[surfingdino]

It always starts with making a list of targets that meet given criteria. Once you have the list its use changes from categorisation to demonisation -> surveillance -> denial of rights -> deportations -> killing. Early use of computers by Germans during WW2 included making and processing of lists of people who ought to be sent to concentration camps. The only difference today is that we are able to capture more data and process it faster at scale.

[Qem]

There's even books written about it. Shame on IBM for this. I suspect in the future we'll have lots of books like this, for other companies enabling this genocide: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust

[imjonse]

The same author wrote Nazi Nexus, with separate chapters for different US companies' (Ford, GM) dealings with the Nazi regime. It can always be a case of "let's not bring politics into work" attitude or the belief that "tech is a tool only, can be used for good or ill" but at least in the years leading up to WW2 there was a lot of support for eugenics, antisemitism (Henry Ford was a notorious one) and other Nazi tendencies in the US too. I would not be surprised if many of those working on killer AI today were politically motivated and not just developers caught in projects they don't really have their hearts in.

[zelphirkalt]

Only recently someone here on HN posted a video about some big hall in the US, where nazi supporters gathered in droves. It made it seem like they had significant ideological footing in the US as well. Unthinkable what could have happened, if they had had even more support. Not exactly this video that was linked, but this seems to be about the same gathering: https://invidious.baczek.me/watch?v=r4zRZ7XLYSA

[cmurf]

It was 1939 at Madison Square Garden, NYC

https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2019/02/20/695941323...

You’ll find these bad ideas never really die. Look and you’ll see it throughout time and location. Russia, Germany, the U.S., Japan. Tyranny isn’t something accidental, exotic or mysterious. People take their eye off the ball and get clobbered with it from time to time.

I’ll always argue we’re better off with a world war than tyranny, but the whole goddamn point of the UN Charter is to prevent both. The lesson was learned. It was written down. And we’re still fucking it up again.

[Sleepful]

Operation Paperclip et al

[GaryNumanVevo]

Don't forget Japanese Unit 731, all the scientists involved were whisked away to the US if they would give up their research on human subjects to the US military and help translate.

[boppo1]

Is any of that declassified now? Did we actually learn anything other than 'causing pain causes pain'?

[ender341341]

there's a lot of "these are some tested to failure limits for humans" results that are of use in medical settings, but they aren't really needed and end up being more of a "fatal dose" style measure.

The most used one I've heard about is studying hypothermia because they took quite detailed notes on the different stages and how the body reacted.

[selimthegrim]

The weird thing is, I’ve seen this author post factually incorrect things about early Islamic history. I just wish he was more careful about things outside his area of expertise.

[palmfacehn]

There's such a premium on outlining the crimes of the Nazis. Condemning eugenics and the culture of blind adherence to institutional norms is valuable. However the concerns ring hollow when we apply it in the retrospective or accusatory rather than the introspective sense.

For decades, Nazi-adjacency has been just another insult to be hurled at the political opponents we've othered. Depending on where you are on the political spectrum, "Nazi" could be synonymous with Elon Musk. In one breath we trivialize the evil humanity is capable of inflicting upon itself. In the next breath we exclaim, "Never again!"

The American Eugenics Society rebranded itself into, "Society for Biodemography and Social Biology". Ambiguous terms like, "bioethics" are used by eugenicist think tanks like "The Hastings Center" where explicit appeals to eugenics are undesirable. The Club of Rome evolved into the WEF. Paul Ehrlich's ideas are as popular as ever. The same eugenicist appeals for population control remain in the forefront of public discourse. Even here on HN, you will regularly find posters lamenting the impending doom of climate change. The answer, if you ask many here is the eugenicist policy of population control.

There are other themes in parallel, but I'll try to keep it somewhat concise and less controversial.

It isn't only the "Banality of Evil" or an engineer only who wants to go home to watch Netflix after designing a killer drone. Similar authoritarian ideas are celebrated in our popular discourse. Instead of examining these ideas critically, we accuse political others, dehumanize them and finally rationalize them into the Nazis.

[CatWChainsaw]

In the future, AI will be so good that it will detect criticism of IBM as you are typing and threaten to lock you out of "your" computer unless you delete your work.

Either that or genAI will be used to publish a bunch of books telling fantasy stories about how IBM personally arrested Hitler. :)

[ysofunny]

as it turns out, there's a better way.

already the AI detects criticism of itself. except its response it's to shadowban you meaning you can continue to post but nobody sees your opinion online.

eventually, you're "bubbled" by AIs.. all your interactions online are surrounded by an AI and you'd think you're interacting with other people when you're just AI-bubbled so to not disrupt the rest of the workers.

you'll still see likes, and other interactions with the social media posts you leave behind, but as a flagged critic of the system, all these interactions are merely faked to keep you calm. as the AI advances you'll even see responses, retweets and other interactions.... all AI driven in order to keep you busy while IBM keeps a calm overwatch over all. the end.

[CapeTheory]

Ridiculous fantasizing - there is simply no way that IBM would be able to build something as good as that.

[ysofunny]

they don't have to, they bought it. or hired it? dunno. for all you know I'm an AI intended to keep you distracted while at the same time you're just an AI bot keeping me occupied with pointless online discussions.

even if neither of us is actually an AI, this interaction will surely aid in training some LLM in the end...

[zelphirkalt]

Maybe some day in the future this will amount to an "organic" way of accidentally building up a simulation of human society, that will be the only thing remaining for some far into the future aliens, who come to visit our planet. And what conclusions they would draw from this.

[pyinstallwoes]

How do you know if you're in the correct reality that isn't predicted by AI?

[CapeTheory]

Maybe that's the new Turing test; true AGI is reached when computers are smart enough to dismiss the possibility of IBM returning to competence. For a warm-up task, ask the AI about a hypothetical scenario involving an honest and ethical Oracle sales rep.

[ysofunny]

this is a really cool question!

i think the only plausible solution is that we don't know but we're just about to find out? as soon as the singularity hits we can ask the AI (...?)

then again, and thinking more broadly, all of life is one giant contest to guess the future, and later, to determine the future by taking precise action

so what you're asking means to try and guess how much of my current reality is predicted by AI (and more generally, by any possibly conscious actor) and how much is wildly unpredictable and chaotic?

[TeMPOraL]

Not today, no. But remember that IBM is critical to SERN due to the importance of IBM 5100 for time travel, so there's a bit of technological back and forth going on within the ~100 year period we happen to be at the center of right now.

[aspenmayer]

Is this a John Titor and/or Steins Gate reference?

[more_corn]

Slow clap.

[aatd86]

Could probably implement this on twitter very easily if it hasn't been already.

Or at a higher level, at the ISP level.

Targeted via DNS tunneling and all.

[vintermann]

Twitter doesn't bother being subtle about it. They aggressively bury anyone mentioning a rival platform.

[red-iron-pine]

like the reddit "shadowban", where your comment isn't shown to others but is visible to you in the thread.

fudge the up/down votes to make it look like it's been seen but not reacted to.

but do you need to burn cycles on AI to keep these people engaged? if someone is spamming stuff you don't want seen have them throw out a basic response and then shadowban or just straight-up ban them. if they're very negative bad actor types just give em the boot

[nebula8804]

Wouldn't this bubble system only work if you are on a platform that has it? And you can also easily test to see if you are being "bubbled".

Enough frustrated people will use AI to quickly generate the code for an alternative platform to avoid this bubble system.

It will be individual platforms all the way down...oh wait.

[fy20]

Welcome to the future of racial / political / ideological / social status segregation.

On platforms like Facebook or YouTube where the feed is algorithmically generated and you can't easily view a filtered list of topics (like Reddit) something like this would be very easy.

The interactions don't even need to be generated by AI, it just needs to keep you seeing interactions with other people in your social status circle. And if you try to venture too far outside of that it shadow bans you.

Heck I'd be surprised if the way the news feed algorithms work today they don't already do something like this, as a byproduct of optimising for viewership.

They'd just need to take it a bit further by preventing you from seeing viewpoints outside your circle. So taking the WWII example, people in the Nazi group would not be able to see pro-Ally content. All they'd see about Allies would be content that paints them in a bad light, and vice versa.

[nebula8804]

It is already happening, just recently Instagram pushed out an update to 'quietly' limit political content (ie. pro Palestinian voices) to all users by default without informing them.

[1]:https://time.com/6960587/meta-instagram-political-content-li...

[MilStdJunkie]

One of the reasons for the adoption of the Hollerith Tabulator in the great 1890 Census - arguably the birth of computing in the United States - was the increasing concern about . . let's say ethnics. To be frank, there were too many of them. "Japanese," "Chinese," "Negro," "mulatto," "quadroon," "octoroon," "negrito", etc etc. So in 1890, we needed dozens of new categories, and the old methods simply would not work. At least in terms of usable - actionable[1] - data in a quantitative setting.

Its success was so marked that it was immediately decided in 1893 to move a Tabulator to Ellis Island, to count the ethnics from the source with Hollerith's new technology. Herman Hollerith had great success in his own lifetime, the technology eventually becoming the core of the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company, otherwise known, a decade later, as International Business Machines.

The establishment of this clear process surrounding race - actual race law - was, believe it or not, pretty novel in Western history. A lot of old-timey race policy - like the relationship between a monarch and the Jews, or what exactly a visiting Muslim could or couldn't do (like sell and buy slaves cough Venice cough) - this race stuff was almost always very, ah, what we'd call "tribal knowledge". A Jew in the Middle Ages could have far greater rights and lifestyle than in later periods, but those rights were completely unpredictable; this was true to greater or lesser extent for many "outsiders" in the early European era. Even in 1900 American innovation in race law - based on "Science!" - was a new thing, and extremely exciting to the enthusiasts of folk movements[2] crisscrossing our entire civilization[3] at the time. One of those was Willy Heidinger, who established Deutsche Hollerith Maschinen Gesellschaft to produce license-built Hollerith machines. World events interceded, however, and the German civil service infrastructure to run a census would not be present until much later . . 1933, in fact, when things would get very spicy indeed in the world of race "science".

And then, of course, cataclysm: the end of the European Order.

On the European continent, a debt to truth was paid. A hundred million dead or maimed, nations wrecked, a whole world - a weltanschauung - burnt down to the foundations - below the foundations. But elsewhere - like in the New World - the lesson was not as stark. And in yet other places the inverse lesson was learned: once you determine a person is not a person, you must brutalize yourself and your population immediately, before the soon-to-be-unpeople realizes that the struggle is existential.

Let's wrap this up.

What 20th century Race Science/Race Law were trying to do was make sense of something as complicated as human culture but using the sciences they understood: 19th century statistics, the physics of iron and steam. Those were the sciences with the capital backing, so - of course! - those were the only science that mattered. Today, we're looking at another complex element of the human experience - human language, human consciousness - and again, we're looking at it through the science that's got the most capital backing it: computation. That's how "text" somehow, incredibly, came to contain "language". Or how "scarcity" was represented by "money" - as if there were any N-dimensional descriptions that could adequately vectorize either of those concepts.

Ultimately, when you really dig yourself into these sorts of artificial - if not downright dishonest - "science-y" establishments, when you start imposing them on the world, you don't break out of them easily. Or without damage. The people making use of your LLM widget do not understand the math - all they know, like the race science of previous centuries - is that it's Science-y. It might as well be wearing a Mitre and Crosier.

[1] What those actions were, is a subject for another post. Probably inside a soon-to-be-flagged topic.

[2] The American example in race law was also very exciting to a certain Mr. Adolf Hitler, as well. You can read all about it in Mein Kampf. Hitler's attitude towards America is really fascinating stuff, but an entirely other subject.

[3] And beyond! Ethnonationalism spread like fire, as colonized peoples realized this could be their big ticket towards peerage in the European age.

[cess11]

IBM decided who was jewish, roma, socialist, and so on? IBM:s machines found these people and brought them to the attention of genocidal authorities?