Comment by dredmorbius

NB: Your comment is extraordinarily difficult for me to read with the quote style you've used. I prefer surrounding quoted text in *asterisks* which italicises the quotes. Reformatting your comment:

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These articles from Schneier are so incredibly NYT-reader pedestrian.

We trust many thousands of times a day. Society can’t function without it.

The obvious problem with this is that you sometimes just have to “trust” something because there is no other alternative. And he comes to the same conclusion some hundred words later:

There is something we haven’t discussed when it comes to trust: power. Sometimes we have no choice but to trust someone or something because they are powerful.

So sometimes you are trusting the waiter and sometimes you are trusting the corrupt Mexican law enforcer... so what use does this freaking concept (as described here) have?

Funnily enough I have found that the concept of Trust is useful to remind process nerds that obsess over minutiae and rules and details that, umm actually, we do in fact in reality get by with a lot of implicit and unstated rules; we don’t need to formalize goddamn everything. But for some reason he goes in the opposite direction and argues that umm actually this “larger” trust is completely defined by explicit rules and regulations. sigh

And we do it all the time. With governments. With organizations. With systems of all kinds. And especially with corporations. We might think of them as friends, when they are actually services. Corporations are not moral; they are precisely as immoral as the law and their reputations let them get away with.

Did I need Schneier to tell me that corporations are not my friend? For some reason I am at a loss as to why I would need to be told this. Or why anyone would.

You will default to thinking of it as a friend. You will speak to it in natural language, and it will respond in kind.

At this point you realize that this whole article is a hypothetical about your own very personal future relationships (because he thinks it is personal) with AI. And you’re being lectured about how your own social psyche works by a computer nerd security expert. Ok?

It’s government that provides the underlying mechanisms for the social trust essential to society. Think about contract law. Or laws about property, or laws protecting your personal safety. Or any of the health and safety codes that let you board a plane, eat at a restaurant, or buy a pharmaceutical without worry.

Talk about category error? Or rather being confused about causation?

“Think about laws about property.” Indeed, crucial and fundamental to capitalist states—and a few paragraphs ago he compared capitalism to the “paper-clip machine” (and rightly so).

The more I think about it, the more this Trust chant feels like left-liberal authoritarianism. Look at his own definition up to this point. You acquiesce to power? Well that’s still trust! (You click Accept to the terms-of-use every time because you know that there is no alternative? Trust!)

As long as there aren’t riots in the street, we the People Trust. Lead us into the future, Mitch McConnel.

Look, I get it: he’s making a normative statement, not necessarily a descriptive one. This speech is basically a monologue that he as a benevolent technocrat is either going to present to elected representatives in whatever forum that Harvard graduates etc. speak officially to people with power because they are some kind of subject matter expert. He’s saying that if he bangs his hand on table enough times then hopefully the representatives will enact some specific policies that regulate The AI.

But it misrepresents both kinds of societies:

- The US has low trust in the federal government. And this isn’t unfounded; it isn’t some Alex Jones “conspiracy theory” that the government is not “we the people”

- Societies with a high trust in the government: I live in one. But the Trust chanters just love to boldly assert that societies like mine (however they are) are such and such because they have high trust. No! Technocrats would just love for it to be that case that prosperity and a well-functioning society is born of “trusting” the smart people in charge, staying in your lane, and letting them run the show. But people trust the government because of a whole century-long history of things like labor organizing and democratization. See, Trust is not created by someone top-down chanting that Corporations are your friends, or that we just need to let the Government regulate more; Trust is created by the whole of society.