I agree with you, and if you frequent tech circles you'd be under impression that the masses prioritize lack of surveillance and privacy. In my experience with IRL acquaintances, although anecdotal, exactly 0% of people I have spoken to where it's come up in conversation care at all about privacy or surveillance in general with the old "nothing to hide" fallacy.
Most folks do care, they just don't understand. When you stop with the high level topics like "surveillance" and start in on the practical impacts like:
- They charge you more if they know you want something (ex - dynamic pricing).
- They try to get you addicted (gambling, vapes, social media)
- They feed you lies (curated social bubbles)
- They manipulate elections (targeted campaigns and ads, targeted social policies)
Etc... most people do actually care, they just struggle to relate the words the industry uses with the real impacts.
Folks tend to think of privacy like someone opening the bathroom door on them (and this gets immediate pushback... see all the articles about the Roomba cameras). But the surveillance we're under now is more subtle and insidious, less visceral. Harder for folks to understand without concrete impacts.
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The reason so many tech people care is because lots of them get to watch the sausage being made, and they understand.
> exactly 0% of people I have spoken to where it's come up in conversation care at all about privacy or surveillance in general with the old "nothing to hide" fallacy.
But they do have something to hide.
Are they going to the toilet more often this week? Are they booking a flight for a funeral? Do they watch midget porn? Are they interested in science experiments that go boom? Did they just get a promotion at work? Did their car just fail the yearly inspection? Are they going on vacation and leaving the house empty for a week? Does their child have ADHD? Did their catalytic converter just get stolen? Is their phone model no longer receiving security updates? Is their child bullied at school? Did they have an abortion? Are they contemplating bankruptcy? Did they just start using a CPAP machine? Did they vote for an independent candidate? Do they listen to the local mosque's podcast? Do they smoke? Are they closet homosexual? Are they being sued? Did their dog just suffer liver failure? Did they put their teenage daughter's child up for adoption?
These are all things that your phone knows about you, which could lead to negative consequences if exposed - ranging from embarrasment to blackmail, higher prices to actual denial of services, scrutiny to arrest. Everyone has something to hide.
That's my experience as well. However, I suspect a lot of it is not really understanding the situation, and not wanting to be bothered learning about it. In other words, I think it's possible those preferences could be changed with the right kind cultural or legal shifts. Even in my lifetime, I look at how massively public attitudes have changed around smoking, wearing seatbelts, and recycling, to take 3 examples. Each of those seemed equally immovable at one time.
I know its won't solve everything but couldn't we teach digital hygiene at school and its importance. For myself I remember in English at high school being taught how different methods of advertising worked and that stuck with me.
Education is good in general, but because alternatives are not common and sometimes not even allowed, there are very few places left to avoid surveillance. Educated or not. Not to mention our schools use google docs.
Technologists seem to lack professional integrity. This blasé blame-the-victim attitude is completely normalized but I don’t think it makes sense if you zoom out far enough.
There are many exceptions and initiatives like truly altruistic OSS projects which aim to empower users. But by and large what we have ended up with is a divide between the tech-empowered and in-the-knows (surveillance etc.) contrasted with people who just want to access their photos on their phone and their computer.
The everyman being enlightened to all the abstract BS in IT is untenable. But programmers aren’t stepping up to collectively protect all of us.
That's almost never the sole or core differentiator though. And getting customers to all coordinate and care is much more difficult than getting a couple CEOs to just decide to surveil.
I share your hate of rent-seeking and subscription culture, but tbf disposable contact lenses are legitimately a nicer product to use. I've done it both ways.
They're far from facts, but have an important advantage over most other sources: the bettors are motivated to predict truth.
News sources are motivated to get clicks, to appeal to certain audiences, and to retain tribal customers. None of these create incentives for truth. You can seek out smart, well-informed and principled journalists who will prioritize truth-seeking over money-making. There are some. But the fact remains you are relying on character to override incentives. With prediction markets, incentives and truth are naturally aligned. This makes them a powerful and valuable resource imo, even if there is a lot of scumminess that comes along for the ride. The insiders, more than anyone, are contributing to the truth signal.
on the other hand, similar to that one old assassination page, where you bet on the death date of people, it might encourage someone to make an event happen and thus fabricate the insider knowledge if the price is high enough.
So the feedback from prediction market turns around, so you can essentially buy events if you put enough money in.
They are motivated to pick what they believe is most likely to happen. The develope their idea of what is most likely to happen for the news. The reporters use their bets to wrote stories predicting what will happen.
First, you have inside traders. Then, among legitimate bettors, you have smart people using multiple data sources (not just the "news") and doing sophisticated analysis that most journalists cannot do, and are not motivated to do -- again, because their incentives are different.
Smart people cannot predict things by 'research'. "Will the US strike Iran by X date" going from 20% likelihood to 80%+ within hours points simply to insiders.
You can do research to know the US would strike, there's no other point in moving multiple carriers over to somewhere. But exactly WHEN is not researchable. This applies to most other bets. So lets stop pretending there's anything more than 2 cohorts, insiders and degenerate gamblers.
It's an empirical fact that smart people can predict things by doing research. See Tetlock's book Superforecasting.
I've been doing it profitably myself for almost 10 years now. I have zero special inside knowledge, and no access to any other non-public information.
> Will the US strike Iran by X date
Last year I did think the market for a strike on Iran was significantly underpriced given the information and conditions within a specific frame of time.
I don't think every smart person can just pop into prediction markets and print money, but I know many smart people who are long-term winners. I also don't try to knock people as degenerate when they have genuine talent.
You haven't been profitable for 10 years on prediction markets and you being profitable doesn't mean anything in regards to insiders or the rigging of a market.
> There is a subset of people that spend time developing complex setups as a hobby. It's the adult equivalent of the student who had school notes in perfect handwriting with 7 different colors and underlines.
This is the key point. It threatens nearly everything in the limit, not one particular industry. There will be no "leveling up" into higher-order jobs, because the machines will be better at those too.
They thought that too in the industrial revolution. You can look back and see the jobs that came out of it. But at the time, it wasn't obvious to the people effected that there would be jobs again.
We may have hindsight bias in evaluating something that happened, but to the people that it happened to it was terrifying.
MIT's motto is mens et manus: mind and hand. These are, basically, the two primary attributes of human labor. They're the reason almost anyone gets hired to do anything. Our brains and our opposable thumbs are what set us ahead of the animal kingdom.
The industrial revolution first attempted to replace our hands. But the labor that was displaced had places to go: into smaller-scale manual work, where mass-production machinery was too expensive, and into knowledge work.
Now the AI is coming for knowledge work, and robots are getting better at small-scale work. We're not at that point yet, but looking down the road I'm not sure there will really be anything competitive left flesh-and-blood humans can offer to an employer.
The only exceptions I can think of are, maybe, athletics, live music performances, and escort services. But with only a few wealthy people as customers, I don't think there will be many job opportunities even in those fields. And I'm not sure that robots won't come for those too.
You don't need a job, if you can maintain purchasing power without selling your labor. I didn't forget that, I just didn't take such an outcome for granted.
In other comments I have expressed support for UBI, as well as for paying parents to stay home and spend time with their children. I think the more automated our society gets, the less people should need to work to earn a living. But I look around and I just don't see anyone implementing such policies.
Nobody had any idea what was coming with the industrial revolution. There wasn't obviously other work for people. And for long periods of time nobody had an answer to that question for large percentage of the population.
In hindsight, we know the answers NOW, but then they did not know what was going to happen. We also don't know what's going to happen, it could go as you hypothesize. Or the Jevon's paradox people might be right and there's way more work to do.
The uncertainty is the historical lesson, not that "it'll all work out"
I guess the people in Wall-E didn't really seem unhappy so perhaps you're right. My gut instinct though, is that there is a qualitative difference in the level of abundance and concentration of wealth, power, and influence we have today that needs to be taken seriously on its merits and not hand-waved away with tenuous historical analogies.
Yes, two hundred years ago, many people thought reading was a dangerous distraction for young people, just as film, radio, TV and the internet became later. But there is a qualitative difference to having social media in your pocket with vibrating notifications. Pretending its just more of the same honestly feels like slightly willful blindness at this point.
If customers cared, the additional income from being someone who didn't surveil could outstrip the income stream from surveilling.
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