Unsupervised Learning: No. 192

Ring has already partnered with over 400 police departments. As you know, I'm torn on this kind of tech. Neighborhood watch can be a good thing, and it can also be a bad thing. Technology tends to magnify both weaknesses and strengths, so it can make neighborhood watch really great, or it can turn it into a nightmare. The problem is that you can easily start on the positive side, build it all the way up, and then in a few legal, policy, and tech changes have it turn into the oppressive form. Some say this is a reason not to do any of this stuff, but I disagree. We know someone is going to do it, so I think the best thing that can be done is to build a benign version and hope it wins in the market. More

People are drawing comparisons between China's social credit system (which is actually multiple systems) and the Silicon Valley's various apps that have internal rating systems. They're saying that these ratings will eventually be used to make decisions about things that matter. Sure, but this has existed throughout human history. Word of mouth, blacklists, etc.: these are all ways of extending the reach of good or bad reputation. I think whenever someone points out the downside of a technology, we should ask ourselves whether that dynamic exists already in the real world, and adjust our opinions accordingly. More

The Pentagon is worried that China will beat the US in AI if we don't create a stronger link between the government and both academia and industry, which China is good at. We basically need to move faster from edge concepts to practical implementations, but it's damn hard to do this when we have all sorts of legal and ethical constraints that China doesn't have. Our caution and morality are a definite weakness in this case. More

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