I think if you bring up a dystopian nightmare, it assumes someone in power acting in bad faith. If their power is great enough, like maybe a government intelligence agency, it doesn't need things like due process, etc., to do what it wants to do. For example, Joe McCarthy & J. Edgar Hoover didn't need the evidence that could have been produced by AI-aided mass surveillance to justify getting people people who opposed his political agenda blackballed from Hollywood, jailed, fired from their jobs, etc.
If everyone involved is acting in good faith, at least ostensibly, there are checks and balances, like due process. It's a fine line and doesn't justify the existence of mass spying, but I think it is an important distinction in this discussion & I think is a valuable lesson for us. We have to push back when the FBI pushes forward. I don't have much faith after what happened to Snowden and the reaction to his whistleblowing though.
Joe McCarthy and J. Edgar Hoover, distasteful as they are, I believe acted in what they would claim is good faith. The issue isn't that someone is a bad actor. It is that they believe they are a good actor and are busy stripping away others' rights in their pursuit.
It may be a common phrase, but I’ve never seen such a road myself. Mostly bad outcomes are preceded by bad intentions, or lazy ones, or selfish ones.
I’d be interested in a couple of examples, if anyone has good ones, but I’m pretty sure that if we put stuff like 737MAX MCAS, the Texas power grid fiasco, etc the count of badly paved roads would be greater.
All of the great wars of the 20th century are perfect examples. WW1 started when an assassin with Serbian state backing assassinated the heir (to an 80+ year old Emperor) of Austria-Hungary. Austria-Hungary demands Serbia effectively let them carry out an investigation and enact consequences at their discretion. Austria-Hungary refuses. So Serbia invades them. This causes Serbia's ally Russia to move in on behalf of Serbia. This causes Austria-Hungary's ally Germany to move in on behalf of Austria-Hungary. This resulted in Russia's ally France joining in on the war, and so on.
Soon enough you had Brits killing Germans because a Serbian assassinated an Austro-Hungarian royal. The most messed up thing of all though is that everybody had a very strong pretext of 'just' behavior on their side. It was just like an avalanche of justice that resulted in tens of millions of dying and things not only failing to get better, but getting much much worse.
Since the winners won, and the losers lost, the winners must be right. So they decided to brutally punish the losers for being wrong, Germany among them in this case. The consequences imposed on Germany were extreme to the point that the entire state was bankrupted and driven into hyperinflation and complete collapse. And this set the stage for a young vegetarian from Austria with an knack for rhetoric and riling up crowds to start using the deprivation the state was forced to endure to rally increasingly large numbers of followers to his wacky cause. He was soon to set Germany on a path to proving that WW1 was not only NOT the war to end all wars, but rather was just the warm-up act for what was really about to happen.
The people that support the War on drugs would say it's with good intentions. But it has put a lot of people in jail where it neither benefits them nor people around them, nor society at large. In many cases leading to worse outcomes for affected communities.
War on terror is not without adverse side effects either.
That's what this article argues though. Even with good faith acting this would be a disaster. Imagine any time you did something against the law you got fined. The second you drive your unregistered car off your driveway (presumably to re register) you are immediately fined. There may be "due process" cause you DID break the law, but there is no contextual thought behind the massive ticket machine.
Our laws are not built to have the level of enforcement that AI could achieve.
Interestingly enough, in some places, automation like that, like red light cameras, even after getting installed, were later prohibited. NJ has discussed laws around protecting NJ drivers' privacy from other states' red light cameras, too. It's important not to be complacent. You can imagine literally anything, but action is required to actually change things.
If everyone involved is acting in good faith, at least ostensibly, there are checks and balances, like due process. It's a fine line and doesn't justify the existence of mass spying, but I think it is an important distinction in this discussion & I think is a valuable lesson for us. We have to push back when the FBI pushes forward. I don't have much faith after what happened to Snowden and the reaction to his whistleblowing though.