Yoshua Bengio Worries About China's Use of AI(bloomberg.com) |
Yoshua Bengio Worries About China's Use of AI(bloomberg.com) |
At least here in the US, we are following europe and china in less freedom, greater government control and stronger centralized power/data/etc. I doubt canada is any better in this regard.
So where does he see government stepping in when it's in the government's self-interest and it's in the self-interest of the elite s to centralize even further and continue to accumulate wealth/power?
Anyway, I think that's what techies have not outlined sufficiently. We need some clearly aggrieved class. Slaves for instance. No one had to write extremely complex explanations of how slaves might have been aggrieved. The government stepped in, and when they did it wasn't pretty. A more contemporary example that involved the tech companies were the revenge porn victims. No one had to explain in all these overly technical terms how revenge porn victims were aggrieved. Government stepped in, and they brought the hammer. A lot of people sitting in prison now for revenge porn and a lot more on their way.
That's what we need, a way to explain that everyone is hurt without writing out some doctoral thesis on economics that sounds like the Unabomber's Manifesto. Like slavery or civil rights, it should be simple enough a concept that your average teacher and preacher can talk about it in plain english and have it make sense.
It's not really that we techies have bad ideas necessarily ... I mean, it might be that but that wouldn't matter anyway ... because the real problem is that we just don't present our ideas in a plain, clear manner that every one from the Chief Justice to the homeless guy can understand.
As for your revenge porn example, I agree that it was right for the government to step in. But the government and the elites had nothing to lose by stepping in. It was no skin off their backs. My point is how are we going to get change when it's in the government and the elites interest to stay the course?
People don't generate change. Elites do. It's been that way from the american revolution to the civil war to civil rights.
1984 by Orwell was required reading for me in school (if I remember correctly, at least I hope it was).
I think you are right about having a simple message but its also unlikely that government will support the distribution of that message.
One of the key focal points of the DoD's research is the identification of the topology of social networks and the flow of trust, information, and rumors. The topology and the chokepoints across it which information is distributed are leverage point where ideas can be contended, disrupted, replaced, challenged or seeded. Doing this at scale requires minimal human operation - only enough to convince the targetted population and narrative centers that the propaganda content is legitimate social traffic - and also information systems to infer microculture so that the information programming can be fit inside the moral, judgemental, human, religious and social (e.g. politeness) parameters from large quantities of communication surveillance.
Although Facebook and Google have some obvious problems with privacy, they also do a great service by open sourcing (with patent rights when using some of their open source deep learning projects) some tools that I really depend on for my work.
For the public commons, the public good, there is some strategy for leveraging open source and sharing data that respects privacy, and allows individuals and organizations to create valuable machine learning and AI applications. The are a lot of constraints: privacy, encouraging innovation, allowing fair profit from innovation without killing competition, etc.
In the past I found useful Lawrence Lessig‘s work on legal frameworks like the Creative Commons (I was the featured creative commoner for a few weeks, a long time ago; and, I have released all my recent books with a Creative Commons license even though I also sell copies). I think we need carefully thought out extensions to the Creative Commons licenses and ideas to cover data sharing to promote innovation and some room to earn a profit.
The same lesson applies here in terms of the nightmare of a surveillance that China is building out today: who is going to stop them? The people don't have the legal ability to do much about it, and have few individual rights, so there is almost no political or legal barrier here for China's government to do whatever it wants with its people. There is no real economic barrier any more because their economy is simply too large and, dare I say, diversified. There is no real technological barrier either on the hardware side or the software side, nor are the costs particularly prohibitive. China's neighbors are no real barrier either since they have little comparable military strength (short of US involvement and a general world war), and they all depend too much on China's economy anyway. And "the West" can't do much except scream and shout for much of the same reasons.
In short, there is really nothing that is stopping the Chinese government from rolling out the first, real, honest-to-god, 1984-style police surveillance state, and the potential capabilities are, frankly, terrifying. Those not involved in machine learning these days may not be able to appreciate it, but the tech is there for pretty much anything you can think of (as far as wide scale automated surveillance, tracking, etc. right down to the individual level at nearly every minute of the day at nearly any point in the country). It exists _already_, it's just a matter of investment capability and political will to make it happen, and China has both of those in spades.
We're talking surveillance of the individual via face tracking, but we're also talking about gait tracking, the tracking of facial expressions (and inference from there to emotion and thoughts), of eye tracking, picking up on little hesitations in body language, of the ability to tracking individuals vehicles, of tracking people as they enter a subway and then exit somewhere else entirely, of tracking of every financial transaction, of your network and cell usage, your power usage. Cameras, drones, and whatever else that will have the resolution to pick up on the text of what you're reading and carrying, of little patterns of evidence on your person. THe amount of enthusiasm you express at a political event or public sports event. Not just the content of your voice, but the tone, and what can be inferred from that. What you're reading, what you're clicking on, how long your mouse hovers over an image. And in all of these things, new inferences will be able to be made that weren't possible before, like estimates on your inner thought process, of intent, of you're long-term threat or lack thereof, all the things that you can currently hide away in private.
It's fucking crazy, and the tech for it, at least at the fundamental level, it's already here.
China will be the first state in history to actually pull off an actual 1984-style surveillance state, and to the detriment of every normal person there, and the eventual determinant to billions more once they start normalizing and exporting it.
As they profile everyone in China, can they do the same elsewhere?
The sheer amount of data, poorly protected, or just up for sale data out there in other countries make it seem like they could do the same for "everyone else" just to perhaps a lesser extent.
Perhaps a requirement for even doing business with China would be participating ....
They could probably even do it as a lease, and keep the most important stuff (key parts of algorithms, training datasets) at home--Surveillance As A Service!
ANd yes, if their economic continues to grow like this, your observation is a great one--there wouldn't be much stopping them from requiring participation in such leases as a condition on economic or military support.
Someday that may not be true. It's very likely the US eventually devolves into a real surveillance-police state of the type we are talking about here, but it is still quite a ways off. And, frankly, there is not much incentive for the US government to really push the envelope so long as the country is stable and rich. If that situation changes, then yeah, the US could devour itself from within in order to prop itself up, but again, that is quite a ways off.
For the Chinese government, none of these barriers exist. Hell, there is barely the concept of individuals rights in the first place.