Comment by Qem
2 years ago
There's even books written about it. Shame on IBM for this. I suspect in the future we'll have lots of books like this, for other companies enabling this genocide: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust
2 years ago
There's even books written about it. Shame on IBM for this. I suspect in the future we'll have lots of books like this, for other companies enabling this genocide: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust
The same author wrote Nazi Nexus, with separate chapters for different US companies' (Ford, GM) dealings with the Nazi regime. It can always be a case of "let's not bring politics into work" attitude or the belief that "tech is a tool only, can be used for good or ill" but at least in the years leading up to WW2 there was a lot of support for eugenics, antisemitism (Henry Ford was a notorious one) and other Nazi tendencies in the US too. I would not be surprised if many of those working on killer AI today were politically motivated and not just developers caught in projects they don't really have their hearts in.
Only recently someone here on HN posted a video about some big hall in the US, where nazi supporters gathered in droves. It made it seem like they had significant ideological footing in the US as well. Unthinkable what could have happened, if they had had even more support. Not exactly this video that was linked, but this seems to be about the same gathering: https://invidious.baczek.me/watch?v=r4zRZ7XLYSA
It was 1939 at Madison Square Garden, NYC
https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2019/02/20/695941323...
You’ll find these bad ideas never really die. Look and you’ll see it throughout time and location. Russia, Germany, the U.S., Japan. Tyranny isn’t something accidental, exotic or mysterious. People take their eye off the ball and get clobbered with it from time to time.
I’ll always argue we’re better off with a world war than tyranny, but the whole goddamn point of the UN Charter is to prevent both. The lesson was learned. It was written down. And we’re still fucking it up again.
Operation Paperclip et al
Don't forget Japanese Unit 731, all the scientists involved were whisked away to the US if they would give up their research on human subjects to the US military and help translate.
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The weird thing is, I’ve seen this author post factually incorrect things about early Islamic history. I just wish he was more careful about things outside his area of expertise.
There's such a premium on outlining the crimes of the Nazis. Condemning eugenics and the culture of blind adherence to institutional norms is valuable. However the concerns ring hollow when we apply it in the retrospective or accusatory rather than the introspective sense.
For decades, Nazi-adjacency has been just another insult to be hurled at the political opponents we've othered. Depending on where you are on the political spectrum, "Nazi" could be synonymous with Elon Musk. In one breath we trivialize the evil humanity is capable of inflicting upon itself. In the next breath we exclaim, "Never again!"
The American Eugenics Society rebranded itself into, "Society for Biodemography and Social Biology". Ambiguous terms like, "bioethics" are used by eugenicist think tanks like "The Hastings Center" where explicit appeals to eugenics are undesirable. The Club of Rome evolved into the WEF. Paul Ehrlich's ideas are as popular as ever. The same eugenicist appeals for population control remain in the forefront of public discourse. Even here on HN, you will regularly find posters lamenting the impending doom of climate change. The answer, if you ask many here is the eugenicist policy of population control.
There are other themes in parallel, but I'll try to keep it somewhat concise and less controversial.
It isn't only the "Banality of Evil" or an engineer only who wants to go home to watch Netflix after designing a killer drone. Similar authoritarian ideas are celebrated in our popular discourse. Instead of examining these ideas critically, we accuse political others, dehumanize them and finally rationalize them into the Nazis.
In the future, AI will be so good that it will detect criticism of IBM as you are typing and threaten to lock you out of "your" computer unless you delete your work.
Either that or genAI will be used to publish a bunch of books telling fantasy stories about how IBM personally arrested Hitler. :)
as it turns out, there's a better way.
already the AI detects criticism of itself. except its response it's to shadowban you meaning you can continue to post but nobody sees your opinion online.
eventually, you're "bubbled" by AIs.. all your interactions online are surrounded by an AI and you'd think you're interacting with other people when you're just AI-bubbled so to not disrupt the rest of the workers.
you'll still see likes, and other interactions with the social media posts you leave behind, but as a flagged critic of the system, all these interactions are merely faked to keep you calm. as the AI advances you'll even see responses, retweets and other interactions.... all AI driven in order to keep you busy while IBM keeps a calm overwatch over all. the end.
Ridiculous fantasizing - there is simply no way that IBM would be able to build something as good as that.
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Could probably implement this on twitter very easily if it hasn't been already.
Or at a higher level, at the ISP level.
Targeted via DNS tunneling and all.
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like the reddit "shadowban", where your comment isn't shown to others but is visible to you in the thread.
fudge the up/down votes to make it look like it's been seen but not reacted to.
but do you need to burn cycles on AI to keep these people engaged? if someone is spamming stuff you don't want seen have them throw out a basic response and then shadowban or just straight-up ban them. if they're very negative bad actor types just give em the boot
Wouldn't this bubble system only work if you are on a platform that has it? And you can also easily test to see if you are being "bubbled".
Enough frustrated people will use AI to quickly generate the code for an alternative platform to avoid this bubble system.
It will be individual platforms all the way down...oh wait.
Welcome to the future of racial / political / ideological / social status segregation.
On platforms like Facebook or YouTube where the feed is algorithmically generated and you can't easily view a filtered list of topics (like Reddit) something like this would be very easy.
The interactions don't even need to be generated by AI, it just needs to keep you seeing interactions with other people in your social status circle. And if you try to venture too far outside of that it shadow bans you.
Heck I'd be surprised if the way the news feed algorithms work today they don't already do something like this, as a byproduct of optimising for viewership.
They'd just need to take it a bit further by preventing you from seeing viewpoints outside your circle. So taking the WWII example, people in the Nazi group would not be able to see pro-Ally content. All they'd see about Allies would be content that paints them in a bad light, and vice versa.
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It's reasonable to view Palestine as a nation and it's reasonable to look at what's going on and see forced starvation of a nation coupled to, as we are discussing here, cruelly relaxed standards for enemy combatants that make a mockery of international law and are de facto indiscriminate by any standard. Sneering about agendas is distasteful in this context. Vast majority of us aren't really keeping score or trying to advance anything at all, just horrified, as horrified as we were by 10/7, while 10% hurl insults at each other and lash out at anything anyone else says.
War is nasty. It won’t stop being
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The entire Palestinian war doctrine is built around attacking Israel, then running for cover of well intentioned Western public. Hamas just needs to survive this to declare victory, and then the clock resets until the next cycle of violence. Hamas assumes Israel will not be allowed to have a decisive win, one where its leadership down to its last junior operatives are hunted down and eliminated.
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I'm trying to understand; it sounds like you feel that an AI selecting targets and letting some live is just as bad and indiscriminate as a group forming a charter that reads "exterminate all Jews." (Paraphrasing, but the meaning is not disputed.)
That's hard to agree with. I'd rather the group that tries to save some civilians over one that targets all civilians intentionally.
Wouldn't you?
That said, we can criticize. But we should do it constructively. Provide a better option, militarily, or otherwise. (I don't have one. And anyway I believe this article is baseless.)
Short of offering options, we're just picking sides, and to me it looks like you're picking the wrong one.
And, that is bias.
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They are deliberately targeting civilians based on nebulous association knowing they will kill up to 20 others without even that thin justification.
There is absolutely reason to believe such missions could range from 10-50 civilians to one actual soldier.
They are claiming kills as justified that never received human vetting. Even the kills that would be lawful are by any reasonable analysis fruits of a poisonous tree.
Done at scale its hardly different than running a gas chamber.
Well it's like facebook pushing trump content and saying "well it's not us, it's the algorithm that decided". Same thing, I think it's to just put blame on something else, even if nobody sensible believes it.