[Tanjreeve]

AI doesn't add anything to the ability to do mass surveillance. That genie was already out of the bottle from clouds and big data systems. At best AI might take on some of the gruntwork for drawing conclusions from profiles but it's doing it's usual thing of being a powerful interface built on top of other systems.

[mithr]

> AI doesn't add anything to the ability to do mass surveillance

I recommend reading Yuval Noah Harari's Nexus for a deep discussion around this.

He makes the point that what makes this AI age much more dangerous for mass surveillance isn't just the collection of data, which has indeed been possible for a while, but the new ability to have AI sift through that enormous volume of information, an ability which until recently has not been possible in a meaningful way without a ton of manual work to support it.

Older attempts at mass control of a population already involved mass surveillance, even in a large amount of detail, but even when capturing in detail all citizens' activities, there were just not enough people around to be able to dig through that and analyze it. This has been somewhat true even with the help of computers, though computers have certainly already been making this easier.

But now you can just give all that data to an AI with your instructions, and it'll apply some sort of "judgement" on your behalf, completely autonomously, and even perform actions against those folks it finds, again autonomously, without needing to manually build a whole infrastructure to do that with manual rules. That's a very meaningful upgrade for someone wanting to control a population.

[Tanjreeve]

That's still actuating using existing infrastructure that already existed. I agree with the summarise + decide part maybe being quicker sometimes but the bottleneck remains collection and collation and actioning infrastructure

[veidr]

crazy take

like saying kids having internet-connected devices with built-in cameras doesn't increase the probability of sexting, they could do the same with film cameras and a fax machine

[Tanjreeve]

AI doesn't increase the amount of data captured or the processing throughput is the difference with your cameras metaphor. As said at best it can summarise things better sometimes.

[1718627440]

I would say AI is very much increasing the processing throughput of labeling surveillance data.