Here's the #DictatorsDilemma: they want to block their country's frustrated elites from mobilizing against them, so they censor public communications; but they also want to know what their people truly believe, so they can head off simmering resentments before they boil over into regime-toppling revolutions.
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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/26/dictators-dilemma/#garbage-in-garbage-out-garbage-back-in
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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/26/dictators-dilemma/#garbage-in-garbage-out-garbage-back-in
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Cory Doctorow
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Cory Doctorow
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https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/10/yuval-noah-harari-technology-tyranny/568330/
Harari wrote that "the desire to concentrate all information and power in one place may become [dictators] decisive advantage in the 21st century."
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Yuval Noah Harari on Why Technology Favors Tyranny
Yuval Noah Harari (The Atlantic)Cory Doctorow
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https://www.foreignaffairs.com/world/spirals-delusion-artificial-intelligence-decision-making
They argued that - like everyone who gets excited about AI, only to have their hopes dashed - dictators seeking to use AI to understand the public mood would run into serious #TrainingData bias problems.
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Spirals of Delusion: How AI Distorts Decision-Making and Makes Dictators More Dangerous
Foreign Affairs MagazineCory Doctorow
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Cory Doctorow
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Cory Doctorow
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https://memex.craphound.com/2018/05/29/garbage-in-garbage-out-machine-learning-has-not-repealed-the-iron-law-of-computer-science/
When it comes to "AI" that's used for decision support - that is, when an algorithm tells humans what to do and they do it - then you get something worse than Garbage In, Garbage Out - you get Garbage In, Garbage Out, Garbage Back In Again.
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Cory Doctorow
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To see this in action, consider the deeply flawed #PredictivePolicing systems that cities around the world rely on. These systems suck up crime data from the cops, then predict where crime is *going to be*.
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Cory Doctorow
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The problem here is that "crime the police detected" isn't the same as "crime." You only find crime where you look for it. For example, there are far more incidents of domestic abuse reported in apartment buildings than in fully detached homes.
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Cory Doctorow
•Ostrzeżenie o treści: Long thread/11
So if your cops practice racially biased policing (I know, this is hard to imagine, but stay with me /s), then the crime they detect will already be a function of bias.
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Cory Doctorow
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That's life *without* AI. But now let's throw in predictive policing: feed your "knives found in pockets" data to an algorithm and ask it to predict where there are more knives in pockets, and it will send you back to that Black neighborhood.
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Cory Doctorow
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This is what #PatrickBall from the #HumanRightsDataAnalysisGroup calls "#EmpiricismWashing": take a biased procedure and feed it to an algorithm, and then you get to go and do more biased procedures.
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myrmepropagandistudostępnił to.
Cory Doctorow
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HRDAG has done excellent work on this, finding a natural experiment that makes the problem of #GIGOGBI crystal clear.
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Cory Doctorow
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took Oakland's drug arrest data from 2010 and asked #Predpol, a leading predictive policing product, to predict where Oakland's 2011 drug use would take place.
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Cory Doctorow
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https://rss.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1740-9713.2016.00960.x
Predpol told cops to go and look for drug use in a predominantly Black, working class neighborhood. Meanwhile the #NSDUH survey showed the *actual* drug use took place *all over* Oakland, with a higher concentration in the Berkeley-neighboring student neighborhood.
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Cory Doctorow
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In other words, GIGOGBI is a system for *concentrating bias*.
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Cory Doctorow
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There's a great name for an AI that's trained on an AI's output, courtesy of #JathanSadowski: #HabsburgAI.
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Cory Doctorow
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Cory Doctorow
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https://www.eddieyang.net/research/DDD.pdf
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Cory Doctorow
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Cory Doctorow
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That means that Yang knows that the "real" sentiment in the Chinese social media snapshot is, and what Chinese authorities would *believe it to be* if Chinese users were self-censoring all the posts that would be flagged by #censorware today.
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Cory Doctorow
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Cory Doctorow
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But it gets better (or worse, I guess): Yang models a "crisis" scenario in which users stop self-censoring and start articulating their true views (because they've run out of fucks to give).
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Cory Doctorow
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But "crisis" is where AI performs the *worst*. Trained on the "status quo" data where users are continuously self-censoring and preference-falsifying, AI has *no clue* how to handle the unvarnished truth.
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Cory Doctorow
•Ostrzeżenie o treści: Long thread/26
But here's an interesting wrinkle: Yang scraped a bunch of Chinese users' posts from *Twitter* - which the Chinese government doesn't get to censor (yet) or spy on (yet) - and fed *them* to the model.
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Cory Doctorow
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He was right - the model got significantly better once it ingested data from Twitter than when it was working solely from Weibo posts. And Yang notes that dictatorships all over the world are widely understood to be scraping western/northern social media.
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Cory Doctorow
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Cory Doctorow
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https://crookedtimber.org/2023/07/25/51610/
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Fully automated data driven authoritarianism ain’t what it’s cracked up to be
Crooked TimberCory Doctorow
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Cory Doctorow
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Cryteria (modified)
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Taylor R Campbell
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> On two occasions I have been asked,—"Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?" In one case a member of the Upper, and in the other a member of the Lower, House put this question. I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Page%3APassages_from_the_Life_of_a_Philosopher.djvu/83
Cory Doctorowudostępnił to.
Fuzed
•Damn it I already have too much to worry about
Pteryx the Puzzle Secretary
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Kindness is thankful
•Devin M. Ceartas
•Cory Doctorow
•https://doctorow.medium.com/how-to-make-the-least-worst-mastodon-threads-daa33943ac31
How To Make the Least-Worst Mastodon Threads - Cory Doctorow - Medium
Cory Doctorow (Medium)Devin M. Ceartas
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