What? Existential in that it could literally end our species? Nuclear war and climate change sure, but info collection? How is this not totally hyperbolic?
In my outrage, I admit to unconscious hyperbole. Substitute grave for existential. But the point remains that if we succumb to this, humanity will be unrecognizable in 3 generations. Perhaps in some way that counts as an existential threat?
It's hard to see why this particular thing is going to make any bigger change than those that have happened over the last 3 generations. Or those to come from other reasons: bio-engineering, implants, VR, AI etc.
Also, I'm unclear why you seem to assume this change is bad?
One concern is that it is a cleave plane between the haves and the have-nots---in this case, the haves are "Those with nothing to hide."
In a future where these technologies are ubiquitous, the person who has to go off the grid for perfectly sane reasons---domestic abuse, witness protection, leaving behind a past that makes one a pariah---will find it that much more difficult. Not only will they no longer have access to the convenience of services that have tuned around their interests and desires---address books that know their work and home, voice recognition that knows what they sound like, personal assistants that can pull useful / valuable information out of the soup of the Internet and surface it to their benefit, etc.---the lack of these technologies in someone's presence will mark them as someone "with a past."
There's the potential that people will look at you a little funny in the future if you have a smartphone with voice recognition disabled, or you're always typing in addresses by hand to a self-driving car because it doesn't just know where you want to go today based on past habits.
I grew up without a TV, and people looked at me funny.
I think the domestic abuse thing is bad, and I know Google has been burnt by that once before. But they fixed it once, and I'm not sure that it is something that is unfixable for any substantial reason.
Some people have always rejected technology, for both good and bad reasons. One can usually think of some very compelling case why a particular piece of technology is bad.
That still doesn't mean that the change is bad overall (indeed, the things the person is missing out on sound very useful). And nothing comes close to making it a "grave threat to humanity", or - like I said - a bigger change than something like implants, let alone CRISPR or AI.
There's the potential that people will look at you a little funny in the future if...
I'd say "potential" is being charitable at this point. We're now in a world where prospective employers have been demanding access to candidates' social network profiles. We're now in a world where national governments seriously propose requiring anyone visiting their country to disclose all of their social network profiles in advance. Privacy-minded individuals have objected strongly to these kinds of practices, not least because of the inferences that might be drawn if someone didn't provide such details (honestly or otherwise).
I see this beyond the issue of tracking. It is one of relentless collection of data. Google is a private company, even if it were a government, it has no right to all that personal data. It collects it because it can.
With a little imagination it can become clear that so much data cannot be a good thing. Can the information be used to repress political opposition? Can it be used to enforce an agenda of say eugenics? Can a business be given undue advantage by promoting its "recommendations"? Can minorities and their views be suppressed?
In a few years with the maturing of AI to fine-tune the processes we will all think alike,behave alike, conform alike, to the wishes of our overlords who know who we are, where we are, what we eat,what illnesses we have who we f..k, what religion we practice, what books we read, and so on ...
In a few years with the maturing of AI to fine-tune the processes we will all think alike,behave alike, conform alike, to the wishes of our overlords who know who we are, where we are, what we eat,what illnesses we have who we f..k, what religion we practice, what books we read, and so on
On one hand we have people claiming that filter bubbles lead to the collapse of civilization, and on the other we have that the same services will lead to conformity.
Based on current trends, it seems like the filter bubble problem is winning. So maybe an all-knowing AI Google would be what saves us? ;)
The alternative view of course is that there won't be one AI, there will be many. And they will compete to please people more so people are more likely to use their services.
If you want to go hyperbolic again, Brave New World is how it ends. Personally, I'm more than happy to trade information for services that work well.
Not the OP, but the central idea is 'Information is Power'. It has existed for a long time in the books of all the powerful people and is essential to the very fabric of our universe (not hyperbole; information, entropy, debates about conservation/loss of information instead of mass inside blackholes [0] and such).
Once you have all the relevant information about someone or some system, then you essentially control them. If I know everything about you, how can you ever hope to have an even footing with me?
This is a good point. But Google's services make a person a more powerful agent compared to others: one can navigate quicker, find better services and access information faster and more accurately.
So yes, there is a trade off. But humans have been making trade-offs forever - civilization itself is one big compromise. Domesticating cattle meant human could not move as quickly and as fast as they used to. But they lived better and longer.
I don't see why information trade-offs are somehow different.
> This is a good point. But Google's services make a person a more powerful agent compared to others: one can navigate quicker, find better services and access information faster and more accurately.
Google could provide most of those services without tracking individuals.
> I don't see why information trade-offs are somehow different.
Because it is about power. We, as humanity, have plenty of experience with power trade-offs. We have so much experience with it that we have names for structures with centralized power, like "monarchy" and "dictatorship". Our experience with those trade-offs hasn't been particularly good. Maybe we should learn something from that.
> I'm unclear why you seem to assume this change is bad?
I guess the idea is to stop assuming you know what the data will be used for. My office manager bought a book then several months later took a trip to NYC. She was pulled into a room and interviewed about it before they let her go, specifically mentioning the book, why she bought it, and asking why she was traveling to NYC.
Is this unreasonable use of data capture? I dunno. Seems okay, right? But it is an example of threat-assessment based on you bought a book. What if you instead had access to every email/text/web-search/webpage-i-have-accessed ever? Not to mention purchases. Of course credit cards are the same way.
Surely posting THIS thread is just as threat-indicating as buying a book, and even more telling because you have my words to back up your assertions. Ought I not have posted this HN post? Will it come back to haunt me? Computers don't forget. They'll never let me forget this post, or any other, and use it as justification for my future actions.
Examples only seem to weaken privacy conversations, since one inevitably internalizes "how likely am I to be caught by that?", but here goes anyway:
I don't feel like these things are shocking, hard-to-execute, or so fabulously ficticious that one ought eye-roll at it. They're simply what any moral-less entity would do to stay alive/in-power/in-control.
The capture of the data is only slightly offensive to me (my library knows a lot about what I like to read, too). Using it to hassle me when traveling is much more odious, in my mind mainly because there absolutely isn't any kind of data showing that "people who read title X were 10% (or even 1%) more likely to commit some atrocity." That's just nonsensical. So yes, technically easy to implement, but why?
If someone did brain surgery on you to turn you into a bundle of delusions (or insert something similar here, plausible or not), would "you", as you currently cherish "you", still exist? It's not like any of our body tissues are terribly inspiring or important in the great scheme of things. It's rather the things that are directly threatened, our ability to think on our own, to be a person. Physical destruction? Meh, doesn't upset me, not in light of the heat death of the universe. A sane humanity getting destroyed by a comet would be more dignified than our current outlook.
An unexamined life isn't worth anything, and an examined life is not compatible with where we are currently heading. Imagine that story of the naked emperor without that child. For me that's like some kind of event horizon -- if everybody fell for it, and stayed stuck to it, there is no story there, no history, no people in it, nothing going on. There isn't even a "there" there, if there is no hope of it ever changing.
Changes to information regimes do have profound effects. Their consequences are quite difficult to predict, and not necessarily good or evil, though that depends on deeper issues as well.
The emergence of the printing press and spread of knowledge, both official doctrine (the Bible), literature (Cervantes' Don Quixote was the first modern novel), ideas (Montaigne's Essays), scientific thoughts (Copernicus and Gallileo), and many, many pamphlets, shocked Europe for the next several hundred years. Keep in mind that a copy of Gutenberg's Bible, new, was the equivalent of about $4,500 based on one recent estimate I've seen -- expensive by modern standards, but previous, hand-written copies of books were the equivalent of handcrafted meticulous art-pieces. A scribe might be able to complete one or two books per year, and had to be fed, housed, clothed, etc., for this, as well as educated. Producing the vellum, inks, quills, etc., used, and candles (for any work beyond daylight hours) also has to be factored in. See: http://history.stackexchange.com/questions/21161/how-long-di...
With the dawning of the industrial age in the early 1800s, mass literacy became a thing. In England, literacy rose from ~40% to near 90% over the course of the 19th century, through publicly-subsidised education, required for the new, highly-skilled factory jobs. Paper became cheap, and presses faster (a few thousand sheets per hour), enabling yet more dissemination of information. Among the consequences, mass movements of the public, independent of demagogues, pressing claims, including the Chartalist movement in the 1820s - 1830s in England, and the Year of Revolutions, 1848, throughout Europe and Central and South America, in which 50 nations saw substantial rebellions.
The early 20th century saw loudhailers, which enabled the voice of one person to reach the assembled ears of tens or hundreds of thousands of people at once. Transport (busses and trains) could assemble them. Radio allowed a single voice to reach, instantly, an entire nation at one time. And declining printing costs allowed single books or manifestos to be distributed en masss (Mein Kampf, Mao's Little Red Book, The Road to Serfdom, etc.), often subsidised by a propagandist. The rise of fascism in Italy and Germany, and World War II, were a partial result, as was the spread of Maoist-Leninist Communism throughout China -- a difficult region to unify otherwise.
Television and mass advertising gave rise to live televised debates and speeches. Kennedy beat out Nixon in 1960 in large part due to the former's far better visual appeal on black-and-white television. Castro could keep all of Cuba tuned in to hours-long diatribes. Vietnam was litigated as much on American (now colour) televisions as in the jungles and rice paddies of south-east Asia. American technical competence was proved in real time via the Apollo Moon landings, and impeached by the Challenger explosion.
The corporatisation and commercialisation of media beginning in the late 1970s, but accellerating in the 1980s and 1990s, cheapened the product, silenced dissenters (particularly Noam Chomsky, though many others -- who've had little if any voice on either commercial or noncommercial television or radio), and enabled first right-wing talk radio, in part an outgrowth of what had long been a rural Christian revivalist movement in the US, then CNN's live, 24/7 cable news, and Fox.
The Internet gave voice to the voiceless, but more voice to the already empowered. Most particularly those who could act with impunity. Distortion, especially of political and economic discussion, from monied interests, Russia, China, Israel, and numerous fringe, crank, and terrorist groups, is manifest -- these are organisations which don't and won't play by the usual rules. Eyeballs-driven, advertising-supported Interent sites only feed this dynamic, one of the more substantive criticisms of an ad-based Internet I think can be made.
Francis Bacon gave us the phrase "knowledge is power" (actually "scientia potentia est"). With due respect, I believe the gentleman wrong: knowledge is a power multiplier. It amplifies the existing power differentials amongst parties.
It's also true that the ruling elite and popular movements have differing constitutions, capabilities, and weakensses. The former have organisation, capability, assets, and control, but suffer from vulnerability. The latter have resilience and adaptability, but little by way of organisation or even common interest. It's interesting to note that the idea of a popular revolution is a quite modern concept, dating largely to the 19th century. Previously, regime change was far more a matter of one oligarchy displacing another, though manipulations of mass sentiments might play a role.
For references: Edward Bernays (and Adam Curtis's The Century of the Self), Plato, William Ophuls, Marshall McLuhan, Jerry Mander, John Kenneth Galbraith, Joseph Nye, Neil Postman, Noam Chomsky, and of course, many others.