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by dragonwriter 1992 days ago
> This is the exact situation in which facial recognition is very bad.

No, it's not.

> Imagine the stasi had it?

Yes, the problem there is the Stasi, not the technology. There is literally no technology that the Stasi having would be a good thing, including pen and paper. Or things so basic we don't tend to think of them as “technology”, like, say, language.
2 comments
_Understated_ 1992 days ago
> There is literally no technology that the Stasi having would be a good thing, including pen and paper.

Not sure I agree with that analogy... pen and paper doesn't scale!

Having the ability to do something at global scale, like facial recognition or real-time tracking and saying "Honest! We won't use it for dodgy things" is not sufficient...

It'd be naieve to say I'd rather it didn't exist, however that cat is out of the bag now so there _must_ be incredibly robust and tamper-proof checks and balances round its use and the penalties for subverting that should be incredibly severe.

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wpietri 1992 days ago
Pen and paper scaled fine for the Stasi. They operated for 4 decades: https://www.wired.com/2017/05/adrian-fish-the-stasi-archives...
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JustFinishedBSG 1992 days ago
Everything scale if you are evil enough. Even doing things manually, alone.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasily_Blokhin#Role_in_the_Kat...

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webmaven 1992 days ago
> Not sure I agree with that analogy... pen and paper doesn't scale!

Most of what the Stasi used didn't scale. They used it anyway.

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endominus 1992 days ago
The point being that the fundamental problem of a police state being the authority granted to the police, rather than the specific tools they use? I do wonder whether tools like this will cause some people to think twice before demonstrating against government policies in the future. AI has the potential to vastly exacerbate the chilling effect of various policies of authoritarians. It will be interesting to see how the next iteration of BLM reacts to these tools being used.
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hooande 1992 days ago
facial recognition tools and Clearview AI existed on Wednesday, when people invaded the capitol and then stood around taking selfies for an hour. It's possible that most of them had never heard of facial recognition or didn't realize that it could be used. But I'd be surprised if that were the case.

This technology is here, being used openly today. If has a chilling effect, where is it?

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