Comment by athrowaway3z
6 months ago
> Internet's "Spy by default" can become "Privacy by default".
I've been building and promoting digital signatures for years. Its bad for people and market-dynamics to have Hacker News or Facebook be the grand arbiter of everyone's identity in a community.
Yet here we are because its just that much simpler to build and use it this way, which gets them more users and money which snowballs until alternatives dont matter.
In the same vein, the idea that FHE is a missing piece many people want is wrong. Everything is still almost all run on trust, and that works well enough that very few use cases want the complexity cost - regardless of operation overhead - to consider FHE.
> I've been building and promoting digital signatures for years.
I agree with this wholeheartedly, and yet I do get the following question a lot "What's all that nonsense at the end of your emails". Any explanation is met with eye-rolls and 1000 yard stares. Have you managed to get laypeople on-board with any kind of client-side cryptography? how?
Everything needs to be built into the application in a way that users don't notice if they don't care. A signature at the end of your emails is more cryptic than the recipient's email client showing an icon with a green checkmark or something similar. I take Chrome's rollout of tls-enforcement by default as a great example of this. All I would had to say to people was "check that the padlock next to your url bar is green."
> that works well enough that very few use cases want the complexity cost
FHE + AI might be the killer combination, the latter sharing the complexity burden.
Is there any reason to think this is a meaningful combination, or do you just like saying the word AI?
Potentially the only thing AI is good at is trudging through tedium. The barrier OP identified for FHE is tedium.
Searching Google query by query as one prosecutes a question with FHE would be annoying. Asking an on-device LLM to go back and forth with Google using FHE is not. I'm also assuming that FHE won't cover all operations, and that its coverage would be both constantly changing and well documented, which is another place where an LLM could abstract away smoothly failing back from FHE to open querying.
Put another way, AIs' text-first prompt-oriented UI seems to be a good fit for FHE in a way that e.g. a dashboard is not.
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