This is why keeping our governments from eating that tasty apple of "if you can record AND analyse everything there will be so much less crime" and "just give us keys to all private communication, we swear we will just use it to find bad guys". Because someone will, and someone will use it to hit on people they don't like
I was watching a crime solving show from the UK. A huge percentage of the crimes are solved using camera footage. Also, they use geofencing, looking at which phones went in and out of the crime location at the time of the crime.
I would be surprised if this hasn't existed for a few decades already.
Back in 2009 I was working at a place where O2 was a client, and they gave us an API that could identify the cell tower (inc. lat/lng) any of their customers were connected to. The network needs to track this data internally to function, so the API is basically the equivalent of their DNS.
This tech would be a massive waste of computational resources to do that. Technology for what you said is way more efficient and has been working well for years now.
How do you think this tech was developed in the first place? It's probably trained and used in the surveillance bid for a decade before it comes to consumers, and this probably isn't the SoA stuff that governments have access to, we're probably 5-10 years behind what's on the cutting edge.
I wouldn’t bet. IT innovation used to be lead by the defence industry, but that has changed and now consumer technology is driving the innovation from what I have been told.
I’m sure they have some cool secret stuff, but they are perhaps not 10 years ahead. Also, I find unlikely that those secrets wouldn’t make it to the public society now, as we are probably close the top of the AI bubble.
Big Brother is a reference to George Orwell's critique of Communism in Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Qwen is a video model trained by a Communist government, or technically by a company with very close ties to the Chinese government. The Chinese government also has laws requiring AI be used to further the political goals of China in particular and authoritarian socialism in general.
In the light of all this, I think it's reasonable to conclude that this technology will be used for Big Brother type surveillance and quite possible that it was created explicitly for that purpose.
Just nitpicking here, but 1984 is a critique of totalitarianism. The only references to systems of government in the book refer to "The German Nazis and the
Russian Communists".
Orwell was a democratic socialist. He was opposed to totalitarian politics, not communism per se.
It's true that it's about totalitarianism to some extent. But we have Orwell's actual words here that it's chiefly about communism
> [Nineteen Eighty-Four] was based chiefly on communism, because that is the dominant form of totalitarianism, but I was trying chiefly to imagine what communism would be like if it were firmly rooted in the English speaking countries, and was no longer a mere extension of the Russian Foreign Office.
And of course Animal Farm is only about communism (as opposed to communism + fascism). And the lesser known Homage to Catalonia depicts the communist suppression of other socialist groups.
By all this I just mean to say when you're reading Nineteen Eighty-Four what he's describing is barely a fictionalization of what was already going on in the Soviet Union. There's just not a lot in the book that is specifically Nazi or Fascist.
I don't have any opinion on whether he thought there were non-totalitarian forms of communism.
I think that Orwell understood his own people much more than Russians, so it might be useful, while reading him, to take a look at the mirror as well..
