[foxyv]

It seems like a lot of tech is used to launder normally illegal activities.

Want to create an illegal taxi company? Just make it an app. Want to discriminate based on race? Hide it behind facial recognition and predictive policing. Collude for wage suppression? Create a wages database and "suggested wage" for HR. Want to copy other people's art but need to file off the serial numbers? Dali has your back. Copy other people's code without a license? AI is on it.

[culi]

The facial recognition one is particularly concerning and explicit. Police stations regularly reapprove contracts with systems that can be as high as 96% false positives. It gives police a scapegoat to do what they wanna do

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/06/detroit-police-c...

[cyanydeez]

sentencing guidelines are automated in some jurisdictions. they recommend based on historical data. so if you had a racist sheriff, guess who's getting longer sentences.

this stuff has been simmering before AI got branded.

it's definitely AI washing.

[foxyv]

Who cares if it has a 96% false positive if it looks good in front of the honorable Grant A. Warrant.

[alanbernstein]

Yes, it seems our legal infrastructure is not capable of keeping up with tech developments. Probably need to replace government with an app...

[paulmd]

Systems of government that bias towards inaction and stalemate, via excessive amounts of checks and balances and other deadlock-inducing mechanisms, are going to be less and less able to keep up with technology that is growing at an exponential rate. A system that biases towards zero change can’t keep up with a world in which the rate of change is rapidly accelerating.

You can even view the climate catastrophe etc and environmental contamination issues and other things as a manifestation of this. Our industrial scale has outpaced our system’s willingness to regulate, and agile corporate structures using this tech advance at a decidedly linear or exponential pace while the government agility trends towards zero.

It is better to have systems that bias towards someone being able to rule, and then we can work on making sure the system decides that someone in a fair way, rather than biasing towards gridlock unless every possible dimensionality of the population (as represented by the various branches and chambers of government) all absolutely 100% concur. Obviously it would be silly to require 100% concurrence, but if you require that five different dimensions of society all agree at 70% threshold then you have effectively required that level of agreement anyway. At some point this leads to social collapse.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberum_veto

Since the US has a unique geographic position which makes it effectively invulnerable this will take the form of internal rot, stagnation, and gridlock until a sufficient crisis pushes us over.

And really those are both just two sides of the same coin anyway, it is pretty obvious to me that over-biasing to inaction is just as dangerous as over-biasing to action in general, and especially inaction may be particularly dangerous as we move into a century where things are ever faster and the consequences are going to be very very real.

> Some say the world will end in fire, Some say in ice. From what I’ve tasted of desire I hold with those who favor fire.

> But if it had to perish twice, I think I know enough of hate, To say that for destruction ice Is also great. And would suffice.

[foxyv]

It's only a matter of time. We already have had judges writing rulings using ChatGPT... DOOM I SAY!

[mschuster91]

> Want to discriminate based on race? Hide it behind facial recognition and predictive policing.

Or gate employment on requiring college/high level academic degrees.

[nerpderp82]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legacy_preferences

[supportengineer]

I often see newly-posted job descriptions for exactly what I am doing now, and they state that a master's degree is required (which I don't have).

[csa]

> and they state that a master's degree is required

This most likely means that they have a surfeit of applicants and want to cull the herd, or that they aren’t serious about hiring (or at least about hiring someone who is actually qualified).

Very few jobs actually require the knowledge gained during an undergraduate degree, much less what is learned during a master's.

[foxyv]

Sorry, I'm going to need you to go back for your Post-Doc before you can write that login page.

[sdfghswe]

This is not a conceptually new thing. People want to enrich themselves, new tech is just new tools to do that. Has happened since the beginning of time.

[iancmceachern]

Totally, so many examples, the ones you already listed plus theranos, enron, all thr crypto stuff, on and on