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by tclancy 2603 days ago
But if we make a world safe from these .000001% events, what do you think that will look like? I can only imagine a dystopian/ Orwellian society where we are all encouraged to report any suspicious behavior and everything becomes a race to the bottom, a Prisoner's Dilemma where I feel pressured to rat out my neighbor for _something_ before he does it to me.
1 comments

Who's asking everyone to report suspicious behaviour ? You have raised a _strawman_ argument. Automatic surveillance of public property and public spaces is in my opinion necessary for analysis, investigation and prosecution of terrorists. This must be done by career intelligence folks not by amateurs.
Pervasive surveillance will inevitably lead to machine learning techniques being used to analyse the data which will massively increase the rates of false positives, people who aren’t a threat but who the system flags as potential threats. Freedom and security trade off against one another.
Citation needed. You are making a strong statement about the inevitable future based on what? Sounds like evidence as strong as your claim would be worth some very interesting papers.
Have you been paying attention to anything regarding government surveillance in the past decade? NSA? Five Eyes? Governments are thirsty for any new tech that allows them to amass data fast about public behavior. There's startups that exist right now that use ML techniques to analyze security footage for bad actors. There was a Japanese one on the HN front page a couple days ago. This isn't a slippery slope argument, this shit is happening right now.
It isn't a strawman at all. The sold paranoia see something say something is very real.

Below I have linked real posters and not satire - unless their graphic designers are covertly revolting in protest.

https://p10.secure.hostingprod.com/@spyblog.org.uk/ssl/spook...