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“Go ahead and imagine that you have privacy, if it makes you feel better.”

a_majoor

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Not entirely clear where this should go, so if the Mods have a better place for it, then be my guest.

https://mythaxis.com/2020/10/28/stupefying-stories-an-interview-with-bruce-bethke/

CM: Going back to Alex Garland, and apologies for the clunkiness of this connection, but I recently watched his television series about a supercomputer being able to predict the future based on deterministic algorithms. In your ‘day job’ you work as a developer of supercomputer software. Any cool (or scary) ideas of what further supercomputer development could lead to?

BB: Most people misunderstand how supercomputers work and what supercomputers really do. We hit peak CPU speed about 15 years ago. More processing speed equals greater power consumption equals formidable heat dissipation problems, so unless there’s some kind of radical breakthrough in processor technology—quantum processing has been coming “next year” for as long as I’ve been in the industry; I’m not holding my breath—the way we increase computer power now is by building ever more massively parallel processor architectures.

The result is that the majority of the work being done on supercomputer systems now is just plain old computational fluid dynamics. Admittedly, we’re talking here about crunching through data sets measured in petabytes or exabytes, but deep down, it’s still just engineering. You may think it’s a dead language, but most of these programs are written in Fortran. While Fortran 2018 ain’t your grandaddy’s Fortran, it’s still Fortran.

There is interesting work being done in artificial intelligence and machine learning on supercomputers now, but it’s more in line with pattern recognition and data mining. For now, most AI work doesn’t need the kind of brute force a modern supercomputer brings to the table.

Ergo, for me, the most frightening possibilities are those that involve the misuse by unscrupulous politicians or corporations of the kinds of insights and inferences that can be drawn from such extensive data mining. The things that are being done right now, and that will be coming online in the next few years, should scare the Hell out of any civil libertarian.

AIs on their own seem to be best at finding flaws in their developer’s assumptions. I’ve seen AIs tasked with solving problems come up with hilariously unworkable solutions, because their developers made assumptions based on physical realities that did not apply in the virtual world in which the AI worked.

CM: Could you elaborate on your comments about data mining?

BB: Sure. What we’re talking about here is a field generally called “big data”. It’s the science of extracting presumably meaningful information from the enormous amount of data that’s being collected—well, everywhere, all the time. “Big data” tries to take information from disparate sources—structured and unstructured databases, credit bureaus, utility records, “the cloud”, pretty much everything—then mashes it together, finds coherences and correlations, and then tries to turn it into meaningful and actionable intelligence—for who? To do what with it? Those are the questions.

For just a small example: do you really want an AI bot to report to your medical clinic—or worse, to make medical treatment decisions—based on your credit card and cell phone dutifully reporting exactly when and for how long you were in the pub and exactly what you ate and drank? Or how about having it phone the Police, if you pay for a few pints and then get into the driver’s seat of your car?

That’s coming. As a fellow I met from a government agency whose name or even acronym I am forbidden to say out loud said, “Go ahead and imagine that you have privacy, if it makes you feel better.”
 
A lot of people still use cash, so you can track them, but not what they buy. A lot of the cash and barter economy does not show up, as the people who choose that, do not want it to. Mainly to avoid tax, although for nefarious reasons as well. Immigrants of Persians and East Indians descent are very cash oriented.
 
Nothing is ever 100%, of course, but I can imagine the justification of deep data mining being to ferret out cash transactions and the barter economy for "tax collection" purposes. A simple and non AI enabled example is criminals using pizza joints as a front to launder cash - the investigator compares things like purchase orders (how much pizza dough was bought) to sales receipts. If there is a considerable mismatch of sales to the amount of pizza that could reasonably be made from the stated purchases, then it is time to dig deeper.

Similar efforts have been made to understand Chinese economic statistics - it has been stated in numerous places that imports of things like iron ore and coal do not square with reported outcomes like steel production. Now these types of analysis depend on just a few variables - what happens when hundreds or even thousands of variables can be reliably tracked and collated?
 
I like that line - go ahead and imagine that you have privacy, if it makes you feel better.  Exactly what I think every time they complain about cameras everywhere, internet sites tracing, etc as an invasion of privacy.  I also wonder how they think when they are in a public place that they have privacy???
 
Try asking people where their electricity and water comes from, where their poop goes or the drainage off their house/apartment, most will have no clue from where or how it gets from point A to B. For them to understand the lack of privacy is likely to much.
 
CountDC said:
I like that line - go ahead and imagine that you have privacy, if it makes you feel better.  Exactly what I think every time they complain about cameras everywhere, internet sites tracing, etc as an invasion of privacy.  I also wonder how they think when they are in a public place that they have privacy???

The issue isn't so much being in public, but the steady intrusion into your own homes, the use of personal devices sharing data without (generally) your knowledge and informed consent and the use of "Big Data" to bring in information from disparate sources. There used to be an expectation that you were secure in your own house, but no more.

The other aspect is since you have no idea which information sources are being used  or where it is going or how it is being used (your picture taken by someone else and posted on a third person's social media site still provides information about you - who is scraping it and where is it going?), you have little or no control. Decisions could be being made about you for reasons you cannot understand, and have no practical means of appealing.
 
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