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Innovation

Dystopia Is Arriving in Stages

Dec 31, 2019 Alex Friedman

Science fiction has a warning about developing mind-reading technology without any proper framework for how to control it. It should be heeded.

NEW YORK – It is commonly believed that the future of humanity will one day be threatened by the rise of artificial intelligence (AI), perhaps embodied in malevolent robots. Yet as we enter the third decade of the millennium, it is not the singularity we should fear, but rather a much older enemy: ourselves.

Think less The Terminator, more Minority Report.

We are rapidly developing literal mind-reading technology without any framework for how to control it. Imagine, for a moment, if human beings had evolved to be able to read each other’s minds. How would that have gone for us?

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Michael Public Jan 3, 2020

You propose zero solutions other than regulation. Banning via regulation is not possible because of the nature of computer programming, being something far easier to implement at home than brewing moonshine in your back yard.

A better solution is counter technology. If Facebook are tracking your emotions enable people to track their own emotions. If Alexa is reading your mind, enable users to read their own minds. If CCTV is recognizing you, develop a face cream that confounds cameras.
- Prashant Kotak Jan 4, 2020
  
  This is exactly right. But it does imply perpetual arms races at various levels - national, corporate, individual, and a global mess of ungovernability.
  
  There is a parallel with nuclear technologies, less immediatly lethal this time, but much more accessible. When nukes were first created in the 40s, the great fear was proliferation - every tinpot would acquire them. Turned out, it wasn't that simple - the bar over which most countries couldn't jump was science and engineering. It requires high-end precision mechanics, device physics and electronics. It requires physicists and rocket scientists. Very few countries had the necessary scientific heft, so the nuclear divide persisted, right to the early 2000s. That natural check on nuclear tech, and the fact that the US (rather than the nazis or the bolsheviks) got to nukes first, was pure luck, but people don't see it that way. These natural checks don't exist with cutting code - anyone can do it, all you need is a laptop, the brains, and the will. Virtually everything else is available for free - training resources, compilers, dev tools, the lot.
  
  In 1905, Einstein published his series of papers that ignited the nuclear age. In under four decades, the US had a working A-bomb. There are a number of implied lines of future developments from this story, too complicated to discuss in detail here, that people are simply ignoring, even if they have an inkling about them. The shocking thing is that Einstein was essentially a lone individual, no stellar academic background, who produced his masterwork as a pure construction of symbols, working in his spare time - no high tech labs, no huge teams of high quality colleagues, no access to the endless corporate money-well. People outside tech don't fully understand this, but programming creates *precisely* the same opportunity. Of course the same is available to nations and to corporations - in spades. But the next Einstein (or next small obscure team) who creates the next algorithmic biggie, be it in, natural language processing, artificial life, ai, genetic modelling, or a means to hack every computer anywhere, will be directly plugged into the core infrastructure of the entire world via the internet, and may have the potential to gain control of... *everything*.
  
  It is crystal clear - tech regulation, policing, governability - a complete mirage.
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