As sad as it undoubtedly sounds (and as if we're already saying goodbye to the utopia), I think this choice might be wiser than we initially thought.
Consider the implications of AI knowing everything about you, even down to your biometric behavior. Think about the threat of disinformation campaigns targeting democracies.
I know my stance may seem weak in terms of ideals, and I feel a bitter regret toward my former self.
But shouldn’t we, as humans, try to honor our shared values and act accordingly?
I am aware that a single hosting company won't do anything regarding those considerations, but ... anyways. I feel sorry for writing those sentences and sharing my doubts.
You may be right and I beg a pardon for my words then.
I still have to dig the current law proposal (my shame).
The conclusion I came to a few years ago is that anonymity in Switzerland is not something useful. Switzerland is not a police state, it mainly copes up with trying to get its citizens to being responsible. Whenever you make something wrong IRL, you have to assume the consequences. Same with online. I concur that my words are messed up.
> try to honor our shared values and act accordingly
What "shared values"? Most of the values people hold as "important" has people on the other side with the opposite values, and both of those are "correct".
There are no "shared values" that all humans agreed upon.
Seems like a not difficult and quite worthwhile exercise to come up with at least one or two values that are so basic and fundamental that everyone could share them. Maybe that's what OP is talking about. Why be obtuse about shared values?
Because historically it has never been done. The closest we got is when a group (religious or political) finds something most people somewhat agree with, declares it a universal value and proceeds to suppress, drive away or eliminate those evil people who do not share it.
It is much better to define acceptable boundaries on actions and let people believe what they want if their actions do not violate those agreed on boundaries.
Switzerland is the oldest democracy in the world. Your comment certainly doesn't fit the way this country handles its citizens. There is the Law, the "what is tolerated" and what isn't. That's the "boundaries on actions".
But any malicious mind won't bow down to those intentional principles.
People absolutely heed laws that they find personally inconvenient but are afraid of the penalties (parking restrictions, paying taxes, loud music and that is not even stepping into hot button topics).
The reason Swiss stayed democratic is likely not because they share universal, similarly understood values, but because they feel that their system that only defines acceptable norms is working okay as is.
I don’t believe that Switzerland is the oldest democracy in the world, but I could be mistaken. Iceland has had a democratic-ish parliament since the 900s[0].
> to come up with at least one or two values that are so basic and fundamental that everyone could share them
Please do try this, I've tried it in the past, and always been able to come up with counter-examples to whatever I came up with. It's surprisingly hard.
"Always be kind" is one example that for me should obviously be shared with everyone, but it's almost disgustingly easily to come up with whole cultures or countries where this is actively seen as a "bad thing" because of reason X and Y, or has to have exceptions because of Z.
In practice there are always exceptions to everything. You don't be kind to murderers, for instance.
Kindness isn't really a value, though.
Shared values are simply things that people decide are important for a society to function as well as possible. Respect for human life and dignity, for example. Good thing right? How many mental gymnastics does somebody have to go through to find some exception to that?
Tell you what though, if I come across somebody who says that they don't respect human life and dignity, I am absolutely going to avoid that person and shun them from any kind of society that I am a part of.
Why not? I think everyone deserves kindness, and I'm not alone in thinking that.
So even something that for me is obvious, it isn't as obvious for everyone.
> Respect for human life and dignity, for example
It's very generic, and subjective, which again leads me to believe not everyone would agree on what it means.
For example, does "respect for human life" mean you should let people live where they currently live, if they and their family lived there for 100 years say? Lots of Israeli settlers would disagree with that, but for me that would be a sign that someone doesn't have "respect for human life".
> if I come across somebody who says that they don't respect human life and dignity
Of course everyone will say "Yeah, of course I do!", but where the rubber meets the dirt is how people define that. Not being kind to people who made mistakes for example, wouldn't be "respecting human life" for me, but you might disagree, as you think we shouldn't be kind to people who committed murders, but you would still claim you "respect human life".
This is suddenly a too-online conversation. Please do go be always kind to murderers. Society is definitely better off without anybody agreeing to value respect for human life and dignity -- just so generic and subjective! Too hard to get anybody to agree on what that even means!
Sharing is not agreeing. I can share values with someone I don't agree with. Switzerland has shared values for instance, it is a country build upon that principle. I bet every society has some. Humans too.
All people or most? If most, where is the threshold (0.1%, 1%, 10%?) for those whose values we can ignore and what should we do with those pesky people who do not share otherwise common values?
Those are great words. The problems start when we try turning those into actionable definitions. That is, defining what kind of freedom citizens have and when the government starts putting pressure on those who step outside those definitions.
Sure, lots of countries agree with this. But bunch of countries still have "death penalty", even one that is usually heralded as the "Savior of the West" still has judicial murders.
Besides, if everyone agreed "murder is bad" we wouldn't have wars, so obviously not everyone agrees with that.
> Stealing is bad?
This I don't even agree with 100%, depends on the context. You're starving while someone else is hoarding food for themselves for no particular reason? Totally justifiable to steal food from them to survive.
War argument kind of fits with this one too, clearly not everyone agrees stealing is bad.
> Consider the implications of AI knowing everything about you, even down to your biometric behavior. Think about the threat of disinformation campaigns targeting democracies. I know my stance may seem weak in terms of ideals, and I feel a bitter regret toward my former self. But shouldn’t we, as humans, try to honor our shared values and act accordingly?
I don't understand this train of thought, what exactly are you saying?
I can interpret it as "it's wise to end online anonymity and feed all personal information (including biometrics) to AIs to enforce social rules" which is, frankly, an absurd proposal even if you are extremely naïve, not even considering one single negative aspect of the loss of all privacy, being managed by a machine in a societal level.
Or I can try to interpret it as feeding all of this into AIs create insurmountable threats, to democracy, to the individual, etc. which is somewhat what I'd expect to logically follow from feeding all this personal data into AI models.
But none of these interpretations are actually possible for me to land at based on what and how you wrote, I can't make sense of it.
What I was trying to say is that simply being on the internet today — using AIs, corporate networks, and so on — almost certainly exposes your most personal and unique information (the kind of data that reveals your very identity) to the entities operating those systems.
Sadly, I was implying that anonymity is becoming an obsolete concept. Then I tried to think of a law that could help the Swiss government track down malicious individuals, and I wondered whether that could actually serve as something beneficial — a way to protect people and their freedom.
I'm in complete agreement with you, I first got scared with the potential for profiling individuals through data collection over time some 15 years ago. I was working on a very small project from a startup, related to football/soccer, where we collected behavioural and sentiment data from football fans over time, in our service and around social media (mostly Twitter at the time), and had a first glimpse on what could be inferred about individuals just based on very public datapoints they'd produce.
That project opened my eyes, and the paranoia it created in me never really went away, it's a constant thought in my mind about how much data I'm generating for massive companies creating very accurate profiles of who I am: what I like and dislike, what I access, where I am, what I'm doing where I am, every single time I click on a link, a video, etc. I feel a little dread that I provided even more information about myself to machines programmed to crunch through all of this and materialise a view of who I am as a person. Right now it's mostly to serve me ads but the potential that absurd amount of information gathering has in the wrong hands truly terrify me.
The worst part is that there's almost no escape living a contemporary lifestyle, the only way is to engage with anything digital in very, very cautious ways, trying to cover every single trace and track you might leave behind while interacting with any digital product, and that is simply exhausting.
>> Right now it's mostly to serve me ads but the potential that absurd amount of information gathering has in the wrong hands truly terrify me.
Unfortunately, it was already used to influence voters with specific psychological settings. And it worked so well that it gave me chills on how fragile we are.
Anyways, I need to dig out the law proposal because it surely is more aimed at protecting citizens than ripping their souls for the "government" (which almost doesn't make sense for a country like Switzerland).
'You are being watched. The government has a secret system, a system you asked for, to keep you safe. A machine that spies on you every hour of every day. You've granted it the power to see everything, to index, order and control the lives of ordinary people. The government considers these people irrelevant. We don't. But to it, you are all irrelevant. Victim or perpetrator, if you stand in it's way we'll find you.'
If I stand in the way of letting everyone live in peace and with dignity? For sure, I'd better be OK with the "government" (you don't know Switzerland, do you?) finding me.
