isn't it theoretically possible that upper management divides duties so that engineers cannot accurately judge the ethical correctness of the task and the overall mission? As an individual you don't have the right tools to make such an evaluation. You can be pushed to investigate further, but the moment you do so, you cease your role as an engineer and put your citizen hat on.
I personally wouldn't object on most cases, my threshold would be very high, a database of people's sexuality is not even close to even being concerning to me, that's like a Wikipedia infobox property. But even if it were a feature that did concern me, like a citizen-ID to real time coordinates system, I wanna be at the helm of it, either way (if I get the privilege). If something is wrong, I'd be in a privileged position to do something about it internally, judicially or through congress, there's also whistleblowing if it comes to that, but that's not in me.
> An conscientious objection is definitely a right you have as a professional, but it's a neutral action, you refuse to do something, and you let someone else do it.
Yes, but it’s still the case that you didn’t do it. You cannot directly control the actions of others, just your own. Do that, at least.
Getting other people to also not do it is the rest of the political act. It’ll never be the case that nobody’s willing to perform an act, but if all the people who are doing so under duress stop, at the very least it helps one identify the proper size and shape of one’s political coalition and the power therein.
And, yes, people have bills. That’s what we mean by politics. We’re 50 years behind the curve on building the capacity for people to act in their own interest or on their own beliefs; that’s no reason not to start now.
>An objection of conscience is definitely a right you have as a professional, but it's a neutral action, you refuse to do something, and you let someone else do it.
Correct, and the lessons in the CIA's very own Simple Sabotage Field Manual
are still as helpful as when they were written.
Actually, you cannot avoid sex. Everything is about sex, even politics. If you want the freedom to develop technology without worrying it will be used by a police state, you cannot ignore sex and just "focus on technology"
There's a deep failed idea here. It's the idea that technology is an alternative to politics, period. I think that whole idea has failed.
You can't avoid building technologies that could be used by a police state, because literally everything can be used for warfare or aggression. The first person who sharpened a stick or a rock created a weapon. Everything is a weapon. Everything is dual-use.
If you want to prevent a police state or any other undesirable political outcome, you have to confront the politics directly. "Change the tools and you change the rules," an old saying from 1990s cyber-culture, is an idea that I think has failed. Instead what happens is that the rules determine what's done with the tools. Those 90s cyber-hippie and cyber-libertarian types vastly underestimated the power of the political to the point of making a category error.
Cryptocurrency is a great case in point. It started as an attempt to create a technology that would act as an escape hatch from corrupt casino capitalism and state-backed financialization. Instead it became an insane absurdist parody of those things. The same types of corrupt individuals who profited off "too big to fail" and the rest of it simply took cryptocurrency and used it to implement the same type of system but on a block chain. The rules (and rulers) changed the tools, not the other way around.
Not everything is dual use. Some information technology grossly favors centralization or decentralization of power based on the type of information problem it solves.
Cryptocurrency is clearly a counterexample to your main point. The fact that some people use cryptocurrency tech to implement centrally managed private currencies is largely irrelevant. To the extent that cryptocurrencies are used to implement private currencies, it largely just hampers them technolgicially if it has any effect at all. These projects just like to use the term cryptocurrency to imply some level of legitimate decentralization or security that doesn't really exist.
It's like saying that because you can use a screwdriver as a weapon, it's inherently a destructive technology (or some mixture of destructive and constructive). On closer inspection it's clear that the screwdriver doesn't sit on the pareto front for weapons, but it does sit on the pareto front for manufacturing tools. So a screwdriver is clearly a technology whose existence favors construction over destruction. Similarly I would argue that technology like bittorrent or bitcoin favor decentralization over centralization.
As another example, surveilance technology favors centralization. None of what we are seeing now with flock would be possible without cheap mass produced digital cameras. The balance of technology favors cheap cameras (and counter-surveilance is often impossible or expensive) and it favors centralization because you need a lot of data to create inferences based on this spurrious data.
If we could have predicted these effects, perhaps we could have delayed the development of cheap cameras, but it just goes to show how complicated this game is. We could just as easily have said that more cameras would lead to unprecedented public transparency (e.g. bodycams on cops, dash cams). Unintended consequences.
I mean you kind of can. The whole premise of AI is basically that we'll make white collar administrative compliance work dirt cheap in the long run and we'll all be richer for it and we'll sidestep the whole "fight with all those industries" step because the sheer economics of it will make it happen and as those industries become cheaper/poorer there will be even less reason to not kick them to the curb. Kind of like how once certain state shed a lot of their manufacturing or agriculture, adopting policy that's bad for the rest became easier. Or how now that solar is cheap we mostly DGAF about coal.
The Marxists were wrong about the inevitability of history no matter which direction or by what mechanism one wants to assert it. You’ve gotta put in the work no matter what, there’s no eliding the actual effort of politics.
The "work" here is changing the technological picture to the point where the political one becomes a non issue, at least for whatever incremental step you're looking at. Because once the technological picture changes enough, whoever your enemy is has to essentially roll over and take it, or your society will get out competed by some other one that did adopt it.
Like no amount of politics is putting the allure of the wealth potential of using a printing press to disseminate information cheaply back in the bag even if that comes at the expense of ending a gravy train for a subset of the current winners in your society.
Recently my wife got locked out of her bank account - all cards blocked, unable to log in to the website or app, so effectively her whole finances were frozen - because she was trying to order a new bank card over the phone and some system couldnt do voice recognition (which we did not know they even used). We were getting ready to get on a plane to NYC, from California (she banks with TD bank) but after a tearful session of phoning anyone and everyone we could at TD, suddenly it magically got reversed.
The problem is not just the tech, its building systems where humans are essentially slaves to the system, with no recourse or power over whats happening.
Few things are more important in modern life than access to your money. That's why I would never use an online bank. I use a local credit union but "local" with actual branch offices you can walk into and talk to a human are the important thing.
TD bank has branches but that's not super helpful if you're at the airport. the helpful thing is having a "relationship manager", someone you can call or email directly - you can get that at a big bank or a small one, and you don't need tons of assets, a lot of banks its having your direct deposit with them is enough to qualify for some special relationship.
Online banks typically offer much more competitive financial products. I have some HYSA accounts at 4% APY, that’s not achievable with a CU or traditional bank.
The solution is the same solution as any financial risk: diversification. I have many accounts at many banks. If any one of them goes down, I’m fine. If multiple go down, I’m still fine in the interim.
I tend to think the same way, but I've personally had far more issues with my local (largest in the region) credit union. Their (human) customer support reps frequently make mistakes processing my share certificates that automation would have otherwise avoided.
Every business school and MBA program has ethics course requirements. Does it really make a difference? Maybe it does, and things would be even worse than they are otherwise. But I'm not sure.
I think the purpose isn't to make people more ethical, which is impossible, but to make ethical people more effective.
It ideally makes people better at identifying when something bad is happening and gives them tools to handle it. If they're amoral in the first place though a course isn't going to change that.
I'm curious why you think an ethics course would actually change minds. In my experience in undergrad, we had a CS ethics course, and it went in in-one-ear-and-out-the-other for 99% of students, probably myself included. I know it was a thorough course but I promptly forgot all of it, and so did everyone else.
Ethical stance is not something you can teach in one course. If you don't have this disposition by the time you're in college, I think you're likely not learning it.
My original comment was more about the quality of discourse in this thread being...somewhat lacking. I'd hope that an ethics course would at least equip CS grads to have a more substantive debate about these sorts of topics. I agree that many students would dial it in for an ethics course (just like they do for many required courses), but I also think there's likely some value in exposure, and it's difficult to argue that ethics are irrelevant to software engineering given the frequency of discussions like this one.
(And, to be fair, it's a discussion board on the Internet, so maybe my expectations are just out of whack.)
A course is nothing. I've long felt that Software Engineering should follow suit of many other engineering disciplines and push responsibility down to engineers. Like how when a bridge falls, an engineer has to answer for it.
I don't know exactly how that looks, and yes there are many issues with it, but we're living in the age of cowboy coding.
I agree. Software engineers are approaching a level of societal impact that it would be appropriate to start thinking about professional ethics systems similar to Canada's Iron Ring (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Ring).
I also think there's a long, long way between here and there, especially in the US. Requiring ethics in CS programs seems more immediately attainable to me, but I agree that it isn't a standalone fix.
Especially if it has concrete historical examples of technology intended for good and how it was later used for evil, rather than something more generally-philosophical.
You really think taking an ethics COURSE will do anything?
How are you supposed to 'learn' ethics?
Never understood the point of those. My university had over 4 for the cyber students and over half the grads went on to work for the MIC contributing to blowing up brown children in the middle east anyway.
Clearly, our problem must have been that they didn't have 5 mandatory time-waster ethics courses. That surely would have solved the matter. Add in a few extra "racism is bad" and "don't be a meanie" courses to round out the collection, just for good measure.
If you think an ethics course is about "racism is bad" or "don't be a meanie" then you weren't paying attention. The ethics class i took in college focused on the philosophical models of ethics from Kant and Aristotle and Nietzsche, utilitarianism and consequentialism and all of that. It's about deriving whether you're doing a "good thing" from first principles, and not some later moral model.
What program? Or if you'd rather stay anonymous, can you share the curriculum somehow? I'm very curious about what a CS program of study looks like with that many ethics courses.
In the US, many undergrad programs award a minor with 15-18 hours of study in the subject (or 5-6 standard courses). Four ethics courses would basically get you to a philosophy minor.
At least I had 6 humanities courses telling me why communism is good
Edit: To make this comment have a little substance, what I'm getting at is, universities are already way too biased and one-sided on humanities issues to be teaching ethics. Students notice it too. I've gotten As on some insanely bad papers just cause I knew what they wanted to hear.
We had an ethics course, it was a requirement for graduation if I remember correctly.
It was entirely performative. You can teach a curriculum of ethics, but that won't make a person empathetic. These are courses for credit hours, not firmware updates.
And a person with empathy can always find or be given reasons to not apply his empathy to a person or a group of people.
I've been arguing with folks on Reddit about this lately when it comes to Google's changes to Android (where they've made it more difficult to install any software on your device without Google first tracking the identity of the developer). My argument ultimately comes down to the fact that Google (and Apple already) have built a technology that gives them immense power to control individual computing freedoms, and no matter their internal policy, they still must follow US law. No amount of promises or legit good faith on their part matter, they've made a dangerous technology and are behold to a government that is very eager to censor anything it doesn't like. It's so disappointing to see 1. Google engineers build such a thing, and 2. For people to support it.
The automobile, the transistor, the Internet, and basically every other technology ~could~ be used by a police state. I'm not sure how that is a helpful rule at all.
The article says the same. I think the point is to be aware and try to build things in a way to minimize the chance for abuse. There's nuance and the author says as much.
It's definitely different to have a prediction than a database. Especially for something that can be denied like religious belief. If the nazis had such a db they would have killed much more efficiently I think.
Technology isn’t going to be a moderator of a police state. We already have technologies that are used for oppression, exploitation, abuse, and so on. They’re just not being used this way by governments in the same way they are being used by criminals. Bitcoin is used to collect ransoms. Telegram/signal is used to plan conspiracies to commit crimes. GPS and location services are used to monitor trafficking victims. There are stories of cartels running their own cellular networks.
A lack of technology doesn’t restrict a police state, see East Germany in the ‘60s-‘80s. It does, however, create more opportunity for crimes. In Seattle there was a shooting at the bite of Seattle festival. They don’t have firm ideas about the identities of all the suspects. There would be a greater chance that they would know who they are looking for if there were more securities cameras deployed at large public festivals.
To prevent a police state you need public participation in governance and a population that lives in the real world and not fantasy lands created by a intentional misinterpretation of events.
I'm in the UK and it always seems weird to me how in the USA its totally normal to publically register yourself as either a Democrat or a Republican. To me seems like the kind of thing that should be private. In the UK I might choose to be a member of a political party but no-one needs to know that except that particular party. Or I can just join no party and vote in private on polling day.
It's because we have open primaries in the US - registering as a Democrat or Republican is only important as far as voting in primaries. In other countries the selection of candidates is internal to the political parties themselves. There are pros and cons for both systems but the US system is fairly unique globally aside from a few exceptions in South America.
Isn't it kinda internal here too? Parties get to pick their candidates how ever they want. The major ones have primaries, but I still don't know if anything legally requires them to respect the votes there.
It's weirder still because you often don't actually have to register with a party, even to vote in the primaries like other commenters have mentioned; it depends on which state and which party. [0]
For example, I just voted in the Minnesota primaries. Ours are open primaries, so you don't need to register with any party and the ballot has every party on it. Though, it spoils your ballot to vote in multiple parties' primaries. So you gotta choose, but you do that privately.
It seems quite weird. Our parties are generally quite weird because were are not supposed to exist in the first place and so most of the rules are sort of ad-hoc.
I don’t belong to one, but it is sort of annoying to not be able to vote in the “primary elections” (where the parties pick their candidates). My state has a strong partisan lean so this is the only election that actually matters here. Oh well.
This is missing the "(2013)" at the end of the HN link, but it does seem weirdly prescient as we say a rise of more polarised politics across the World, just 13 years later.
In my country there are two parties always being elected. Quite similar to US system. It's always first saying "elect us, otherwise second will win" and the second saying the opposite.
Asymptotically those parties go the same way, but always introducing new laws that improve oppression-style control, explaining that those others must be controlled. And the voters accept the solution, but do not understand that the next year the second party will come and use the solution.
I don't know if you get what I'm saying without the context but this is exactly the case: imagine police state appearing in your country. Does the law help them or are you still free
Has this philosophical approach ever worked? It's a commonplace in the hard sciences and engineering fields (ie, refusing to work on weapons systems), but weapons systems are elite and well-compensated engineering projects that don't have any trouble finding talent. The same thing goes for NSA, which has a line out the door from elite academia.
I'm not dismissing the sentiment here. It's morally sound. You should act in accordance with your principles and it useful to be reminded how those principles intersect the world. I have similar guardrails (probably not the same as the author's). I just wouldn't want people to overestimate what can be accomplished with this approach.
A significant number of people in positions of power in the AI industry get their moral framework from science fiction books and a particular Harry Potter fanfiction. It’s hard to predict what ideas and philosophies will become important.
Most people get their moral framework from TV, movies, and memes. Hence the common refrain of “this is just like gattaca” and “have you not seen the movie X? This happens there!” And the torment nexus crap.
But that seems normal and historical. Stories are how we encode memorable concepts for transmission to each other and probably why the Bible is full of parables and so on.
"Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality" written by Eliezer Yudkowsky has become something akin to a sacred text among the rationalist community.
edit: posted is a podcast by Behind the Bastards about the Zizians, a death cult that branched out of rationalist community and which was responsible for six deaths, but it covers the rationalist community and the Harry Potter fanfiction as well.
The sad irony of "Share this post on..." with neat list of all the services doing exactly what the post warns against. They can and often are already used by police state.
Isn't it an age old maxim: democratic governments should remember to not build tools/give them selves powers that they won't want the opposition to be able to use WHEN they come to power.
That just moves the decision point to “could be used by a police state”. Some people prefer humans as being the only people who can determine what a civil violation is. E.g. if a policeman doesn’t pull you over you shouldn’t be punished. This allows for great personal discretion and the potential for a police state through such discretionary exertion of power as exemplified by the famous line
> “For my friends, everything. For my enemies, the law”
I prefer speed cameras, red-light cameras, and so on because automated enforcement removes discretionary power from enforcement agents. I believe that enforcement agents are the arms of the civic body tasked with ensuring the commons are not ruined. Consequently, controlling the exertion of discretion is entirely an engineering approach to controlling quality of enforcement. Others believe that enforcement agents are our rulers or agents thereof that we must submit to - and therefore to whom we must give great discretion so that they can choose whether we are worthy or not.
That is incompatible with all being equal before the law.
> I prefer speed cameras, red-light cameras, and so on because automated enforcement removes discretionary power from enforcement agents.
There can still be corruption with automated enforcement. If the punishment is fees and the fees go towards the budget of those in charge of the automation parameters, then you'll see manipulation of parameters to increase fees paid. Shorter yellow lights, shorter distance between a speed limit sign and the speed camera, requiring more effort to contest the automation when it's wrong than to just pay the fee, etc.
This is true. A useful difference between this form of parameter optimization and the unalignability of humans is that it is possible to force constraints on these parameters. E.g. San Francisco’s speed cameras run in collection mode to obtain baselines and then in enforcement mode where they have to demonstrate reduction in speeding. California mandates minimum yellow times.
Flaws exist but we can constraint-engineer to minimize adversarial optimization of parameters. Improvements allow us to asymptotically approach our goal optimum. Human discretion, on the other hand, is fluid and dodges all attempts at enforcement.
We require many human agents solely because transforming unstructured vision space into structured judgment was impossible in the past. Currently, in a sufficiently constrained environment (roadways) we are able to solve sufficiently constrained problems (speeding, running a red light).
One hopes that we are able to solve this problem in more spaces as time goes by.
> It's bad civic hygiene to build technologies that could someday be used to facilitate a police state
Not “avoid building technologies that could be used by a police state”, as the HN title currently says.
The HN title reads like any technology a police state could ever use should be avoided. Like cars, or pencils. Anything.
Schneier’s quote says “used to facilitate a police state” is a lot more specific: could be used to bring a police state into existence where it wouldn’t have been possible before, like having a database of everyone’s sexuality, etc.
The article is not completely wrong in its premises, but phrased incorrectly.
This is not about technologies (after all, an authoritarian government will use many existing technologies, from the car to the computer), but about powers granted to a government, that could be used differently by the next party/majority in power.
The answer to that is to not grant government too much power in the first place.
Of course, this is often a contentious point for leftists, since they do want to grant government a lot of power in the first place; they're just concerned that the exact same powers will then be used by a different political side in a way that bothers a different category of people.
You will get downvoted to oblivion for even suggesting it here but it's so obviously a take that maps on cleanly to reality. Massive power centralization in government makes everything dual use in the service of a police state. The easiest thing to do is resist massive centralization of power in a government.
you get downvoted because to most people we don't care if its tyranny.gov or tyranny.com. "don't give powers to the government" just means they buy them from corporations. see: cellphone location data.
the solution is not to have the power exist at all, anywhere.
>the solution is not to have the power exist at all, anywhere.
This is nonsensical. The power always exists, it's just your fellow human beings doing things, to you, around you, with you, without you.
You cannot do anything to not have that power. It doesn't matter if your neighbors are lynching you because the evil dictatorial police state said to, or because the rough consensus of a mob of lunatics want your food.
You as a human lack power. Humans working together have far more power. Sometimes, you can use the combined power of some humans working together to empower other humans. That's what laws are. That's what a State can do.
That's why corporations can have power even though they are not part of government. Being able to direct 1000 humans to do something is what power is.
You cannot eliminate that power. It's a fundamental part of reality. It's the entire reason animals evolved to be social at all, to take advantage of that power.
Its like you need a list of laws rules and enforcement "we" people have built to stop "them" (corporations/governments/groups of lobbyists) from working together.
I'll point to the gun rules, where gun owners prevented the state from building gun registries, forced gun sale records to be kept on gun store premises, and then largely purchased from small independent gun stores. They ensured the background check was on the person and not the gun. All intentionally with the understanding that someone somewhere was going to attempt to grab the power of who had what guns.
You can avoid giving any single person or group too much power. It does take effort.
Your thesis that the solution is to "not to have the power exist at all, anywhere" and your insistence here that "you need a list of laws rules and enforcement "we" people have built to stop "them"" are at odds. "We" did not build those laws nor do "we" enforce them. The government wrote those laws and the government enforces them with its monopoly on violence. You cannot have a set of laws which anyone respects or enforces without a source of power capable of doing so, and in the US that source of power is not "we the people," regardless of what your civics classes might have taught you.
>All intentionally with the understanding that someone somewhere was going to attempt to grab the power of who had what guns.
And so it became impossible to do anything effective to prevent gun violence and mass shootings and "that someone somewhere" proceeded to centralize power anyway because the gun owners don't actually care as long as no one touches their guns.
Meanwhile the rest of the Western world has democratic governments which actually function and don't have mass shootings.
I find it frusrating how the conversation around this almost always focuses on one side of the equation. Why is it always about preventing tools from being built in case authoritarians comes to power rather than preventing those authoritarians from coming to power in the first place? I'm far more scared off the authoritarian aspect than the tech. The Nazis didn't need Flock cameras to kill millions. It seems like focusing on the actual bad guys is going to be more effective because if the state wants to bear its weight on you, it rarely requires tech to do it.
People have incentives to become more powerful - through wealth, power, leverage, or in other ways.
So unfortunately, authoritarianism tends to have gravity going for it.
The Nazis relied heavily on IBM technology for national census data (to identify jews), military logistics, ghetto statistics, train traffic management, and concentration camp capacity
I fully agree with your base perspective, that the main focus should be on preventing authoritarians from coming to power in the first place.
I also agree with your final point, that the government doesn't need tech to lean on a person.
We disagree in the middle, on how tech that makes evil orders of magnitude easier might be a contributing factor and might enable the government to lean on many more people than it would otherwise.
My comment was made knowing and understanding the Nazis use of tech. But it's an argument of efficiency and efficiency matters less and less when dealing with the state due to their relative resource and power imbalance compared to individuals. Tech might have sped up the Nazi death machine, but the desire and intent for murder is all that matters in the long run. Their efficiency was of note really only because their time in power was relatively brief. If they were like some other authoritarian regimes and remained in power for decades, they likely would have eventually racked up the same death toll with or without the tech.
We also never seem to accept this answer for other forms of tech. Should we ban encryption because it makes it easier for terrorists to hide? Should your phone run ever photo you take through a CSAM database to catch preditors? Should we ban 3d printers because someone might print gun parts? For some reason we understand that people motivated enough to commit crimes will find a way to do it. This is much truer when it comes to the actions of the state than it is for individuals. I'm never going to learn to smith parts for a gun, but I could figure out 3d printing pretty easily. If the state wants me dead or in jail, I don't think the Flock cameras are that meaningful.
>The Nazis didn't need Flock cameras to kill millions.
No, but they were extremely happy to hop over to France and realize that we kept lists that indirectly listed jews. Actions have consequences that we may not be able to predict.
As a recruiter once said to me, if you don't do the defence work, somebody else will.
So you might as well do it and do a better job and get paid well.
I didn't go for the job.
If your government has elected someone bad its already over. So much effort is put into trying to restrict what the highest point of power may do. But its the highest point of power and if its compromised you've already lost. See trump breaking all the checks and balances. Its better to build what you need and focus on getting good people into power.
You shouldnt be able to hide from your government.
Defaulting to discussing the US here: let's start with reducing the state's size - it shouldn't be the world's largest employer, it shouldn't be able to run an unfathomably large deficit, it shouldn't be able to declare war without congressional approval. Technology to run a police state is just the last step in a long line of ridiculously unacceptable steps.
How does the number of state employees de facto result in a police state?
I agree with you on our obscene debt and our obsession with "conflicts" around the world, but I'd argue we're seeing the mass reduction of state employees and it's just making everything worse (eg massive deregulation and the destruction of checks and balances).
Let's slip in your pet bugaboo. Workforce size very little to do with state surveillance. In fact, mandating that it shrink can result in blowback, just like we have seen with how the US provides a great antagonist for China to evolve its own capabilities faster than if we had done nothing.
It won’t work for any country. They all want more control, and also create a class of people depending on government money to be on their side. Only people losing out are the powerless ordinary citizens and taxpayers
They all are created by US companies only. FB, Instagram, Youtube, X, Google (Android & others), Apple, etc.
Face Recognition, Drones, space exploration (engines for missiles), AI, LLMs, etc.
So, Either do it yourself (China) or get run by them (India).
Libertarianism has its moments but it generally hasn't caught on because state capacity is unique and useful. And virtually every last bit of it can be used to facilitate a police state because it's... a state.
Sure, we could all live without IDs and use motio belli for defence but this arrangement will be soon replaced by someone more organized because there is a huge return to that organization despite its risks.
this is an important topic, and i hate that people forget how difficult it is. in any political conversation, it's pretty easy to pull this thread to unravel anyone's adamant belief in one thing or another (e.g. gun control). my biggest concern is that people seem less willing than before to actually have those discussions.. they'll immediately just label you as being opposed to their views, "against" them.. when really we need these conversations to find viable policy solutions that wont easily be used in the exact opposite way that they were intended when implemented
"Civic hygiene isn't about saying we distrust our current government - it's about not trusting the next government." I've made similar points. Granting one government administration more power, is by extension granting it to all future administrations. Do so only with great care.
Clearly you need to consider how general the capabilities and use cases of the technology is. The most general-purpose technologies will always have obvious use cases for police states and other bad groups or people.
Civic Hygiene is the opposite of how you were taught to write code...
>It should be noted that no ethically-trained software engineer would ever consent to write a DestroyBaghdad procedure. Basic professional ethics would instead require him to write a DestroyCity procedure, to which Baghdad could be given as a parameter.
Like others have said, I don't think it's possible to create technology that cannot be weaponized. I think it's possible (mostly) to design technology so that abuse requires more people, requires the leaving of evidence / paper trail, needs checks, etc.
But still, it's not possible to prevent abuse altogether and sometimes we even applaud breaking the rules (the movie Hunt for Red October for example kicks off with the Soviet captain jumping the guardrails).
Also, the most "benign" public infrastructure is usually the most impactful, e.g., water systems and electrical systems. Don't like the people in that one town who keep protesting and voting against you? Turn off their power, water, and also make it so that their trash doesn't get picked up for a year. See how they like it.
Technology is force multiplier. Everything could be used for oppression. Deal with it - the future is boot stomping on human face forever. There are lucky few that could choose whether they will be the face or foot. But it is inevitable.
Or we could stop all tech development. But it is not going to happen.
Edit; wrote this comment before I realised this is a blog post from 2013. In 2013 I would've agreed 110% with this.
-----------
This is one of those things that make for great post title and gets you all riled up at first but when you think about it, it's really shallow.
Most civic databases can be abused by any sufficiently authoritarian government. A homeless shelter's records may contain exactly the sort of information that could be used to get "undesirables" off the street. But those same records are useful for coordinating beds, outreach, medical care, etc. Surely the conclusion isn't that the shelter shouldn't keep records.
It seems much more useful to focus on limiting what gets collected, who gets access to it, and how long it can be retained. In other words, boring things like data-minimisation and retention laws. Somewhat amusingly, that gets you pretty close to the sort of principles behind GDPR, which isn't exactly universally loved around here.
I don't really disagree with the blog post's moral intuition. What bothers me is the emphasis on individual moral choices by the people building these systems. I've seen plenty of my peers happily work for companies that have spent the last twenty years building exactly this kind of technology, there will always be someone willing to build it. That's not an argument for abandoning personal ethics, but it is an argument against treating personal ethics as any form of serious societal safeguard. "good engineers should refuse to build them" means nothing.
About 15 years ago I was locked up in SF (850 Bryant/HoJ 7th floor) and everyone was talking about their "jobs"; like what they did for a living outside of the obvious. I said "I fuck with computers and shit" and I got some follow-up questions I did not expect like - "wtf you doing here", they were all along those lines. I been locked up plenty of times but this was the 1st time I was publicly ridiculed for it. This guy named Vic; big ass black dude with an extremely visible front tooth missing said: "Man, if I could do what you do I would rebuild the Gov." What followed was a discussion where everyone in the pod which not only showed interest and consensus but an abject disappointment in me and my choices so I said jokingly, well OK; if I am ever locked up w/ my computer I'll rebuild the Gov. Then Covid hit, i got fired from Goop and I found myself essentially "locked up w/ my computer". Here on HN; this is NOT a popular sentiment and I know it will garner nothing but admonishment in the form of downvotes and ridicule but I have really been able to help some people w/ housing, re-entry, healthcare, addiction etc... so fuck it.
Everyone in that pod agreed the Gov was broken. Nobody could put their finger on it or articulate in what AI might deem a "load bearing" - HHAHAH capacity. The other day i saw a comment on here by bob1029 [1] and he put it better than I ever could. It's broken because nobody can execute across all the moving parts; its a coordination issue in many ways - the cost of collaboration has become so large that it has become the thing to overcome instead of whatever first principal is the whole point of the shit e.g.: Healthcare, Food, Housing etc... The bottleneck was never intelligence it's coordination. The cost of getting many parties to act together without the whole thing blowing up.
The Anthropic multi-agent article hit it too...turf war, the 2.4M-request queue, the price collusion, the merge silos. Every one is the same thing: free-form runtime "negotiation" blowing up. And every success is an agent ad-hoc reinventing an institution mid-fight inventing a "verifiable criterion," writing an apology commit and pulling in a human, running a tournament as a commitment device. They keep hand-rolling the institution, badly, under fire.
So stop making them reinvent it. The generalization of the "constrained action space" idea isn't just bounding one agent's moves it's what I call an intent: intents don't just constrain each agent's actions, they codify the coordination itself.
And I make the unit of coordination a first-class object: the Deal a structured negotiation instead of a free-form one. The Deal is the container those agents keep reinventing, handed to them up front: scope and terms, the parties and their roles, the ordered steps, a verification gate as the neutral arbiter, and an appeal / human-escalation path as recourse, all over an append-only record. Agents negotiate inside a bounded contract instead of improvising one mid-fight.
How it works from what you say to what actually happens (the "Deal")
1. You speak the intent. You can use a form but I found people like the verbal shit much more.
2. Break the problem into an ontology. The ask gets decomposed into the real work it implies mapped to actual job roles (O*NET). Problem → Solution.
3. Vet the solution with the gov council agents. Every domain has one public AI expert in that agency's real systems Medicare, Medicaid, SSA, OPM (pda:codify.<domain>). Policies get deliberated and voted, elected officials in the loop, before anything runs. Stakeholders.
4. We staff it. It matches the specific expertise needed the exact specialty, not a generic "doctor." Down to the right role for your case.
5. We set up the financing. The money that follows the person eligibility, benefits, the payment rail. Financing.
6. An agent manages the process with expertise humans in the loop for anything high-risk, adjusting as outcomes come back, like an adaptive trial, until the outcome is met or it fails honestly. Expertise → Outcome.
The atomic unit of value here is a "Deal". Problem broken down, solution vetted, staffed, financed, executed under contract. intent → Deal → outcome.
/me inserts the "You're proposing a software solution to a social problem" copypasta form
Seriously, if the coordination problem you've identified isn't solved by the instantaneous global communications tech that we've had for between thirty and a hundred years (depending on how you count), it's a people problem that's not going to be solved by more tech. Notice how everything except maybe steps six and three in your plan require people to agree on the nature of the problem, whether it is a problem that even should be solved, and how many resources to commit to solving it. Getting people to agree to solve problems that need to be solved -even in the cases where solving those problems makes them personally worse off- is the blocker. Your use of shiny new software tools does nothing to remove that blocker.
* Refusing to permit anyone who will enrich themselves at the expense of others to serve as a public servant.
But both seem somewhere between impractical and impossible, so the only workable thing is taking the "Eternal vigilance is the price of Liberty" quote to heart and banding with like-minded fellows to make a world where everyone can spare the time and effort required to keep abreast of what the bastards in charge are doing and keep them from making our world worse to uplift themselves and their friends.
Well, given the state of things; this seems to be working out great for you and I wish you the best of luck there.
> No, definitely.
I'm glad you are so confident but I have achieved actual outcomes; you are just posting on a forum and waiting for mind control. Respectfully, my way is more fun.
Companies that agree to work on Chat Control deserve a special place in hell. One company that was eager to participate, hoping this harmful law would pass, is Atos. Name and shame them.
I think this runs into a basic issue that all large software systems that enforce the law contribute to locking down a society because laws tend to need be broken to be changed.
That a system can be avoided offends the investor who want their products to be ubiquitous.
The system that is not perfectly enforced offends the engineer who dislikes broken things.
Yet both are required if we as a society are to grow. I think the thing that it might be good to learn is when to say "I've done/had enough."
I think I could collect enough weight of books on "civil disobedience" at my local library that I could crush you underneath them, even if you didn't bother reading them.
I'm sure you could. But it would in no way demonstrate that laws generally need civil disobedience to be changed. Laws are changed all the time, as bills, as legal precedent, and as regulations.
Assholes like this were all for the police state back when it was up to stop-the-spread “contact tracing”, real-time “fact-checking” my private messages, arresting people for facebook posts, and transing your kids.
Now that the red pedophiles are in charge instead of the blue ones, he changes his tune.
But only if it isn't Republicans, right? The Biden administration sure loved partnering with private tech companies to censor and monitor Americans to fight imaginary bogeymen like those darned evil white people who want their own nation like everyone else! (gasp!)
the problem is Capitalism does not need Democracy to function or survive
many countries like Singapore, etc. prove this easily
Authoritarianism can even be desired by Capitalists if they know who to bribe to remove regulations and get approvals
and no surprise, that's exactly where the United States is right now, teetering on the edge of that hole, about to fall in
"AI" is going to be weaponized, already is, and any resistance against its abuse is simply overriden with threats to destroy profits or even company survival at all
There is some sort of "nerd naivete" that they are the ones with power to control those things.
If you're a nerd developing open source (not an insult; I'm in that category), our job is to develop effective technology.
If you want to do politics, go into law and/or politics (or into business, so you can fund/control politics).
>"But software which OpenBSD uses and redistributes must be free to all (be they people or companies), for any purpose they wish to use it, including modification, use, peeing on, or even integration into baby mulching machines or atomic bombs to be dropped on Australia. " -- Theo De Raadt
> There will always be someone willing to build that thing
… with sufficient time and money. As opposed to the minimal time and money required if the baddies are just pulling an existing solution off the shelf.
I hope you are joking, or haven't thought this through! If you sincerely believe and act on what you're saying here, you should be shunned from polite society.
Well, there are quite a few frames to think about. What about the unintended consequences of building something for a worldview at the time? Then the next generation of stewards take over, do not have the same understanding of the problem the system solved and different ideas on how to use the system. That's definitely something worth writing about. Stewardship in software is a real and common aspect of the greater system we all live in, and has unknown consequences with each generation that takes over. When you step in as a gen-1 builder, you should probably consider what it is you are about to build.
Just because someone is willing to build it doesn't mean it has to be you.
We may all play some part in societies that have some degree of monstrous outcomes, but I feel like staying on the "tragic civilian casualty" side versus the "legitimate target" side of a freedom fighter's bombing campaign is probably the way to go.
It's not about someone willing or not, it's about you, an ostensibly grown adult who should think in terms of your own responsibilities instead of others'.
Terrible argument. You can say ”why not work as a concentration camp guard? There will always be someone willing to do it so you might as well cash in”
People cite Flock as an example of this. Yet the same people walk around with iPhones and Android devices that can record conversations (who talks to whom at what times and for how long), know our exact locations and log everything we do online.
If I had told you 30 years ago that we are going to build a surveillance network and make the people we are tracking pay for it all you would have laughed me out of the room. But that is what we have built. The modern Smart Phone.
Now we use our iPhones to complain about cameras on public roads as if they are watching us.
Very flawed argument, anyone can go for a walk without their phone on them and have a conversation, nobody would ask them why they don't have their phone on them.
Ostensibly they need a warrant to get that data from Apple/Google whereas they have a direct line to Flock data cause that's how that relationship works
Harder than it looks. Everything is dual use. Certainly didn't expect my game development telemetry[1] system used to improve artillery [2]...
[1] https://gdcvault.com/play/1012227/Development-Telemetry-in-V...
[2] https://www.army.mil/article/85934/solution_to_weapon_develo...
You didn't expect the application you developed called "Skynet" that has an eye of sauron as it's logo to be used by the military? Sorry, I don't believe you.
I only made a prototype of the torment nexus as illustrative satire, I didn't think someone would actually ship it to production! All satire is dual use.
Orwell didn't think he was writing a guidebook...
Oh from the cautionary sci-fi classic "Do Not Create the Torment Nexus"? I always thought it'd be awesome to create after reading that!
Twitter/X has a lot to answer for, but at least it helped create some memorable memes.
It was part of the training data.
Yep. Early in my career I developed a simple driver for a CAN interface to be used in a medical device, which was my assigned project.
The same code was used in another project of this same company. The project was a missile. It felt weird.
Possibly always was the main project.
There should be a distinction between helping the military and helping a police state.
Eg. Flock cameras don’t help the military but do help the police state.
Military tech often flows to cops.
Part of the reason we're seeing objectionable government action now is because we militarized law enforcement tasks and equipment in the post-9/11 era.
Let's not forget the War on Drugs -- that's been the baseline for police oppression for decades (well before 9/11).
In case of ground invasion (or just to detect enemy drones in the sky) having access tonlots of cameras is of military use.
Not a likely scenario, FWIW: https://www.military.com/history/5-reasons-why-geography-ame...
I would expect any invading forces would need to be surveilled by planes or satellites, or perhaps drones, since they would immediately destroy something like flock cameras.
You're assuming that the invaders can't just buy, hack, or social engineer, access to the cameras from Flock. Lately it has been social engineering: https://www.404media.co/floridas-wildlife-cops-are-searching... but there's also a concern that the cameras themselves have compromised supply chains and may serve other masters: https://www.404media.co/new-jersey-used-covid-relief-funds-t...
In the case of Iran, having access to tonlots of cameras proved to be an incredible assets for a neighbor’s military.
What’s more likely is that an aspiring dictator illegally uses the military for domestic police operations, then military and police use is the same thing.
https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/cour...
I think you are just playing devil’s advocate.
The constitution is legislation protecting you
I don't think the author is suggesting we shouldn't build useful things. He's saying to the people who built the military system that they shouldn't be doing that.
It's the last step that's the problem, not the people who built all the things they stand on. Otherwise we'd be suggesting that no one build a database engine or a digital camera or a computer ever again in case they're used to build evil tech.
Not sure about digital cameras or database engines, but computers and the Internet were, in large part, created for military needs first and foremost.
They're not confessing, they're bragging
You didn't expect your telemetry system to be used as a telemetry system?
So what's the answer here? Don't build telemetry systems?
Generally, yes. Most telemetry systems in software are not producing enough actionable insight to justify the privacy invasion. Spying on your customers on an opt-out basis just in case you one day come up with a use for that data is a widespread practice but clearly unethical, and leaves you (or whoever acquires your employer) in the position of being tempted to use the data for worse things than just deciding what bugs and features to prioritize.
Yes. Telemetry is anti-social at best, authoritarian at worst. We have built industries on "the user won't tell us what they want so we have to spy on them so we can build what they want" and then instead of building what they want, building the thing that extracts the most money out of their users (probably not what the user wanted!)
I don't think the article is saying don't build a payload-agnostic telemetry engine. The specific examples cited are that it's probably legitimate to have a vehicle registration database (with the caveat that even that could be abused), but not a database of sexual orientations or religious affiliations.
I think there's a distinction between creating generic info-gathering technology that helps them gather their own data from their own users, and you gathering data that the government can then ask (force) you to hand over.
Keeping it within game dev, I will say that telemetry and bug report tooling looks really cool. Big fan of it grabbing build info directly from the session that the user was playing. Feeling kinda inspired to build something similar for the studio I work at now.
Thanks for sharing!
Do you actually object to countries having standing armies with ranged area weaponry?
This isn't what the article is talking about at all. It never says don't build military technology. It says don't build things like a database of who in the country is and isn't gay and what religion everyone practices, for fear a future bigoted administration might use it to target those people. If your government is turning howitzers on you, that's less a police state and more a civil war.
I don't know what you do against that, but it's a different situation. There is precedent in the US with the Army being used to round up and forcibly displace native populations, but that really seems to be the kind of thing that requires a political solution, not prevention of any possibility. If we didn't have an Army at all, then secession would have succeeded, there would still be chattel slavery, and one of the hostile European colonial powers likely would have simply conquered the west itself and killed all the natives anyway.
>Harder than it looks.
But maybe easier than it sounds.
All technology can be weaponized. It can also be de-weaponized.
One of my favorite late-night thought experiments, is "what would it take to turn an AK47 or an AR15 into a water pump?" .. the possibilities are endless. "How could a tank be turned into a bicycle factory?", another great one worth the effort to think about.
The only difference between peaceful technology and a weapon is the intention of the user. The very real spiritual intention.
De-weaponization starts with the human being. Those who think weapons are necessary must always take lesser priority than those who invent technology to make the lives of their fellow human beings better. There are so many examples of the tool-makers winning harder and at greater scale than the bomb-manufacturer. We wouldn't be here now if the balance was the other way - our world is however threatened by having this scale weighed heavily, by those who think murder is the solution to anything.
It's a spirit thing. Not spiritu-al, a spirit thing. What is the spirit of the designer? If they want to help humanity, it will be difficult technology to weaponize (although not impossible). It will be easy to de-weaponize, also.
We need to focus more on the spirit of help, and less on hurt.
Imagine if those F35 mounting pylons were used to drop field-portable water-purification systems directly where they are needed most.
Imagine if they could be used to drop a copy of archive.org, anywhere in the world, in any language.
Imagine if those ships were being used to bring power to the villages that need it most. Instead of glide bombs, we have glide libraries. Instead of cluster munitions, we instead drop cluster medical kits!
Oh, the glory to be had by those who would do this - the allies in the poor and weak of the world to be found! Imagine this happening, changing the intention from hate and fear, to respect and love.
All it takes is the spirit, a bit of imagination, and any and all technology can be de-weaponized.
It is the warrior narcissist who stands in the way of this. Disarm them too - smash their mirror: Drop books, not bombs!
> Imagine if those F35 mounting pylons were used to drop field-portable water-purification systems directly where they are needed most.
Except we can (and do!) accomplish that with much simpler airplanes. The staggering costs and complexities of an F35 (the thrust:weight, maneuverability, and stealth) don't make sense for any "peaceful" application.
> Those who think weapons are necessary must always take lesser priority than those who invent technology to make the lives of their fellow human beings better.
And then a group that prioritizes weapons over human-life-improving-tools kills the group that prioritizes life and takes your resources.
This is like the larger group version of suicide by cop.
We've been playing this game for as long as human beings have existed.
There have always been a greater group of humans which de-weaponize (make peace) than those who make war. Always. The evidence is very clear: there are far, far, far more humans in the world not-killing each other than there are, killing each other.
>And then a group that prioritizes weapons over human-life-improving-tools kills the group that prioritizes life and takes your resources
Only for as long as those who make peace, don't pay attention to the prioritization of weapons - and that group of warrior narcissists whose identity is more important than human life must never be allowed to be bigger than the group who make peace - as is happening today at a pace far too great - because otherwise, we all die.
>We've been playing this game for as long as human beings have existed.
Yes, humans have been making peace at far greater scale than those limited few who make war. You just don't see them because a) you have your own warrior narcissist mirror obscuring your view, and b) those people are not narcissists, and are living human lives instead of primping their warrior narcissist identities...
> There have always been a greater group of humans which de-weaponize (make peace) than those who make war. Always.
What are you talking about? We're in the most peaceful period in human history by every objective measure and we spend almost a trillion dollars annually on defense. "Always" is objectively incorrect by basically every measure you use.
> Only for as long as those who make peace, don't pay attention to the prioritization of weapons - and that group of warrior narcissists whose identity is more important than human life must never be allowed to be bigger than the group who make peace - as is happening today at a pace far too great - because otherwise, we all die.
Word salad.
> Yes, humans have been making peace at far greater scale than those limited few who make war. You just don't see them because a) you have your own warrior narcissist mirror obscuring your view, and b) those people are not narcissists, and are living human lives instead of primping their warrior narcissist identities...
More word salad.
Other comments have pointed out this: how are you going to stop the "warrior narcissist" if you disarmed/de-weaponized the peace-makers? Even if de-weaponize after you erase all the current "warrior narcissists", how will you prevent new ones from rising up and re-weaponizing? Surely, you know that war is not the default state, so this isn't a theoretical.
Also, I think your description of "warrior narcissists" as a shallow description of the spirit of these people. You mentioned something about "identity" in later comments, and I cannot help but wonder what do you mean by that. I don't think Putin's main motive is his self-image, nor do I think Israel's leadership is murdering Palestine's populace to appear heroic.
It would also help to not assume the motives of people criticizing your ideas by presuming them to be "warrior narcissists" themselves. Elevate the discussion, not downgrade it.
I'll always appreciate the spirit of pacifism and collaboration, but your comments seem quixotic, and not in a good way.
The police state exists entirely to maintain its own identity - and thus control - over that of its subjects. It is a warrior - controlling the lives of others or killing them - and it is doing it narcissistically, to maintain its own image of itself.
All current war theaters are the result of a police state and these police states only function because of technology.
The subject is de-weaponization of technology.
First, you separate the technology from the person using it correctly - i.e. not to create a police state.
Then, the person using it incorrectly in a police state.
In this case, the person you don't want to have using technology to murder/do harm/violate the actual human rights of others, is the warrior narcissist.
So, as a technologist, I do not let my technology be used by someone who is only going to use it on others, for actual war-fighting/warrior purposes, for the purposes of protecting or promoting their identity over the life of others.
Because that is what good technology is - something which gives all users, equal rights. An equal, new identity, with each new form of technology.
So, de-weaponization means, disconnecting the user from using technology in destructive ways.
Constructive ways are easier, such as I demonstrated with extreme prejudice, such as the notion of the pink F35, dropping cluster medical supplies, water desalination pods instead of child-maiming fertilizer bombs, or indeed - fertilizer in the right place, with emergency seed-bombs for a 3 month re-supply of the landscape, food-wise, etc.
All current war theaters are the result of a police state and these police states only function because of technology.
These are parables I'm dramatizing, with intent. I do know there is no chance in hell of turning off all the weapons - I for sure know that there is a way to use technology to make sure a police state doesn't happen in the first place. (Because I've been doing exactly that with technology for decades.)
Putin is an identity of someone you don't actually know, but yet, you think you know the warrior narcissism in Putin - but it is actually the identity, not the individual, that I am talking about. I rate Putin among all the other war criminals of the world - they are there, because they have the technological might of their people - or indeed the ignorance of their people in spite of this might, or indeed even collective agreement on scale, to perpetuate that identity.
And lest it not be clear, I find that in order to be a good pacifist, you have to allow for new identity, always. It is the use of technological power to gain mass identity and exploit it for war, which I am specifically calling the playground of the warrior narcissist. Those who would murder to maintain their own identity.
Drop books not bombs, is legitimately the simplest pacifist view I can express. I see far, far more peace to be had in the world with the concept of dropping a complete archive.org gardening section from the pink F35, you know .. "turning the pistol into a pump" ...
>It would also help to not assume the motives of people criticizing your ideas by presuming them to be "warrior narcissists" themselves. Elevate the discussion, not downgrade it.
Apropos quixotic.
You might notice that I am manifesting the very thing I am resisting.
That is by design. For every excuse for murdering 'those people over there', I have and can spot a greedy instance of technological mis-use. There is no longer any good, legitimate reason for war - technologically. It happens, because technologists don't confront the warriors.
So I'm targeting warrior narcissism intentionally, and yes in a way guaranteed to create a cloud of smoke on the horizon, because .. after all .. dang himself, could prove the value of my point by switching me off right now.
What is this word salad? "Spirit?" Intention? Disarm the "warrior narcissist?"
Good luck - this flies in the face of the entirety of human history.
> "what would it take to turn an AK47 or an AR15 into a water pump?"
As someone who has manufactured these from billet: why would you do this? (hence "word salad") Why does one thing at all relate to the other? Why not just manufacture a pump from the same raw resources? Why not both?
> Those who think weapons are necessary must always take lesser priority than those who invent technology to make the lives of their fellow human beings better.
Did the Allies in WWII not "make the lives of their fellow human beings better" using violence? Why didn't they just ask mean old Hitler: "Hey, be nice! Have a good spirit!"? The world has finite resources, inherently making anything often denies those resources (your time, actual materials, etc.) to other causes. "Better" is subjective.
> There are so many examples of the tool-makers winning harder and at greater scale than the bomb-manufacturer.
These organizations are often one in the same.
> We wouldn't be here now if the balance was the other way
The balance is already the other way regardless of your citation-free assertion. You're using the internet to proliferate this tripe - famously a DARPA invention.
> Imagine if those F35 mounting pylons were used to drop field-portable water-purification systems directly where they are needed most.
Why is a high-performance stealth aircraft required for this? Why does one thing have anything to do with the other? What peaceful purpose does stealth capability serve?
> Imagine if those ships were being used to bring power to the villages that need it most.
No need to imagine, this already happens: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Powership
> Disarm them too.
With what? Words? Precisely how do you non-violently disarm someone who is willing and demonstrated to use violence to prevent you from disarming them? Again, the world's resources are finite, and control of these resources inherently requires violence.
Your ability to spread these "ideas" are rooted in violence: taxation, freedom generally. Freedom isn't free, and the price is paid in blood.
There's a real problem with governments that invade other countries and attack civilians, and we're in a particularly hot time right now. That gives many current examples, though: should Ukraine prioritize manufacturing water pumps? Or do they mostly need weapons to fight back in the war?
I get that folks don't like war. I hate war. I've seen much more evidence that deterrence produces peace more readily than disarmament. On the flip side, more destructive weapons may be used more rarely, but they kill more people when they are used.
I'm not sure what the optimal approach is, but it almost certainly requires nations to arm themselves in case they are attacked. "Provide for the common defense" was not specified idly.
Ukraine should prioritize making peaceful relationships, as should the Russians and Americans and British - and the rest of the world should be making sure they do so.
That they have not made that priority, choosing instead to prioritize their nations' collective warrior narcissist identities rather than valuing the human life of each, is why those nations are on the brink of destroying each other.
Warrior narcissism is infectious and contagious and insidious. You can see it at an individual scale and you can see it at nation scales, too. The solution is to smash the mirror: deny any and all of the identities involved their right to their own identities, until they see, underneath it all, the true value of human life.
There is no American/Russian/Ukrainian/British identity worth more than the human lives in each state. There is no Israeli/Palestinian identity worth more than the human lives in either state.
The fact that one identity is held as more valuable/important/special than the other, is what gives each the justification (not right) to murder the other.
If the rest of the world had shunned the Russians and the Ukrainians and the British and the Americans at equivalent levels until their identities were no longer of any perceived value, the conflict would not have perpetuated. The fact that Russians clung to the identities of the Russian-speaking humans in the Donbas, the fact that Ukraine nationalist identity took higher priority over respect for human life, the fact that Americans gloat over their own cultural identity of warriors, as do the Brits - is why we have the conflict.
>I've seen much more evidence that deterrence produces peace more readily than disarmament.
Bullshit. Deterrence did not stop a single human life being murdered in any of the current conflicts. "Deterrence" is just warrior narcissist speak for "I've got my mirror, it's bigger than <theirs>, and that is all that matters".
> Ukraine should prioritize making peaceful relationships
Ok, let's steel man this thing. Russia is not going to be peaceful regardless of your idealism - this isn't a disputable fact. Now, how does Ukraine "prioritize making peaceful relationships?"
Specifically, what concrete actions should Ukraine take to prevent violent incursion by an outside actor? No word salad: if you are the benevolent dictator of Ukraine today, what do you do? Counting on third parties to "shun" is out, it's not an effective option (and it arguably already happened with sanctions, but still.)
> Deterrence did not stop a single human life being murdered in any of the current conflicts.
What would Ukraine look like absent any donated war materiel from third parties? Why does Russia not own Kiev in that scenario?
"Prioritize making peaceful relationships" is entirely unhelpful along the lines of saying "Do the work". The way you're writing so dismissively of other people's analysis of this topic demands that you provide something far more specific than you are. As it is, you're writing seems completely divorced from reality.
clearly people have a responsibility to sit down and think long and hard and try to rule out as much as possible the negatives of any tech or ideas they share with other people. Or at least give it a cursory thought or find someone with that mindset to tamp those issues down. Absolutely before even considering a funding step or presentation to anyone outside of a very small trusted group. Ideas take fire way too quickly now not to be cautious.
From another excellent comment:
>How do you make sure a police state doesn't happen?
There is no way to be sure, all one person can do most of the time is make a personal effort and hope it is not overwhelmed by storm-trooper ambitions and communist-dictator tactics.
When I look at Flock, it is so sad. It's been 30 full years since I got my early webcams when they were made by Intel and were still expensive business machines intended for teleconferencing over dial-up. Without really needing the internet of course.
It didn't take long before I was using one for observing my fledgling company's parking lot 24/7, and on more than half my CRT monitor you could see every car that drove by on my street, which was almost constant during the daytime. This was 99% of the action compared to visitors who pulled in.
It didn't take that long before I could remotely call in to the cam plugged into the front office PC through dial-up networking in Windows 95, and when I got a smartphone in 2001 I no longer needed a remote laptop most of the time as long as I was OK with the small screen of the flip-phone form factor. Rather than leaving the spare land-line available for calling directly in, alternatively it was also possible to log into an ISP over dial-up from my company, then keep the line tied up so I (or anyone really) could have access over the internet.
When broadband internet came around it made a really big difference since the stream was not as compressed, and motion not nearly as blurry and jerky. It was nice having the choice between a private remote connection to my front office PC over direct dial-up whenever I wanted, as well as enjoying the faster speed of the public internet plenty of the time too.
Anyway it didn't take long to realize that if webcams ever really catch on, then our local law enforcement would be highly interested in what could be done if they could freely observe them like I was doing looking at my own stream. I didn't know anybody else that had a webcam at first, but for protection of my own building all I would have to do is give the law my IP address and they could pick up the stream no differently than I was. They already knew my location and I had an excellent relationship with all the first responders. Naturally nothing was encrypted back then so that wasn't even a consideration, there was really nothing confidential on my stream to begin with.
I really thought about it long and hard and it took quite a while trying to examine all the possibilities. There were a few obvious downsides regarding privacy which needed much further consideration, so I could not in good conscience pull the trigger until that had been justified very deeply.
I didn't expect to hesitate that long but it really did take more than a year to conclude without a doubt that the negatives outweighed the positives, but that was only in the short run. In the long run the virtually unlimited downsides could only accumulate in excess of the possible upsides, and it was a big unknown how scattered cams could be used to compromise general privacy. Eventually had to realize such a cam network would be more easily used in a predatory way rather than for protection from predators, regardless of who was watching or recording. At significant scale it seemed like it could very well become exponentially dystopian.
No big deal, if you're not capable of thinking of something overwhelmingly positive to base your business on, I understand.
At least I didn't pioneer it, and I assume a lot of other early webcam owners gradually engaged in some of the same thought processes or it would have gotten a lot worse a lot sooner. I sure did talk to a lot of them, as webcams got more popular over time. Most of them were on laptops though and very seldom were aimed at a public space.
There are so many worthwhile things to do which don't amount to spying on Americans.
How do you not consider all Americans spies, given the way our devices work and constantly hoover everything? Perhaps most Americans aren't approached to sell the data they essentially collect 24/7 on everything around them, assuming even just a smart phone (not to mention cars, music, nest-like devices, iot, yadda yadda), but it is one hell of a mesh.
I think that's a good observation because people are really doing it to themselves.
Most of our electronics hasn't been American for quite some time now, so there is that. It really is made in, and for, less freedom & liberty loving countries, with the USA becoming more like collateral damage each decade.
It wasn't really this bad until Facebook came along whose sole mission ended up trying to monopolize PII as much as possible. And if not that at least put billions of dollars to work changing peoples' habits to neglect their own privacy anyway even if they end up on other platforms.
If privacy wasn't so valuable in a fundamental way, they wouldn't have been able to get as rich as they did by monetizing its removal.
I feel really bad for you.
It might actually be wise [1] to create a new, slightly less permissioned license for open source wherein the open is defined as anything that isn’t in a kill or surveillance chain or, more broadly, for military use…
[1] for the community
That wouldn't be open source. OSI includes the clause "No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor"[0] for its definition of open source. Famously, the JSON license[1] has a clause "The Software shall be used for Good, not Evil," so the Free Software Foundation considers it nonfree.[2]
[0]: https://opensource.org/osd
[1]: https://www.json.org/license.html
[2]: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html#JSON
Arguably, any such clauses - similar to attempt for "non commercial" licenses would do more harm than good.
If you actually wanted to respect such a license,you would have to endlessly argue what is dual use technology for example, the same as people argue if advertisements on project website or tangentially related donations make the thing "commercial"?
While at the same time, any "bad guys" will just ignore both.
The idea that a defense manufacturer would be stopped by this is too funny. The code won't be auditable by you so how will you know? Secondly even if you did find out the most you'd get is a payout. Thirdly if you believe that missile aren't running GNU/Linux I have a bridge to sell you.
IBM would be stopped
I've contemplated writing an email to RMS asking him how he feels about the use of GNU software in military and surveillance systems and if he could do it over if he would do things differently to alllow users to put a clause in their OSS licenses that forbid such things.
IIRC that has been discussed many times & can be definitely found in mailing list archives.
He's already written that essay. It's more rhetoric than substance, but his position is clear. https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/programs-must-not-limit-freed...
This line of reason is one I find appealing but somewhat untimely. If I'm grokking the deeper message it's that "limiting licensed use in these creative ways opens the door to potentially evil chicanery" -- i.e. you start limiting licenses to non-police activities and then some corporation goes "great! now that we can do that our licenses now limit usage to only endeavors that boil your firstborn and undermine our competition".
Problem is in era de la grift we've sort of realized that they never needed permission - there's no precedent to set anymore.
Call that "deeper message" A1. He's got arguments A1 and A2, and goes "if P, then A1(P) implies C; and if ¬P, then A2(¬P) implies C; therefore C". But we can just as easily go "if ¬P, then A1(¬P) implies ¬C" (as you did); "and if P, then A2(P) implies ¬C; therefore ¬C". Logical arguments don't let you do this: the arguments are pure rhetoric.
Quite a lot of Richard Stallman's arguments are pure rhetoric, actually. And, I mean, I guess it worked, in that the GPL and FSF ended up being quite influential; but the trouble with building a philosophy on rhetoric is that people start to believe that rhetoric – including you –, and it erodes and replaces the foundations of their beliefs, so it'll all come crashing down sooner or later.
I don't really think we need to engage with the rhetoric on an intellectual level, since it's obviously wrong: far better to read philosophers whose reasoning is sound, or to come up with your own ideas.
Sorry, but you must be way smarter than me or something because that made no sense. Not that I don't understand what that notation is supposed to mean, but that I'm not seeing the connective tissue here. It's also a little weird to come at me based on the 'erosion of my foundation of beliefs', considering how orthogonal that is to the topic of legal precedent and contracts.
For what it's worth, what I do believe is that our system of law was a good idea at one point but is totally ineffectual in the current context - that's my point about an era of grifters. Didn't get that one from stallman, measured that on the eyeball mark I.
This is the first time my poor communication skills have been interpreted as a sign of my superior intelligence. I think I'm ready to become a professional expert consultant!
I was abstracting Richard Stallman's argument to its (il)logical structure: P and ¬P are whether the license restriction is enforceable, etcetera. "Erosion" was talking about people who, seeing free software as a good idea, begin to adhere to Stallmanite orthodoxy (which is, largely, philosophically-unsound): that was not aimed at you, but at Richard Stallman himself (the Ur-Stallmanite, we could say). I saw this as generalising your criticism. I didn't notice you were making a broader point about the law, so this was somewhat of a supercalifragilisticexpialidocious non-sequitur; thanks for clarifying your point.
Why do you want the people risking their lives to protect your freedom to have worse artillery? I don't understand this thinking at all. If my country is going to shoot something, I want them to be able to control what actually gets hit. I swear, people take borderline religious stances on things to the point that they no longer make sense.
"protect your freedom" does a lot of work here..
because my country isn't protecting my freedom, it's killing schoolgirls in a country we had a perfectly fine agreement with four years ago
How do you know for sure that only your team is using the code? Are you ok with "the enemy" using your code to kill your soldiers, or you?
Many wars are simply what you’d expect from violent leaders who realize they can order other people into combat for them. But some wars really are for the greater good. There are definitely militaries that I want to see win, and militaries that I want to see lose.
I realize I don’t have any code that would be of any use to any military. If I did, I don’t see how I could write a license to allow the use of my code by only people I agree with.
You can write whatever you want in a license, including something as vague as “you can only use this code if I agree with your moral stances”. (For expediency, it might be worth enumerating the cases.)
The OSI might disapprove, but you don’t have to listen to them.
Where has my “freedom” been protected in the last ~40 years?
>borderline religious stances on things
+
>risking their lives to protect your freedom
=
nonsense.
The only thing that protects my freedom is active peace-making at levels greater than active war-making.
We are all under a great deal of threat precisely because borderline religious warrior narcissism has taken precedence over emphatic, unstoppable peace-making.
The USA has been bombing people into oblivion "protecting peace", for decades now. Is the world safer now?
No, it very definitely is not.
>Why do you want the people risking their lives ..
I want people risking their lives to make great peace. That is not happening at the scale that it should be.
Instead, the lazy, less noble warrior narcissist, has the world by the nose. The only difference between an utter criminal and a war fighter is a very, very thin line of paper which makes murder in one case illegal and in another case, legal. This paper is tattered and torn and covered in the muck of the victims, held high by the victors to justify their crime.
However, we see today the fallacy of this condition.
If your country is going to shoot something, I want to be damn sure it has done everything ethically, technologically, and administratively possible to have first made peace, at all costs.
That is simply not evident in any of the current world conflicts.
Instead of engaging in foreign cultures, we in the West march in lock-step behind those who have deemed foreign cultures inferior and worthy of nothing but destruction and despair.
I want to see the warrior narcissist who profit from this condition, disarmed and made irrelevant. The only way that happens is if human life takes precedence over human identity.
No humans identity is worth more than another humans life.
Risk your life for true peace this way: Before you murder, abandon yourself!
> Why do you want the people risking their lives to protect your freedom to have worse artillery?
Hi. Veteran here. I protected his freedoms to do just that. You asking this question in that way insults veterans, whether you intended it or not. People using this line of thinking usually only care about veterans when it can win them arguments, and do not care any other time.
> I don't understand this thinking at all
Then, instead of asking questions with inflammatory language, you should humble yourself and ask respectfully so you can understand.
I would protect his freedom to do just that as well, but I don't agree with it.
If they can't do their job non-violently then I don't want them to do that job.
> Why do you want the people risking their lives to protect your freedom to have worse artillery
If better artillery is being built on open source tech then everyone has better artillery. Not just the people "protecting you" but also the people trying to kill those people
> If better artillery is being built on open source tech then everyone has better artillery.
Only if the end product is released as open source or even source available, which in many cases (all?) it has not been.
(This has never been done with a Linux based artillery system to my knowledge, of which there are MANY)
I'm going to assume that you're an American, speaking from an Americentric point of view and I'd like to take this as an opportunity to discuss the fact that Hacker News is a website that is available to people around the world. Many of those people are not American citizens and do not have the same relationship with the US military and government that you do.
Only Americans want to defend their country? I'm Swedish, did my military service, and generally agree that I would want our defence forces to have the best weapons available.
The link given was to a blog post from the US army. Good try though.
This isn't a gotcha or 'try' it's a critique about how US defaultism overwhelms conversations on this site and how it is detrimental to the conversation at hand.
I'm not disputing that one of the links from the comment that gmerc made came from a US military domain, but that's moot. A licence against military use covers every army, not the one you happen to identify with.
As an aside, I'm curious what nationality user gmerc is. If they're the person in the video that they linked to it sounds like they're German?
And this isn't being nitpicky -- it's really important in the context of this discussion. People from certain countries more than others seem to lack this concept of civic hygiene and clam up when the discussion comes up.
We should push past that awkwardness and keep having these discussions about concepts like civic hygiene. It's important.
I doubt this is enforceable. Are you going to sue a government secret program because they used some open source code in a way that violates some weird clause?
Yes, citizens should sue the government when the government takes actions which are grounds for suit. The government sure will come after your money if you do things they say you shouldn't, and what's good for the goose is good for the gander.
You won't know, they'll say it's for national security so licenses don't matter, and then if you keep going they'll make sure your life is a living hell and your bank accounts closed.
I'm begging tech bros to understand that abusive governments _do not care about abusing you_
That doesn't mean you should spread your legs for them. This defeatist attitude is suicidal
No, treating your illusion of control as a religion is suicidal. You need a theory of power other than complaining to the manager.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusion_of_control
Surely you should use every tool at your disposal including the courts?
On the other hand, it may be worth publicly and unambiguously stating a position even if unenforceable. This seems to be what most modern protest movements are based on. For instance, how many software repos "stand with Ukraine", even though they won't make an impact on frontline military reality?
https://firstdonoharm.dev/
You think they're going to read that license and then go oh, sorry, we won't use this because you told us not to?
Ah yes, they're carpet bombing people and indiscriminately killing fighters, adults and children, but they're going to be stopped because... the software they use is two clause GPL.
You could sue cloud providers who are using your software and selling to the military
The other rule here is that you cannot avoid politics if you want to create a better world. If you want the freedom to develop technology without worrying it will be used by a police state, you need to put in the work to make sure a police state doesn't happen - you cannot ignore politics and just "focus on technology."
On the other hand, a few heuristics will get you pretty far:
Don't build technology that interacts with people in ways they did't consent to. Don't build skinner boxes. Let the user decide who gets whatever data they generate while using the thing. Let the user control how it will work, insofar as it doesn't contradict the other heuristics.
These are political principles, but they're pretty basic. You don't have to keep up to date with the news, just check in with your morals once in a while.
Yes but now you've ruled out 95% of websites regularly used today
Yeah I'm not sure that the web is worth saving. But the internet is ok, and we can build a new web on top of it.
The alternative is doing nothing while the world gets less and less safe for our children. So let's try.
Yeah, there’s definitely good design principles, but as others have pointed out, it’s extremely difficult to build technologies that are not trivially dual-use.
And, to be clear, I’m not saying “politics” as in “did you hear what Trump said?” I’m saying politics as in “what is your city council doing, how are your neighbors doing, and what are the consequences of your work and economic choices and who’s paying them.” Most of the news is a circus; that stuff is not.
It’s not at all hard to not “intentionally” build asshole software, but your definitely leaving money on the table.
The nit pick arguments are just a defence to avoid honesty and introspection IMO.
Hard to say whether this is a feature or a bug of capitalism. It's like an alternate definition of enshittification though:
Once you've exploited every moral way to make money with your business, expand your scope to every "legal" way.
Note where this particular Venn diagram will fail to overlap.
I'd call it a bug. If we don't fix it, I think that our habit of creating incentives towards outcomes that nobody actually wants will eventually kill us.
“The point of a system is what it does.”
Seems like most popular mainstream platforms violate many of those heuristics. Google, Facebook, maybe even hacker news probably, does things with your data you likely never consented to. Do we decide who gets whatever date we generate on those platforms?
I like some platforms do give us choice over our data but rarely do they not have our data be a component of the product. OpenAI, and anthropic for example use our data for "analytic purposes" which is broad enough that we compromise our agency over our data.
So what do you do when the majority of the systems you use on a daily basis to function in a normal life, require you (or atleast the majority of the populace) to compromise on morals? Do you know its expensive rise-wise, cost-wise, socially etc to check in with you morals in that kind of environment. I'm just curious your thoughts on this or if I'm misreading it. edit: And I'm not all doom gloom, I have hope and desire and trust in a future where morals aren't compromised in this way - I just see it as coming with a higher up-front cost and being aware that the most common environments around you systematically actively oppose you.
> So what do you do when the majority of the systems you use on a daily basis to function in a normal life, require you (or atleast the majority of the populace) to compromise on morals?
You replace those systems, one by one, with systems that don't. You figure out who is doing the work that makes that possible, and you figure out how to ensure they're supported while they do that work. You educate your friends and family that doing so as well is an investment in their future safety. Consider contributing to systems that help, consider damaging systems that harm. Fix a graphene OS bug. Shame a Palantir employee. Donate to Signal. Put a bag over a flock camera. Break somebody's pervert glasses (that is, supposing they're using them without consent of the people around them). There are a million ways to resist, some easy, some hard, some risky, some safe. Find something that jives with your tolerances and your skills and take action.
I heard that. thank you.
I had been a bit naive and gullible in the past, and resisted and several times was unable to gauge the actual risk and had severe negative repercussions for being the one who did what was right. I think thats the biggest challenge here stopping most people from resisting: it isn't always clear what risk one is taking on, and from there the impact of it isn't all that clear.
I wonder why risk has become so unclear and uncertain, while impact feels so low. Do you have any thoughts on that?
And in regards to educating others - assuming I have been able to find and articulate the high-enough impact and low-enough risk opportunities to others, how do you balance the lack of priority by your friends and family? Or maybe that sweet spot of risk-impact and finding opportunities first that fit their risk tolerance's, is the hardest part, and articulating it from there may land differently than other opportunities friends/family have received. Edit: I don't know why I have resistance to trying to educate others - there's a fine line between education and trying to convince/influence another to take your desired action. That then starts to feel like holier-than-though or a "I know better than you whats good for you" type of attitude which meets resistance.
The comment you replied to doesn't imply the users are immoral, but the creators. They're saying that we shouldn't build such systems. I, personally, also believe we should resist using them as much as possible, instead of rewarding them by using them. But, obviously, that may be easier or harder for any given individual situation. So be it; just avoid as much as you can tolerate if you agree that these things shouldn't exist the way they are.
How do you make sure a police state doesn't happen? Block traffic? Tweet? Cut off ties with friends and family that don't share your political beliefs?
Of course you can avoid politics. Just be a good person. Vote for who you think is the best candidate at the time. And move on with your life.
Ironically the people most involved in politics don't have their own house in order. They're often mentally ill, over educated, underemployed and without meaningful ties in their life (e.g. family, real life community, etc).
There are a lot of answers to this, but since we're likely coders in here, there's a software design answer worth pointing out.
Watch how police states behave. What tools do they use? Typically, it's roots of trust. They take down sites by tampering with their domain name. They MITM web traffic by compelling certificate authorities to do unstrustworthy things. They spy on cell phones by mimicking external authorities that the phones are wired to trust explicitly and without input from the user. They insert devices into ISP infrastructure which users tend to assume is neutral.
So if we want to prevent this: Don't tolerate roots of trust that the user cannot configure. Use a threat model that includes nation states. Don't design with the assumption that trusted third parties will remain trustworthy. Think about how to protect your users privacy. Prefer peer-to-peer where possible, because your server may at one point become compromised and harm the users. Think about how they can protect themselves if that happens. Give them control over whether to install updates. Publish your API so users can make unauthorized clients if they don't trust yours. Prefer repeatable builds, and check hashes to spot malware. Review contributions and be wary of binary blobs that may have hidden use cases.
Mostly this is just sound engineering. It means doing your job well, which is not always the same as doing the job the shareholders asked for. They invested so they could have leverage, so ask yourself ahead of time if those are the same kinds of levers that police states want to pull. Shoot them down in the design phase if possible, sabotage them after the fact if necessary.
By being durably involved in your community and by being aware of and not ignoring the consequences of your actions, of the policies you advocate for, the actions of the politicians you endorse, etc. By not just voting once and moving on.
What does this mean? This is all vague.
"Being aware"
"advocate for"
What are you talking about? Should you hound co-workers that don't work for you? Leave pamphlets on cars with bad bumper stickers? Subscribe to the New Yorker?
If you're interested in politics you should read it, but you should not let it affect your life in any meaningful way.
You're being needlessly antagonistic and it makes me think you haven't actually explored local options. Let's start elsewhere: what sort of civic engagement are you involved with? Have you ever submitted a FOIA request? Been to a community advocacy group?
I have not. Are these things you advocate?
I have picked up garbage around my neighborhood. Kept my sidewalk clean and tidy. Helped neighbors w basic tasks.
Does this count?
Everybody should submit FOIAs. If that makes me an advocate for public records, then sure, I'm an advocate.
And of course those things count, but it's arguably only focused on your immediate surroundings. I've done some pretty significant cleanup of parks in my area. It's very rewarding.
Are you interested in being less antagonistic about basic civics?
You're not going to get far talking to political fanatics. And like you said, they very likely do not have their own houses in order.
> you should not let it affect your life in any meaningful way.
Oh, I’ve got really bad news for you.
Politics affects your life in basically every way you could possibly think of, regardless of your apathy towards it.
When you’re apathetic, these decisions don’t just disappear. You implicitly delegate them to everyone else. Now, knowing what you know about most people, does that sound like a wise idea?
It’s sort of like saying “I don’t care where we eat” in your friend group, and then they choose sushi and you hate fish. Whoops.
> Politics affects your life in basically every way you could possibly think of, regardless of your apathy towards it.
Yep, 100%. It's unavoidable.
Being able to vote? You have that right because people engaged in politics.
Being educated for free as a child? Politics.
Clear air to breath? Politics.
5 day work week? Politics.
Not held in chattel slavery? Politics.
Allowed to worship at a church of your choosing - or not worship at all? Politics.
Our entire modern lives were built by people engaging in politics. Ignoring political issues is wreckless and shortsighted.
Wow, this is pretty telling.
> Of course you can avoid politics. Just be a good person. Vote for who you think is the best candidate at the time. And move on with your life.
This has got to be one of the most naive takes I have ever seen on this subject.
Has it never occurred to you that often times being a good person means engaging in “politics”?
The people most involved in politics are mentally ill? Got it...
This definitely feels true, yeah.
> Vote for who you think is the best candidate at the time
That is definitionally not avoiding politics.
I think you misunderstand what politics is, at a fundamental level.
> Block traffic? Tweet? Cut off ties with friends and family that don't share your political beliefs?
All of the above. Get involved with political organisations, NGOs, volunteering groups, go to protests and network with people there. So that when the government starts doing something that approaches a police state, you, your group, and many other groups of people will be out there ready to make their will known. Block roads, burn tires, occupy squares, remove cameras, etc. Is is easy? Not at all. Can you do it alone? No. Is it worth doing to avoid living in a police state? Yes.
Take a look at Russia if you want an example of what widespread political apathy leads to.
There's nothing that could convince me to do the opposite of what a proponent of a policy is advocating for than inconveniencing me to that extend.
If someone blocks traffic because of [topic], I don't think "gee maybe we are overly-dependent on oil", but the reverse. Most people are the same.
If I see someone defiling a public space, I am more accepting to more authoritative means to restore order.
If someone cuts ties with me because of their political beliefs, I am further convinced they are part of a cult. Because that's essentially what cults advocate for.
You can believe what you want, but you should not be deluded to think you're changing anyone's mind by behaving this way.
> There's nothing that could convince me to do the opposite of what a proponent of a policy is advocating for than inconveniencing me to that extend.
This is a toddler’s logic.
Zero proof that any of that works to prevent police states from forming.
>you cannot ignore politics and just "focus on technology."
Stallman was right again
https://www.azquotes.com/quote/755239
Politics in the broadest sense is just any decision-making process where a single decision affects multiple people and those people don't all agree on which decision should be made.
We are well, well past the point where it's possible to avoid a police state.
An conscientious objection is definitely a right you have as a professional, but it's a neutral action, you refuse to do something, and you let someone else do it. If you really are against it, you actively do something about it, like presenting a law or making a criminal complaint.
That said, they are both compatible, you can refuse to do something, and make efforts so that nobody does it.
But I think the the latter is the actual core security model of our society, and refusals aren't really effective to the point that I wouldn't worry much about it and just focus on compartimentalizing and executing on my duties. Isn't it theoretically possible that upper management divides duties so that engineers cannot accurately judge the ethical correctness of the task and the overall mission? As an individual you don't have the right tools to make such an evaluation. You can be pushed to investigate further, but the moment you do so, you cease your role as an engineer and put your citizen hat on.
I personally wouldn't object on most cases, my threshold would be very high, a database of people's sexuality is not even close to even being concerning to me, that's like a Wikipedia infobox property. But even if it were a feature that did concern me, like a citizen-ID to real time coordinates system, I wanna be at the helm of it, either way (if I get the privilege). If something is wrong, I'd be in a privileged position to do something about it internally, judicially or through congress, there's also whistleblowing if it comes to that, but that's not in me.
> An conscientious objection is definitely a right you have as a professional, but it's a neutral action, you refuse to do something, and you let someone else do it.
Yes, but it’s still the case that you didn’t do it. You cannot directly control the actions of others, just your own. Do that, at least.
Getting other people to also not do it is the rest of the political act. It’ll never be the case that nobody’s willing to perform an act, but if all the people who are doing so under duress stop, at the very least it helps one identify the proper size and shape of one’s political coalition and the power therein.
And, yes, people have bills. That’s what we mean by politics. We’re 50 years behind the curve on building the capacity for people to act in their own interest or on their own beliefs; that’s no reason not to start now.
>An objection of conscience is definitely a right you have as a professional, but it's a neutral action, you refuse to do something, and you let someone else do it.
Correct, and the lessons in the CIA's very own Simple Sabotage Field Manual are still as helpful as when they were written.
Actually, you cannot avoid sex. Everything is about sex, even politics. If you want the freedom to develop technology without worrying it will be used by a police state, you cannot ignore sex and just "focus on technology"
Except for sex, which is about power
For some people it’s just about pleasure, for others about intimacy. Sex is not implicitly always about power.
I understand that, I was referencing a quote (often misattributed to Oscar Wilde, I don't know its true source)
define "put in the work" what does that work look like. an example please!
There's a deep failed idea here. It's the idea that technology is an alternative to politics, period. I think that whole idea has failed.
You can't avoid building technologies that could be used by a police state, because literally everything can be used for warfare or aggression. The first person who sharpened a stick or a rock created a weapon. Everything is a weapon. Everything is dual-use.
If you want to prevent a police state or any other undesirable political outcome, you have to confront the politics directly. "Change the tools and you change the rules," an old saying from 1990s cyber-culture, is an idea that I think has failed. Instead what happens is that the rules determine what's done with the tools. Those 90s cyber-hippie and cyber-libertarian types vastly underestimated the power of the political to the point of making a category error.
Cryptocurrency is a great case in point. It started as an attempt to create a technology that would act as an escape hatch from corrupt casino capitalism and state-backed financialization. Instead it became an insane absurdist parody of those things. The same types of corrupt individuals who profited off "too big to fail" and the rest of it simply took cryptocurrency and used it to implement the same type of system but on a block chain. The rules (and rulers) changed the tools, not the other way around.
Not everything is dual use. Some information technology grossly favors centralization or decentralization of power based on the type of information problem it solves.
Cryptocurrency is clearly a counterexample to your main point. The fact that some people use cryptocurrency tech to implement centrally managed private currencies is largely irrelevant. To the extent that cryptocurrencies are used to implement private currencies, it largely just hampers them technolgicially if it has any effect at all. These projects just like to use the term cryptocurrency to imply some level of legitimate decentralization or security that doesn't really exist.
It's like saying that because you can use a screwdriver as a weapon, it's inherently a destructive technology (or some mixture of destructive and constructive). On closer inspection it's clear that the screwdriver doesn't sit on the pareto front for weapons, but it does sit on the pareto front for manufacturing tools. So a screwdriver is clearly a technology whose existence favors construction over destruction. Similarly I would argue that technology like bittorrent or bitcoin favor decentralization over centralization.
As another example, surveilance technology favors centralization. None of what we are seeing now with flock would be possible without cheap mass produced digital cameras. The balance of technology favors cheap cameras (and counter-surveilance is often impossible or expensive) and it favors centralization because you need a lot of data to create inferences based on this spurrious data.
If we could have predicted these effects, perhaps we could have delayed the development of cheap cameras, but it just goes to show how complicated this game is. We could just as easily have said that more cameras would lead to unprecedented public transparency (e.g. bodycams on cops, dash cams). Unintended consequences.
I mean you kind of can. The whole premise of AI is basically that we'll make white collar administrative compliance work dirt cheap in the long run and we'll all be richer for it and we'll sidestep the whole "fight with all those industries" step because the sheer economics of it will make it happen and as those industries become cheaper/poorer there will be even less reason to not kick them to the curb. Kind of like how once certain state shed a lot of their manufacturing or agriculture, adopting policy that's bad for the rest became easier. Or how now that solar is cheap we mostly DGAF about coal.
The Marxists were wrong about the inevitability of history no matter which direction or by what mechanism one wants to assert it. You’ve gotta put in the work no matter what, there’s no eliding the actual effort of politics.
The "work" here is changing the technological picture to the point where the political one becomes a non issue, at least for whatever incremental step you're looking at. Because once the technological picture changes enough, whoever your enemy is has to essentially roll over and take it, or your society will get out competed by some other one that did adopt it.
Like no amount of politics is putting the allure of the wealth potential of using a printing press to disseminate information cheaply back in the bag even if that comes at the expense of ending a gravy train for a subset of the current winners in your society.
Recently my wife got locked out of her bank account - all cards blocked, unable to log in to the website or app, so effectively her whole finances were frozen - because she was trying to order a new bank card over the phone and some system couldnt do voice recognition (which we did not know they even used). We were getting ready to get on a plane to NYC, from California (she banks with TD bank) but after a tearful session of phoning anyone and everyone we could at TD, suddenly it magically got reversed.
The problem is not just the tech, its building systems where humans are essentially slaves to the system, with no recourse or power over whats happening.
Few things are more important in modern life than access to your money. That's why I would never use an online bank. I use a local credit union but "local" with actual branch offices you can walk into and talk to a human are the important thing.
TD bank has branches but that's not super helpful if you're at the airport. the helpful thing is having a "relationship manager", someone you can call or email directly - you can get that at a big bank or a small one, and you don't need tons of assets, a lot of banks its having your direct deposit with them is enough to qualify for some special relationship.
Online banks typically offer much more competitive financial products. I have some HYSA accounts at 4% APY, that’s not achievable with a CU or traditional bank.
The solution is the same solution as any financial risk: diversification. I have many accounts at many banks. If any one of them goes down, I’m fine. If multiple go down, I’m still fine in the interim.
My CU has 6-month CDs at over 4% right now.
CDs are okay but I don’t prefer them due to lack of liquidity. There’s basically no reason to choose a CD over a HYSA at the same rate.
The minumum deposits are a lot lower. If you have a HYSA with low balance requirements, sure that's great.
I tend to think the same way, but I've personally had far more issues with my local (largest in the region) credit union. Their (human) customer support reps frequently make mistakes processing my share certificates that automation would have otherwise avoided.
This entire thread is such a strong case for why all undergrad CS programs should have a core requirement of at least one ethics course.
Every business school and MBA program has ethics course requirements. Does it really make a difference? Maybe it does, and things would be even worse than they are otherwise. But I'm not sure.
I think the purpose isn't to make people more ethical, which is impossible, but to make ethical people more effective.
It ideally makes people better at identifying when something bad is happening and gives them tools to handle it. If they're amoral in the first place though a course isn't going to change that.
I think of it like so:
All the great people in history who would be regarded as ethical never took an ethics course.
Its hard to know whether an ethics course makes people behave ethically, but its clearly not a necessary requirement to ethical behaviour
Many of them were probably religious though, which is basically ethics with a lot of supernatural trappings.
Although lot of terrible people in history were likely at least outwardly religious, so not sure that proves anything one way or the other.
I'm curious why you think an ethics course would actually change minds. In my experience in undergrad, we had a CS ethics course, and it went in in-one-ear-and-out-the-other for 99% of students, probably myself included. I know it was a thorough course but I promptly forgot all of it, and so did everyone else.
Ethical stance is not something you can teach in one course. If you don't have this disposition by the time you're in college, I think you're likely not learning it.
My original comment was more about the quality of discourse in this thread being...somewhat lacking. I'd hope that an ethics course would at least equip CS grads to have a more substantive debate about these sorts of topics. I agree that many students would dial it in for an ethics course (just like they do for many required courses), but I also think there's likely some value in exposure, and it's difficult to argue that ethics are irrelevant to software engineering given the frequency of discussions like this one.
(And, to be fair, it's a discussion board on the Internet, so maybe my expectations are just out of whack.)
Don't ethics courses make people less ethical because they teach people how to come up with ethical justifications for straightforwardly bad things?
One of my favourite tweets, which unfortunately I can't find again was:
"My ethics teacher has gotten his sons girlfriend pregnant. I think about this often"
Reply: "To be fair, you have to be really good a ethics to get away with that"
Interesting. I don't know. Do you have specific sources you're thinking of?
A course is nothing. I've long felt that Software Engineering should follow suit of many other engineering disciplines and push responsibility down to engineers. Like how when a bridge falls, an engineer has to answer for it.
I don't know exactly how that looks, and yes there are many issues with it, but we're living in the age of cowboy coding.
I agree. Software engineers are approaching a level of societal impact that it would be appropriate to start thinking about professional ethics systems similar to Canada's Iron Ring (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Ring).
I also think there's a long, long way between here and there, especially in the US. Requiring ethics in CS programs seems more immediately attainable to me, but I agree that it isn't a standalone fix.
The iron ring is symbolic, just like that ethics course.
A Professional Engineer license and the passing down of liability to the individual is what's needed IMO
Especially if it has concrete historical examples of technology intended for good and how it was later used for evil, rather than something more generally-philosophical.
You really think taking an ethics COURSE will do anything?
How are you supposed to 'learn' ethics?
Never understood the point of those. My university had over 4 for the cyber students and over half the grads went on to work for the MIC contributing to blowing up brown children in the middle east anyway.
Clearly, our problem must have been that they didn't have 5 mandatory time-waster ethics courses. That surely would have solved the matter. Add in a few extra "racism is bad" and "don't be a meanie" courses to round out the collection, just for good measure.
If you think an ethics course is about "racism is bad" or "don't be a meanie" then you weren't paying attention. The ethics class i took in college focused on the philosophical models of ethics from Kant and Aristotle and Nietzsche, utilitarianism and consequentialism and all of that. It's about deriving whether you're doing a "good thing" from first principles, and not some later moral model.
> My university had over 4 for the cyber students
What program? Or if you'd rather stay anonymous, can you share the curriculum somehow? I'm very curious about what a CS program of study looks like with that many ethics courses.
In the US, many undergrad programs award a minor with 15-18 hours of study in the subject (or 5-6 standard courses). Four ethics courses would basically get you to a philosophy minor.
At least I had 6 humanities courses telling me why communism is good
Edit: To make this comment have a little substance, what I'm getting at is, universities are already way too biased and one-sided on humanities issues to be teaching ethics. Students notice it too. I've gotten As on some insanely bad papers just cause I knew what they wanted to hear.
It's good in theory, I wonder if they talk about the practice..
They said in practice Cuban communism was good. Fastest P/NP in the west.
Yup, it was a utopia... until the Soviet subsidies ended.
Whose ethics?
We had an ethics course, it was a requirement for graduation if I remember correctly.
It was entirely performative. You can teach a curriculum of ethics, but that won't make a person empathetic. These are courses for credit hours, not firmware updates.
And a person with empathy can always find or be given reasons to not apply his empathy to a person or a group of people.
The problem is not a lack of ethics courses. Many CS programs have those ethics courses.
The problem is all the techbros who take those ethics courses and laugh at them as easy and pointless and don't care about them.
There's a lot of very unserious people right now.
I've been arguing with folks on Reddit about this lately when it comes to Google's changes to Android (where they've made it more difficult to install any software on your device without Google first tracking the identity of the developer). My argument ultimately comes down to the fact that Google (and Apple already) have built a technology that gives them immense power to control individual computing freedoms, and no matter their internal policy, they still must follow US law. No amount of promises or legit good faith on their part matter, they've made a dangerous technology and are behold to a government that is very eager to censor anything it doesn't like. It's so disappointing to see 1. Google engineers build such a thing, and 2. For people to support it.
The automobile, the transistor, the Internet, and basically every other technology ~could~ be used by a police state. I'm not sure how that is a helpful rule at all.
The article says the same. I think the point is to be aware and try to build things in a way to minimize the chance for abuse. There's nuance and the author says as much.
"Should we have a national database of, say, religious beliefs? Almost instinctively the answer is no."
What about an ad system that can predict beliefs and home addresses? Ooops.
Google, Microsoft, Apple, every telecoms provider, every modern car maker..
It's definitely different to have a prediction than a database. Especially for something that can be denied like religious belief. If the nazis had such a db they would have killed much more efficiently I think.
Technology isn’t going to be a moderator of a police state. We already have technologies that are used for oppression, exploitation, abuse, and so on. They’re just not being used this way by governments in the same way they are being used by criminals. Bitcoin is used to collect ransoms. Telegram/signal is used to plan conspiracies to commit crimes. GPS and location services are used to monitor trafficking victims. There are stories of cartels running their own cellular networks.
A lack of technology doesn’t restrict a police state, see East Germany in the ‘60s-‘80s. It does, however, create more opportunity for crimes. In Seattle there was a shooting at the bite of Seattle festival. They don’t have firm ideas about the identities of all the suspects. There would be a greater chance that they would know who they are looking for if there were more securities cameras deployed at large public festivals.
To prevent a police state you need public participation in governance and a population that lives in the real world and not fantasy lands created by a intentional misinterpretation of events.
I'm in the UK and it always seems weird to me how in the USA its totally normal to publically register yourself as either a Democrat or a Republican. To me seems like the kind of thing that should be private. In the UK I might choose to be a member of a political party but no-one needs to know that except that particular party. Or I can just join no party and vote in private on polling day.
It's because we have open primaries in the US - registering as a Democrat or Republican is only important as far as voting in primaries. In other countries the selection of candidates is internal to the political parties themselves. There are pros and cons for both systems but the US system is fairly unique globally aside from a few exceptions in South America.
Isn't it kinda internal here too? Parties get to pick their candidates how ever they want. The major ones have primaries, but I still don't know if anything legally requires them to respect the votes there.
It's weirder still because you often don't actually have to register with a party, even to vote in the primaries like other commenters have mentioned; it depends on which state and which party. [0]
For example, I just voted in the Minnesota primaries. Ours are open primaries, so you don't need to register with any party and the ballot has every party on it. Though, it spoils your ballot to vote in multiple parties' primaries. So you gotta choose, but you do that privately.
[0] https://ballotpedia.org/Primary_election_types_by_state
Because by and large they're all trapped in an "us vs them" team sport where both sides believe everybody on the opposing team is literally Satan.
No, it's because you need to register for a party if you want to vote in its primaries.
I'm really hoping we can get over this silly delusion soon.
It seems quite weird. Our parties are generally quite weird because were are not supposed to exist in the first place and so most of the rules are sort of ad-hoc.
I don’t belong to one, but it is sort of annoying to not be able to vote in the “primary elections” (where the parties pick their candidates). My state has a strong partisan lean so this is the only election that actually matters here. Oh well.
Then again, EU citizens would find it questionable how in the UK recruiters are asking about your ethnicity, disability status etc.
UK also arrests you for boomer facebook memes. Then again maybe parts of EU too.
Well you can join as many parties as you want no?
I'm a tech worker.
I'm given a promotion for adding invasive features based on "insights".
I'm incentivized to create something patent-able to restrict competition.
I'm rewarded for more detailed metrics to reveal more.
I'm hired by how many people were affected by my previous work regardless of ethics.
There is no reward for protection, privacy, and restricting access to data.
This is missing the "(2013)" at the end of the HN link, but it does seem weirdly prescient as we say a rise of more polarised politics across the World, just 13 years later.
And a rise in tech companies building products and features that dont benefit the users, knowing we cant really escape at this point.
Thanks, didn't notice it before you pointed it out (and I already made my comment), actually turned into quite an interesting retrospective for me
In my country there are two parties always being elected. Quite similar to US system. It's always first saying "elect us, otherwise second will win" and the second saying the opposite.
Asymptotically those parties go the same way, but always introducing new laws that improve oppression-style control, explaining that those others must be controlled. And the voters accept the solution, but do not understand that the next year the second party will come and use the solution.
I don't know if you get what I'm saying without the context but this is exactly the case: imagine police state appearing in your country. Does the law help them or are you still free
Has this philosophical approach ever worked? It's a commonplace in the hard sciences and engineering fields (ie, refusing to work on weapons systems), but weapons systems are elite and well-compensated engineering projects that don't have any trouble finding talent. The same thing goes for NSA, which has a line out the door from elite academia.
I'm not dismissing the sentiment here. It's morally sound. You should act in accordance with your principles and it useful to be reminded how those principles intersect the world. I have similar guardrails (probably not the same as the author's). I just wouldn't want people to overestimate what can be accomplished with this approach.
A significant number of people in positions of power in the AI industry get their moral framework from science fiction books and a particular Harry Potter fanfiction. It’s hard to predict what ideas and philosophies will become important.
Most people get their moral framework from TV, movies, and memes. Hence the common refrain of “this is just like gattaca” and “have you not seen the movie X? This happens there!” And the torment nexus crap.
I call this https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Story-Logic_Bias
But that seems normal and historical. Stories are how we encode memorable concepts for transmission to each other and probably why the Bible is full of parables and so on.
Someone pointed out to me that said Harry Potter fanfiction author has written about this specific bias as well https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/rHBdcHGLJ7KvLJQPk/the-logica...
Sorry, purely just curious here because I'm not sure what you mean - what Harry Potter fanfiction?
"Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality" written by Eliezer Yudkowsky has become something akin to a sacred text among the rationalist community.
edit: posted is a podcast by Behind the Bastards about the Zizians, a death cult that branched out of rationalist community and which was responsible for six deaths, but it covers the rationalist community and the Harry Potter fanfiction as well.
[0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9mJAerUL-7w
Sweet, I love Behind the Bastards, thanks for providing the entertainment for my next few walks :)
The sad irony of "Share this post on..." with neat list of all the services doing exactly what the post warns against. They can and often are already used by police state.
Isn't it an age old maxim: democratic governments should remember to not build tools/give them selves powers that they won't want the opposition to be able to use WHEN they come to power.
That just moves the decision point to “could be used by a police state”. Some people prefer humans as being the only people who can determine what a civil violation is. E.g. if a policeman doesn’t pull you over you shouldn’t be punished. This allows for great personal discretion and the potential for a police state through such discretionary exertion of power as exemplified by the famous line
> “For my friends, everything. For my enemies, the law”
I prefer speed cameras, red-light cameras, and so on because automated enforcement removes discretionary power from enforcement agents. I believe that enforcement agents are the arms of the civic body tasked with ensuring the commons are not ruined. Consequently, controlling the exertion of discretion is entirely an engineering approach to controlling quality of enforcement. Others believe that enforcement agents are our rulers or agents thereof that we must submit to - and therefore to whom we must give great discretion so that they can choose whether we are worthy or not.
That is incompatible with all being equal before the law.
> I prefer speed cameras, red-light cameras, and so on because automated enforcement removes discretionary power from enforcement agents.
There can still be corruption with automated enforcement. If the punishment is fees and the fees go towards the budget of those in charge of the automation parameters, then you'll see manipulation of parameters to increase fees paid. Shorter yellow lights, shorter distance between a speed limit sign and the speed camera, requiring more effort to contest the automation when it's wrong than to just pay the fee, etc.
This is true. A useful difference between this form of parameter optimization and the unalignability of humans is that it is possible to force constraints on these parameters. E.g. San Francisco’s speed cameras run in collection mode to obtain baselines and then in enforcement mode where they have to demonstrate reduction in speeding. California mandates minimum yellow times.
Flaws exist but we can constraint-engineer to minimize adversarial optimization of parameters. Improvements allow us to asymptotically approach our goal optimum. Human discretion, on the other hand, is fluid and dodges all attempts at enforcement.
We require many human agents solely because transforming unstructured vision space into structured judgment was impossible in the past. Currently, in a sufficiently constrained environment (roadways) we are able to solve sufficiently constrained problems (speeding, running a red light).
One hopes that we are able to solve this problem in more spaces as time goes by.
Pinging the absolute jerkwads at amutable.com who state that it's not their problem how their remote attestation technology will be used.
https://neveragain.tech/ is still up.
Title was mangled. The actual quote is:
> It's bad civic hygiene to build technologies that could someday be used to facilitate a police state
Not “avoid building technologies that could be used by a police state”, as the HN title currently says.
The HN title reads like any technology a police state could ever use should be avoided. Like cars, or pencils. Anything.
Schneier’s quote says “used to facilitate a police state” is a lot more specific: could be used to bring a police state into existence where it wouldn’t have been possible before, like having a database of everyone’s sexuality, etc.
Does explicit licensing and the threat of a lawsuit related to violation of it not help here?
Lawsuit against a tirant? Who would dare?
I guess it falls on how the courts see it. I'm sure the app devs would love to take their money.
The article is not completely wrong in its premises, but phrased incorrectly.
This is not about technologies (after all, an authoritarian government will use many existing technologies, from the car to the computer), but about powers granted to a government, that could be used differently by the next party/majority in power.
The answer to that is to not grant government too much power in the first place.
Of course, this is often a contentious point for leftists, since they do want to grant government a lot of power in the first place; they're just concerned that the exact same powers will then be used by a different political side in a way that bothers a different category of people.
You will get downvoted to oblivion for even suggesting it here but it's so obviously a take that maps on cleanly to reality. Massive power centralization in government makes everything dual use in the service of a police state. The easiest thing to do is resist massive centralization of power in a government.
you get downvoted because to most people we don't care if its tyranny.gov or tyranny.com. "don't give powers to the government" just means they buy them from corporations. see: cellphone location data.
the solution is not to have the power exist at all, anywhere.
>the solution is not to have the power exist at all, anywhere.
This is nonsensical. The power always exists, it's just your fellow human beings doing things, to you, around you, with you, without you.
You cannot do anything to not have that power. It doesn't matter if your neighbors are lynching you because the evil dictatorial police state said to, or because the rough consensus of a mob of lunatics want your food.
You as a human lack power. Humans working together have far more power. Sometimes, you can use the combined power of some humans working together to empower other humans. That's what laws are. That's what a State can do.
That's why corporations can have power even though they are not part of government. Being able to direct 1000 humans to do something is what power is.
You cannot eliminate that power. It's a fundamental part of reality. It's the entire reason animals evolved to be social at all, to take advantage of that power.
Its like you need a list of laws rules and enforcement "we" people have built to stop "them" (corporations/governments/groups of lobbyists) from working together.
I'll point to the gun rules, where gun owners prevented the state from building gun registries, forced gun sale records to be kept on gun store premises, and then largely purchased from small independent gun stores. They ensured the background check was on the person and not the gun. All intentionally with the understanding that someone somewhere was going to attempt to grab the power of who had what guns.
You can avoid giving any single person or group too much power. It does take effort.
Your thesis that the solution is to "not to have the power exist at all, anywhere" and your insistence here that "you need a list of laws rules and enforcement "we" people have built to stop "them"" are at odds. "We" did not build those laws nor do "we" enforce them. The government wrote those laws and the government enforces them with its monopoly on violence. You cannot have a set of laws which anyone respects or enforces without a source of power capable of doing so, and in the US that source of power is not "we the people," regardless of what your civics classes might have taught you.
>All intentionally with the understanding that someone somewhere was going to attempt to grab the power of who had what guns.
And so it became impossible to do anything effective to prevent gun violence and mass shootings and "that someone somewhere" proceeded to centralize power anyway because the gun owners don't actually care as long as no one touches their guns.
Meanwhile the rest of the Western world has democratic governments which actually function and don't have mass shootings.
Good work I guess.
I find it frusrating how the conversation around this almost always focuses on one side of the equation. Why is it always about preventing tools from being built in case authoritarians comes to power rather than preventing those authoritarians from coming to power in the first place? I'm far more scared off the authoritarian aspect than the tech. The Nazis didn't need Flock cameras to kill millions. It seems like focusing on the actual bad guys is going to be more effective because if the state wants to bear its weight on you, it rarely requires tech to do it.
People have incentives to become more powerful - through wealth, power, leverage, or in other ways. So unfortunately, authoritarianism tends to have gravity going for it.
The Nazis relied heavily on IBM technology for national census data (to identify jews), military logistics, ghetto statistics, train traffic management, and concentration camp capacity
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust
I fully agree with your base perspective, that the main focus should be on preventing authoritarians from coming to power in the first place.
I also agree with your final point, that the government doesn't need tech to lean on a person.
We disagree in the middle, on how tech that makes evil orders of magnitude easier might be a contributing factor and might enable the government to lean on many more people than it would otherwise.
My comment was made knowing and understanding the Nazis use of tech. But it's an argument of efficiency and efficiency matters less and less when dealing with the state due to their relative resource and power imbalance compared to individuals. Tech might have sped up the Nazi death machine, but the desire and intent for murder is all that matters in the long run. Their efficiency was of note really only because their time in power was relatively brief. If they were like some other authoritarian regimes and remained in power for decades, they likely would have eventually racked up the same death toll with or without the tech.
We also never seem to accept this answer for other forms of tech. Should we ban encryption because it makes it easier for terrorists to hide? Should your phone run ever photo you take through a CSAM database to catch preditors? Should we ban 3d printers because someone might print gun parts? For some reason we understand that people motivated enough to commit crimes will find a way to do it. This is much truer when it comes to the actions of the state than it is for individuals. I'm never going to learn to smith parts for a gun, but I could figure out 3d printing pretty easily. If the state wants me dead or in jail, I don't think the Flock cameras are that meaningful.
They also used Volkswagen, BMW, Mercedes, Porsche, Audi, Siemens, Hugo Boss, Bayer, Deutsche Bank, Allianz.
There is obviously a spectrum here, but none of these companies are inherintly evil, the people working at these companies aren't either.
The evil ones are committing the crimes.
See:
* https://dave.autonoma.ca/blog/2019/06/06/web-of-knowledge/
* https://i.ibb.co/WWWYznHX/flock-future.png
* https://www.cfr.org/education/learn/reading/what-fascism
The water flows whichever way there's a gradient of height.
Don't create gradients you don't have dams for.
>The Nazis didn't need Flock cameras to kill millions.
No, but they were extremely happy to hop over to France and realize that we kept lists that indirectly listed jews. Actions have consequences that we may not be able to predict.
As a recruiter once said to me, if you don't do the defence work, somebody else will. So you might as well do it and do a better job and get paid well. I didn't go for the job.
If you don't man the concentration camps, somebody else will. So you might as well do it and do a better job and get paid well.
If your government has elected someone bad its already over. So much effort is put into trying to restrict what the highest point of power may do. But its the highest point of power and if its compromised you've already lost. See trump breaking all the checks and balances. Its better to build what you need and focus on getting good people into power.
You shouldnt be able to hide from your government.
The obvious 21st century United States instance of "don't collect data that the government might later use for persecution" is E-Verify.
Defaulting to discussing the US here: let's start with reducing the state's size - it shouldn't be the world's largest employer, it shouldn't be able to run an unfathomably large deficit, it shouldn't be able to declare war without congressional approval. Technology to run a police state is just the last step in a long line of ridiculously unacceptable steps.
How does the number of state employees de facto result in a police state?
I agree with you on our obscene debt and our obsession with "conflicts" around the world, but I'd argue we're seeing the mass reduction of state employees and it's just making everything worse (eg massive deregulation and the destruction of checks and balances).
Let's slip in your pet bugaboo. Workforce size very little to do with state surveillance. In fact, mandating that it shrink can result in blowback, just like we have seen with how the US provides a great antagonist for China to evolve its own capabilities faster than if we had done nothing.
It won’t work for any country. They all want more control, and also create a class of people depending on government money to be on their side. Only people losing out are the powerless ordinary citizens and taxpayers
They all are created by US companies only. FB, Instagram, Youtube, X, Google (Android & others), Apple, etc. Face Recognition, Drones, space exploration (engines for missiles), AI, LLMs, etc.
So, Either do it yourself (China) or get run by them (India).
I'd be careful banging two rocks together else someone might start a war with them!
Wouldn't a better title be "don't give out information that you wouldn't want used by bad actors"? Seems less about technology and more about privacy.
how about you guys understand that state is criminal master org. that uses violence monopoly? is it too high level or hard to understand this?
see war on drugs and more
No electricity yea! No internet, no food! No Water!
The impossibility of drawing a line! So difficult! So nebulous! I will work for a concentration camp
I think it’s the other way around. We are from time to time graced with scraps from military research and we think it’s neat.
The concept is like the perpetual machine in the 1800s. It is simply an impossibility. Please avoid wasting time.
Libertarianism has its moments but it generally hasn't caught on because state capacity is unique and useful. And virtually every last bit of it can be used to facilitate a police state because it's... a state.
Sure, we could all live without IDs and use motio belli for defence but this arrangement will be soon replaced by someone more organized because there is a huge return to that organization despite its risks.
Is a prosecution fantasy comorbid with sexual deviance?
this is an important topic, and i hate that people forget how difficult it is. in any political conversation, it's pretty easy to pull this thread to unravel anyone's adamant belief in one thing or another (e.g. gun control). my biggest concern is that people seem less willing than before to actually have those discussions.. they'll immediately just label you as being opposed to their views, "against" them.. when really we need these conversations to find viable policy solutions that wont easily be used in the exact opposite way that they were intended when implemented
"Civic hygiene isn't about saying we distrust our current government - it's about not trusting the next government." I've made similar points. Granting one government administration more power, is by extension granting it to all future administrations. Do so only with great care.
Or, and here me out…
“Become ungovernable.”
That has been the motto of our governors.
This is the most correct response.
What about fire?
Clearly you need to consider how general the capabilities and use cases of the technology is. The most general-purpose technologies will always have obvious use cases for police states and other bad groups or people.
Civic Hygiene is the opposite of how you were taught to write code...
>It should be noted that no ethically-trained software engineer would ever consent to write a DestroyBaghdad procedure. Basic professional ethics would instead require him to write a DestroyCity procedure, to which Baghdad could be given as a parameter.
https://blog.codinghorror.com/to-serve-man-with-software/
Like others have said, I don't think it's possible to create technology that cannot be weaponized. I think it's possible (mostly) to design technology so that abuse requires more people, requires the leaving of evidence / paper trail, needs checks, etc.
But still, it's not possible to prevent abuse altogether and sometimes we even applaud breaking the rules (the movie Hunt for Red October for example kicks off with the Soviet captain jumping the guardrails).
Also, the most "benign" public infrastructure is usually the most impactful, e.g., water systems and electrical systems. Don't like the people in that one town who keep protesting and voting against you? Turn off their power, water, and also make it so that their trash doesn't get picked up for a year. See how they like it.
Bertrand Russell:
“If war is not impossible, then every advance in scientific technique in an advance in mass murder”
As true today as then
You can replace war with “police state” and it’s the same message.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=GzTlTVaYDtk
Technology is force multiplier. Everything could be used for oppression. Deal with it - the future is boot stomping on human face forever. There are lucky few that could choose whether they will be the face or foot. But it is inevitable.
Or we could stop all tech development. But it is not going to happen.
just make guns that on l can only shoot the baddies! easy!
Edit; wrote this comment before I realised this is a blog post from 2013. In 2013 I would've agreed 110% with this.
-----------
This is one of those things that make for great post title and gets you all riled up at first but when you think about it, it's really shallow.
Most civic databases can be abused by any sufficiently authoritarian government. A homeless shelter's records may contain exactly the sort of information that could be used to get "undesirables" off the street. But those same records are useful for coordinating beds, outreach, medical care, etc. Surely the conclusion isn't that the shelter shouldn't keep records.
It seems much more useful to focus on limiting what gets collected, who gets access to it, and how long it can be retained. In other words, boring things like data-minimisation and retention laws. Somewhat amusingly, that gets you pretty close to the sort of principles behind GDPR, which isn't exactly universally loved around here.
I don't really disagree with the blog post's moral intuition. What bothers me is the emphasis on individual moral choices by the people building these systems. I've seen plenty of my peers happily work for companies that have spent the last twenty years building exactly this kind of technology, there will always be someone willing to build it. That's not an argument for abandoning personal ethics, but it is an argument against treating personal ethics as any form of serious societal safeguard. "good engineers should refuse to build them" means nothing.
About 15 years ago I was locked up in SF (850 Bryant/HoJ 7th floor) and everyone was talking about their "jobs"; like what they did for a living outside of the obvious. I said "I fuck with computers and shit" and I got some follow-up questions I did not expect like - "wtf you doing here", they were all along those lines. I been locked up plenty of times but this was the 1st time I was publicly ridiculed for it. This guy named Vic; big ass black dude with an extremely visible front tooth missing said: "Man, if I could do what you do I would rebuild the Gov." What followed was a discussion where everyone in the pod which not only showed interest and consensus but an abject disappointment in me and my choices so I said jokingly, well OK; if I am ever locked up w/ my computer I'll rebuild the Gov. Then Covid hit, i got fired from Goop and I found myself essentially "locked up w/ my computer". Here on HN; this is NOT a popular sentiment and I know it will garner nothing but admonishment in the form of downvotes and ridicule but I have really been able to help some people w/ housing, re-entry, healthcare, addiction etc... so fuck it.
Everyone in that pod agreed the Gov was broken. Nobody could put their finger on it or articulate in what AI might deem a "load bearing" - HHAHAH capacity. The other day i saw a comment on here by bob1029 [1] and he put it better than I ever could. It's broken because nobody can execute across all the moving parts; its a coordination issue in many ways - the cost of collaboration has become so large that it has become the thing to overcome instead of whatever first principal is the whole point of the shit e.g.: Healthcare, Food, Housing etc... The bottleneck was never intelligence it's coordination. The cost of getting many parties to act together without the whole thing blowing up.
The Anthropic multi-agent article hit it too...turf war, the 2.4M-request queue, the price collusion, the merge silos. Every one is the same thing: free-form runtime "negotiation" blowing up. And every success is an agent ad-hoc reinventing an institution mid-fight inventing a "verifiable criterion," writing an apology commit and pulling in a human, running a tournament as a commitment device. They keep hand-rolling the institution, badly, under fire.
So stop making them reinvent it. The generalization of the "constrained action space" idea isn't just bounding one agent's moves it's what I call an intent: intents don't just constrain each agent's actions, they codify the coordination itself.
And I make the unit of coordination a first-class object: the Deal a structured negotiation instead of a free-form one. The Deal is the container those agents keep reinventing, handed to them up front: scope and terms, the parties and their roles, the ordered steps, a verification gate as the neutral arbiter, and an appeal / human-escalation path as recourse, all over an append-only record. Agents negotiate inside a bounded contract instead of improvising one mid-fight.
How it works from what you say to what actually happens (the "Deal")
1. You speak the intent. You can use a form but I found people like the verbal shit much more.
2. Break the problem into an ontology. The ask gets decomposed into the real work it implies mapped to actual job roles (O*NET). Problem → Solution.
3. Vet the solution with the gov council agents. Every domain has one public AI expert in that agency's real systems Medicare, Medicaid, SSA, OPM (pda:codify.<domain>). Policies get deliberated and voted, elected officials in the loop, before anything runs. Stakeholders.
4. We staff it. It matches the specific expertise needed the exact specialty, not a generic "doctor." Down to the right role for your case.
5. We set up the financing. The money that follows the person eligibility, benefits, the payment rail. Financing.
6. An agent manages the process with expertise humans in the loop for anything high-risk, adjusting as outcomes come back, like an adaptive trial, until the outcome is met or it fails honestly. Expertise → Outcome.
The atomic unit of value here is a "Deal". Problem broken down, solution vetted, staffed, financed, executed under contract. intent → Deal → outcome.
Overview
- Intent: https://wiki.erpo.law/agent/wa-erpo
- Program: https://erpo.law/program/71069-petition-for-an-erpo-as-a-fam...
- Protocol: https://erpo.law/protocol/71079
I'm building it in the open because I think thats the only way this can be done
https://medicare.dev
https://epa.dev
etc...
Learning how to take criticism better so the more criticism the better.
[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49316271
/me inserts the "You're proposing a software solution to a social problem" copypasta form
Seriously, if the coordination problem you've identified isn't solved by the instantaneous global communications tech that we've had for between thirty and a hundred years (depending on how you count), it's a people problem that's not going to be solved by more tech. Notice how everything except maybe steps six and three in your plan require people to agree on the nature of the problem, whether it is a problem that even should be solved, and how many resources to commit to solving it. Getting people to agree to solve problems that need to be solved -even in the cases where solving those problems makes them personally worse off- is the blocker. Your use of shiny new software tools does nothing to remove that blocker.
Perhaps. What would you suggest? Other than your obvious, just vote for Trump yell MAGA and claim everything is great.
> Perhaps.
No, definitely.
> What would you suggest?
Unironically? Either:
* Mind control.
* Refusing to permit anyone who will enrich themselves at the expense of others to serve as a public servant.
But both seem somewhere between impractical and impossible, so the only workable thing is taking the "Eternal vigilance is the price of Liberty" quote to heart and banding with like-minded fellows to make a world where everyone can spare the time and effort required to keep abreast of what the bastards in charge are doing and keep them from making our world worse to uplift themselves and their friends.
Well, given the state of things; this seems to be working out great for you and I wish you the best of luck there.
> No, definitely.
I'm glad you are so confident but I have achieved actual outcomes; you are just posting on a forum and waiting for mind control. Respectfully, my way is more fun.
Companies that agree to work on Chat Control deserve a special place in hell. One company that was eager to participate, hoping this harmful law would pass, is Atos. Name and shame them.
I think this runs into a basic issue that all large software systems that enforce the law contribute to locking down a society because laws tend to need be broken to be changed.
That a system can be avoided offends the investor who want their products to be ubiquitous.
The system that is not perfectly enforced offends the engineer who dislikes broken things.
Yet both are required if we as a society are to grow. I think the thing that it might be good to learn is when to say "I've done/had enough."
> because laws tend to need be broken to be changed
Nope.
I think I could collect enough weight of books on "civil disobedience" at my local library that I could crush you underneath them, even if you didn't bother reading them.
I'm sure you could. But it would in no way demonstrate that laws generally need civil disobedience to be changed. Laws are changed all the time, as bills, as legal precedent, and as regulations.
Assholes like this were all for the police state back when it was up to stop-the-spread “contact tracing”, real-time “fact-checking” my private messages, arresting people for facebook posts, and transing your kids.
Now that the red pedophiles are in charge instead of the blue ones, he changes his tune.
But only if it isn't Republicans, right? The Biden administration sure loved partnering with private tech companies to censor and monitor Americans to fight imaginary bogeymen like those darned evil white people who want their own nation like everyone else! (gasp!)
the problem is Capitalism does not need Democracy to function or survive
many countries like Singapore, etc. prove this easily
Authoritarianism can even be desired by Capitalists if they know who to bribe to remove regulations and get approvals
and no surprise, that's exactly where the United States is right now, teetering on the edge of that hole, about to fall in
"AI" is going to be weaponized, already is, and any resistance against its abuse is simply overriden with threats to destroy profits or even company survival at all
> many countries like Singapore, etc. prove this easily
Economic freedom is a necessary but not sufficient condition for political freedom.
well, be glad it's company survival and not personal survival yet. We had that article about the men with guns in egypt recently too
There is some sort of "nerd naivete" that they are the ones with power to control those things.
If you're a nerd developing open source (not an insult; I'm in that category), our job is to develop effective technology.
If you want to do politics, go into law and/or politics (or into business, so you can fund/control politics).
>"But software which OpenBSD uses and redistributes must be free to all (be they people or companies), for any purpose they wish to use it, including modification, use, peeing on, or even integration into baby mulching machines or atomic bombs to be dropped on Australia. " -- Theo De Raadt
Your taxes are building police state for you.
What's the recourse here?
What is the point of writing something like this?
It's embarassing for an adult to think like this. There will always be someone willing to build that thing (and that was true even before llms)
> There will always be someone willing to build that thing
… with sufficient time and money. As opposed to the minimal time and money required if the baddies are just pulling an existing solution off the shelf.
I hope you are joking, or haven't thought this through! If you sincerely believe and act on what you're saying here, you should be shunned from polite society.
He's not joking, he's tacitly asking for peace of mind from his peers :)
Well, there are quite a few frames to think about. What about the unintended consequences of building something for a worldview at the time? Then the next generation of stewards take over, do not have the same understanding of the problem the system solved and different ideas on how to use the system. That's definitely something worth writing about. Stewardship in software is a real and common aspect of the greater system we all live in, and has unknown consequences with each generation that takes over. When you step in as a gen-1 builder, you should probably consider what it is you are about to build.
Just because someone is willing to build it doesn't mean it has to be you.
We may all play some part in societies that have some degree of monstrous outcomes, but I feel like staying on the "tragic civilian casualty" side versus the "legitimate target" side of a freedom fighter's bombing campaign is probably the way to go.
It's not about someone willing or not, it's about you, an ostensibly grown adult who should think in terms of your own responsibilities instead of others'.
“Someone else will build it anyway, might as well be me.” I don’t think embarrassment lies at the feet of OP.
What's embarrassing about it?
Speaking of embarrassing, your argument is an argument against having any professional ethics whatsoever.
It's embarassing for an adult to think like this.
Joe's gonna die anyway. I might as well kill him before someone else does.
It's embarassing for an adult to think like this.
Terrible argument. You can say ”why not work as a concentration camp guard? There will always be someone willing to do it so you might as well cash in”
At Nuremberg, they all were just doing their job and executed their orders, those eager beavers of men.
People cite Flock as an example of this. Yet the same people walk around with iPhones and Android devices that can record conversations (who talks to whom at what times and for how long), know our exact locations and log everything we do online.
If I had told you 30 years ago that we are going to build a surveillance network and make the people we are tracking pay for it all you would have laughed me out of the room. But that is what we have built. The modern Smart Phone.
Now we use our iPhones to complain about cameras on public roads as if they are watching us.
Smart phones are opt-in technology. Flock is not.
Very flawed argument, anyone can go for a walk without their phone on them and have a conversation, nobody would ask them why they don't have their phone on them.
I know it is not a popular opinion. But it is my opinion.
Do you seriously think that governments need Flock cameras when they have Apple, Microsoft and Google?
Ostensibly they need a warrant to get that data from Apple/Google whereas they have a direct line to Flock data cause that's how that relationship works
The government needs a warrant to access Apple/Google/Microsoft's data.
Governments don't need flock or AMG, that's where the flaw in your argument begins.