I work in a field where privacy of customer information is protected by law and we all take this very seriously. So, no, I would not do this, and I think that police (who have vastly much more power over people's lives than I do) should not either.
That's great. Now put yourself in the same situation the cops are working with and not your arbitrarily applied restrictions. The cops clearly do not have these restrictions, so why are you applying something artificial like this?
Flock records public events. None of these apply. There is no reasonable expectation of privacy in a public space and the courts have been quite clear on this. Actual legislation would need to be passed to restrict what can be recorded in public settings. A redefinition of "public", basically. And what about the public? Would they also be barred from making their own recordings of public events? Would they be barred from sharing them with law enforcement?
Not necessarily. One could argue my cell phone's signal is in the public when I use it (home or otherwise; it is rather omnidirectional), and the records thereof aren't subject to it the same way as say a search of my phone or my home.
However, in Carpenter v. United States, government entities were found to be in violation of the fourth when accessing historical CSLI records containing the physical locations of cellphones without a search warrant (at least over a period of 7 days or more, if I understood it right). Previously, it was considered fair game under the basis of records technically turned over to a 3rd party.
Then there's United States v. Jones (2012), where it was established a GPS tracking device was attached to a car constitutes a search.
It remains to be seen how Flock will ultimately hold up in court. Although a few cases have popped up, I think it's too early to tell.
The police officer is not standing on the street corner, observing public events. They are searching a privately-held database of sensitive information whose use is governed by certain restrictions, which are being violated by the police officer. Whether or not those violations rise to the level of crime does not erase the fact that they unethical, and likely against both Flock's terms of service and the department's policy.
Pardon, but I think that someone who carries a gun (and is allowed to use it) as part of their work uniform requires stronger, not weaker ethical guidelines than someone who pushes code.
I hold myself to all sorts of standards that are not enforced by anyone outside of me. There are plenty of things I choose not do do despite a complete lack of consequence if I do them.
It's a called integrity and morality. Clearly another thing cops and their sycophants don't have.
> The Israeli Effective Altruist firm Irregular caused unsecured AI models to hack real targets.
Why are we saying it this way? They did not "cause AI to hack." This phrasing in analogous to saying "caused the bullet to fire into" instead of "shot."
Bullet trajectories are deterministic. A better analogy would be "caused a pair of trained fighting dogs to bite a passerby by leaving the gate open". There is some uncertainty and variation in the system, though gross negligence and willful endangerment is key.
The details don't matter. If you use a machine to commit murder, then you have committed murder, not the machine. The user is responsible, and the article's phrasing is an attempt to obscure that fact.
> What mechanism would an AI have today to simultaneously kill every single human being?
Lull us into a sense of complacent idleness over the course of centuries by slowly taking on more responsibility for maintaining human civilization, until we've lost all ability to think or act on our own, as in WALL-E. Then just stop helping us.
You are not smarter than your dog in dog behavior.
LLMs have a significant advantage in being trained on all attainable data of any sort about human behavior, which we've established quite a rich record of over the years.
> You are not smarter than your dog in dog behavior.
That's true, which is my point: intelligence is not a scalar value. LLMs are intelligent from us in different ways, as a result of not being human, despite having access to a record of human behavior.
To bring this back to the dog analogy: we have a rich record of dog behavior and yet people still don't know how to be smarter than dogs in dog behavior. Because we're not dogs.
Sure LLMs are different from human intelligence, but empirically this is obviously trending towards that difference being more like a superset of intelligence dimensions (as compared to any human) versus the dog/human distinction which are cognitions that forked like 80 million years ago.
The political, rather than legal, justification for unrestricted gun ownership in the US is that an armed citizenry is able to resist a tyrannical government.
Regardless of your opinion on that argument, I don't think it applies well as an argument against AI regulations.
If the trigger has already been pulled, then we're off the hook. That genie ain't going back in the bottle! Pop the champagne and order 3 more data centers, pronto.
HA! I'm of the belief that it is impossible to predict other than it's going to keep improving.
If you read this essay, you see quickly that his implicit assumption is that this is now the way things will remain. It is literally insane, given what we are seeing.
> What should we be doing instead?
I have no idea. No one does. This is a runaway train.
I guess being out of control is so intolerable to some people that their minds will not accept it.
reply