Especially since all the above is designed as additive tech which uses a lot of brain hacks: Infinite scrolling, dopamine maximization, "check for new messages!" and so on.
How do you reduce your consumption of addictive stuff, in the easiest way? You quit, full stop.
It is the same as if you want to quit smoking, or as if you realize that you are drinking four cans of beer each summer evening and realize this is not good for you. It is far easier to quit, and decide what to do instead, than to "reduce".
> The UK's proposal makes the "digital ID" a pointer to an entry in a centralized database.
Very similar to the "EU settlement scheme" which would gave EU citizens which had work and settled in the UK pre-Brexit after a very lengthy and non-deterministic application process the right to stay without any paper document to prove that they actually got that right. Just a database entry on a government computer. Too bad if an extreme right-wing goverment came to power and something happened to that database.
A digital ID requires essentially a digital signature running on a secure device (for example, a smart card).
Thus it implements public key cryptocraphy. Which makes confidentiality and integrity of computing two inseparable sides of the same medal.
You simply cannot break confidentiality of communication without practically breaking integrity of digital signatures at the same time. (Otherwise, a user, for example could generate a fresh random public key, sign it with their digital id, and send it to any communications partner).
Breaking this in turn means that the government can sign on behalf of you, without your knowledge.
Human communication is based on symbols and whatever the means are to transport these symbols, cannot work without trust.
> I’m sure it’s not even deliberately dismantling privacy. They’re doing it blindly.
That is often a variant of Hanlor's razor brought up on questions like this. How do certain actors turn reliably to a course of action that is so damaging - but to any expert or even rational mind seems stupid! That can't be what they want?!
I do not think that this reasoning holds.
Hannah Arendt, when writing about totalitarism, came to the conclusion that there is a kind of complicity between evil and thoughtlessness. (I am still trying to find her exact words on this.)
I know this is 4 days past, but wanted to let you know I recently stumbled upon Hanna Arendt's work while working on a video Essay for the TV series andor and man what a eye opener it is about these subjects. I havent read the book yet, but I listed to the youtube writing group talk on it from https://hac.bard.edu/
Consider how much space you do need ahead for safe travel as a pedestrian, on a bicycle, on an interstate highway in a car, or on a plane taking off at an airport, and you have the answer.
Cars already require a ridiculous amount of space for safety. I live in Germany and there are cities with 200,000 inhabitants that are smaller in area than a single highway intersection.
The argument is like it is unethical to lock my front door because this also stops people which genuinely only want to enter to have a look at my living room.
just like signs such as no trespassing: active shooting range; or apiary[bee] yard; or open shaft mines, means that exactly, and in my region, signage is sufficient no gate or fence required.
every so often someone thinks they are too important for that to apply and they find out the signage is no joke when they encounter the target line, and backstop being hit from somewhere uprange; or violate the space of a bee hive; or fall into a shaft. some even have the nerve to complain this is a threat.
robots.txt == no trespassing == stay out unless invited
What I think he is wrong with is that LLMs are, despite being named as "Artificial Intelligence", not intelligent
.
I guess that some people confound the source of information with its medium. A book might contain Newtons equation of motion, Gauss' works, Maxwell's equations, or an introduction of Einstein's theory of special relativity. But it is not the book that is intelligent, it is the people that wrote up the ideas.
You can see that confusion between the medium and authority by the holy scriptures of the large religions which were among the first human organizations that employed written words for their purposes - for example, muslim and Jewish people treat their respective foundational books as holy themselves.
With LLMs, it is clear that when you average the writing of many more or less intelligent people, the result might appear more or less intelligent. In the same way as common sense, sometimes, does make sense. But it is still not the medium that is intelligent, but the authors of the input.
But what the blog author is probably right about is persuasion by influencing communities which in turn influence individuals. That is exactly how Googles or Facebooks practices that violate privacy - like offering free emails accounts which use data from personal mails for advertising - became widely accepted even if it is clear they are not good for individuals.
I think that dimension of persuasion might be often overlooked when people, for example, think about the Cambridge Analytica scandal:
He never actually mentions LLMs once. It is explicitly a post about a hypothetical implicitly artificial being with 300 IQ that can communicate at 10,000x speed. LLMs are an interesting background to this as an illustration of how people might end up interacting with it, but no more.
The foundation of quantum physics being developed with plenty of hikes and walks outside is almost a science meme. These researchers took a lot of very productive breaks.
So what needs to happen to ban smartphone use while driving? I mean not "formally forbidden" but "thoroughly enforced".
Personally, I avoid phone use even as a pedestrian in busy city spaces - I think the time it takes to fully switch attention to be fully aware of things like a reckless driver running a red light is too long to not affect safety.
Every phone has sensors that can tell when they're being used in the car and how many other phones are near them. An increasing number of cars have cameras pointed directly at the driver and sensors that detect how many passengers are in the in vehicle. Thanks to our glorious surveillance state it's likely that all the data we need to detect people using their phones while driving is already being routinely collected.
In the Netherlands we have 'focus cameras' now that specifically detect smartphone use while driving, with hefty fines of €430. These cameras are mobile as well, so they get placed on different spots over time.
Too bad that the language we use is also a demonstration of social status. If I think about it, it could have a somewhat corrosive effect on that glue that keeps society in shape.
How do you reduce your consumption of addictive stuff, in the easiest way? You quit, full stop.
It is the same as if you want to quit smoking, or as if you realize that you are drinking four cans of beer each summer evening and realize this is not good for you. It is far easier to quit, and decide what to do instead, than to "reduce".
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