Our expectations of how "Star Trek AI" would actually be implemented were completely different than how highly connected cloud-based services like Google Assistant work today.
Anyway, the point being, if the assistant lived entirely in your own computer, it would entirely different. Most people are not concerned about what their "computer" knows about them, they're concerned about what companies and their employees do.
Except that's what I did for many years using a computer only as a terminal for an AIX mainframe. My mail was there, I browsed what was the web, used gopher, wrote programs, all stored there.
The trope-namer (Star Trek AI) was a ship-wide AI - when considering the ship sizes, it definitely is closer to the "cloud" model and not limited to a private instances on officers' bunker/bridge terminals/tricorders. Perhaps a hardcore Trekkie could answer this question: is there any canon that defines the AIs scope? Is restricted to just one ship, or could it possible be a Federation-wide presence with a presence/instances on ships?
for example, the Star Trek universe didnt seem like a universe where you had to shop around for a trustworthy mechanic, who wouldnt overcharge or over diagnose. (e.g. headlight fluid)
Maybe the implicit trust of other people was integral to the AI being successful in that universe.
We're starting to lose that ability now.
I also think the comparison isn't perfect, because Federation vessels (in my mind) are similar to today's Navy vessels. All onboard systems are connected to other onboard, but opsec demands the ship systems not be influenced by external actors.
* Don't start that argument. Seriously.
The clearest example of extensive off-starship monitoring (within the Federation) that I can think of in TNG is a civilian (though, to be fair, a civilian in a role analogous to a "defense contractor"), Dr. Leah Brahms.
> I'd argue enough episodes are strong on fundamental individual rights, that it's hard to imagine Federation life for civilians being a surveillance state.
Actually, I'd say that its quite plausible that the Federation is a "benevolent surveillance state", that is, one with pervasive monitoring but a very low incidence of "serious" abuse (that is, the kind that substantially limits practical liberty -- casual intrusions on privacy may be more common.)
While the Federation seems keen on "fundamental individual rights", it doesn't seem to exactly mirror, say, some modern views on what those rights are -- and not just in terms of privacy.
And arguably, if she was working at Utopia Planitia Fleet Yards on the Galaxy class project, she presumably worked on a Starfleet orbital facility (technically, a number of facilities) over a span of years, where certainly enough data would be collected to make a poor replica of her personality, as in the show. I don't see anything suggesting specifically outside of basic biographical data, that she was being monitored in her civilian life.
La Forge, having interacted with that hologram extensively, and having surely read Starfleet's records... apparently didn't know she was married.
There are some cannon exceptions to this (such as in Nemesis where the subspace communication interruption affected the star charts), but even then the functionality of the ship was not impacted.
The Star Trek ships are very analogous to our own ocean-bound ships, where satellite communication is possible almost anywhere, but they don't rely on it.
So, yes, the AI is completely confined to the ship.
Was there ever an indication that their AI-level data was transferred along with their personnel file? For example did the replicator know what food to offer them on day one?
If so, then it's seems reasonable to assume that the Enterprise's AI data was backed up at Federation HQ during routine maintenance, and that the "IT department" at Federation knew exactly what you liked to do on the Holodeck.
Through specific indication from the user. Recall the constant utterance of "tea, earl grey, hot"?
Ultimately, I imagine the user's information (documents, etc) was passed directly between ships, or through (as you say) Federation HQ.
> Enterprise's AI data was backed up
Ultimately, I think this is where AI will differ from ML. An AI won't have data that isn't a part of the AI - i.e. you couldn't separate out information specific to Picard from the rest of the AI code. An AI might be able to "scribble" down some notes about interacting with Picard and pass them off to another ship's AI, but the second AI would never treat Picard quite the same way as the first, even with those notes.
This stems from my belief that how ML interprets data is different from how an AI would. If you were to copy all of the data used to build a ML model and apply it again, you'd end up with the same ML model. An AI, on the other hand, if built twice twice from the same data would end creating two separate AIs.
Instead I get the current evolution. I want a 3rd party.
The same thing comes to my every day of usage, I'm still on win 7, and short of leaving Linux(yes I should have already), I can't upgrade without becoming a product.
I want what we all imagined and dreamt of, and I pay for it.
What I won't do, is become a product.
Instead I'm stuck with multiple fake accounts on Gmail, using a pseudonym on everything(including programming contract sites such as upwork), just to keep some semi iota of privacy, and to enjoy the benefits of what we all want.
Imho we need a new major party to emerge, that will charge an initial fee(like windows 7), and let us do what we want with those services(with caveats of course).
But I fear we won't get that anymore.
It's not that complicated. Use a common distro like Ubuntu and everything's documented online.
But my main coding(admittedly amateur and earning very little) uses .net. on top of that most of the games I play to relax are Windows does only(as far as I know for most).
O keep meaning to make time, but it just hasn't happened yet. I don't get paid as a programmer (English teacher), so I need to spend my free time earning money on what I know.
As always, one day when I have money to spare(or time, which is basically the same thing haha).
I will fully admit I have not spent enough time in Mac to figure out the file system, but from what (little) I have seen, your not in control.
I like my pc because I can see what sub-processes are running, who is taking up how much memory, install things to where I want and if worse comes to worse, manually change how windows runs. (I apologise if you can do all that in Mac, as I said, I don't have the experience certificate - I bounced off it hard).
To answer your questions, you're in complete control with macOS, you can turn off SIP, turn off Gatekeeper and install whatever kernel extensions you want. Apple doesn't snoop on you like with Win10 telemetry.
Where technology has failed us most is in the utterly stagnant evolution and maturation of secure private networks. The following is a utopian notion, but had private networks seen as much R&D as the public clouds, they would be significantly less cumbersome than today's clunky VPNs. Imagine all of your devices collaborate directly with one another and with you on your own secure private network—no central cloud servers needed. Your personal assistant is software running on a computer you own rather than a third-party's centralized server.
I still feel this ideal will eventually be realized, but for the time being, no large technology company is willing to take the necessary risks to buck the trend of centralization.
The biggest fiction propped by up centralization and cloud proponents is that it would be impossible to provide the kind of utility seen in Cortana, Siri, Google Assistant, Alexa, et al without a big public cloud. A modern desktop computer has ample computational capability to convert voice to text, parse various phrases, manage a calendar, and look up restaurants on Yelp. Absolutely nothing the public clouds provide strikes me as something my own computer would struggle to do (to be clear, I would expect a local agent would be able to reach out to third-party sites such as Yelp or Amazon at your command in order to execute your desires, but they would do so directly, not via an intermediary).
A few years back, when Microsoft was at the beginning of its Nadella renaissance, I had hoped it would be the first technology titan to disintermediate the cloud and make approachable and easily-managed personal private networks a thing. Microsoft's legacy of focusing on desktop computers would have made it well-situated to reaffirm your home computer as an important fixture in your multi-device life. They could have co-opted Sun's old bad tagline: "Your network is your computer." But they elected to just follow the now-conventional public cloud model, reducing everyone's quite-powerful home computer to yet another terminal of centralized cloud services. Disappointing, but I think it is ultimately their loss. I suspect a lot of money is on the table for someone to realize a coherent easy-to-use multi-device private network model that respects consumer privacy by executing its principal computation within the network.
Not just secure private networks, but secure and programmable personal computing in general. The amount that I can actually do with my workstation PCs, let alone laptops or mobile phones, is now thoroughly restricted compared to problems that require a full-scale datacenter.
I originally enjoyed computing because, so to speak, it was an opportunity to own and craft my own tools, rather than being forced into the role of consuming someone else's pre-prepared product. Now we're being boxed into the consumer role in computing, too.
idk man. Computers are powerful. I like seeing what I can do with them.
I think that as far as the nascence of these features goes, the cloud model will beat the on-prem features any day of the week for several reasons. Lack of configuration to set up, ease of use from anywhere without network configuration, etc. are table stakes. But the biggest at this point is the sheer amount of training and A/B testing data you can ingest to determine what is useful for your end users.
The velocity of cloud-based products is nothing short of amazing and I doubt that on-prem will compete with the feature set and ease of use of always connected solutions until there are feature-complete, mature cloud versions to then bring in.
And, for better or worse, Dragon's text-to-speech is pretty damned good after a rather minimal amount of training.
I don't think there's anything stopping voice and intent recognition from coming back to our personal machines other than the ability to keep making money from having it come up to the cloud.
When I was working on Google Search what really astounded me is how we could leverage hundreds of machines in a single request and still have virtually no cost per search. The reason was that each search used a tiny amount of the total resources of those machines and for a very short time. A total search might have (made up numbers) one minute of computation time, but spread across 200 machines it only takes 300ms from start to finish.
That's the benefit the cloud will provide. You don't want to have a 1000-machine data center available at all times to store billions of possible documents and process your requests with low latency. If we went to a private-network model I fear that the turn-around time would be a lot closer to a human assistant. You'd ask it to do things and then it would get back to you sometime later (seconds? minutes? hours?) when it had finished it's research and come up with an answer.
Quick shoutout to Urbit here.
I would like to say that the cloud we have is a privacy concern because we don't know the full scope of data collected, nor what happens to it, nor do we own any of "our" data once it's in the cloud. But not every cloud would have to be that.
There's a perfect world where one wouldn't have to be paranoid about this stuff, but it's not what we have right now.
Maybe someday that will be a realistic endeavor, but it would take a lot of effort to set up and maintain your own personal versions of all of google's services, and integrate them
It's just not easy to do, both in setup and maintenance effort. Most people would not care about their privacy nearly enough to justify that.
But it stores the private data about your location, your searches, your purchases. this could even be an encrypted private fire-walled bit of cloud rather than a robot in your house.
The point being your AI is serving you. And you can delete/edit this private data (or even the whole AI) if you wish.
When my AI can talk directly to your AI, we can transfer mail etc without cloud services. If it knows our social network, perhaps it can remotely store encrypted backups of our data, but only with people who we already trust.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligent_agent
Perhaps using Urbit as the network architecture since it already has pki. As Yarvin calls it, true 'personal cloud computation'.
Really it's the only sane way to live in the 21st century.
I've designed my home automation system on the concept that the only route to the Internet is my computer (and therefore, my home automation software). My computer is a secure, well-managed intermediary that can store my data, and decide when and how to receive and send data to the Internet.
The idea of dozens of Internet-connected devices in the home is :terrifying: in comparison, especially considering that badly-secured IoT devices are now powering some of the biggest botnets out there.
My light switch, however, cannot talk to the Internet. It has local-only communication protocols that are simple. It knows how to be told to turn the lights on or off or dim or a handful of other settings, but it's literally incapable of doing anything else... and why would I want anything different? Why should my light switch have Bluetooth and Wi-Fi and software updates and a miniature flavor of Linux... It's a switch!
I suspect that chances of would-be burglars or identity thieves breaking into Google data are pretty slim, in comparison to a home-installed system.
OTOH both Google and a private person can be strong-armed by a court order, or even a three-letter agency, to open up their AI knowledge vaults.
It's like saying "People would never break into a bank, when they could break into someone's house and steal their stuff"
It may be easier to break into someone's home-brew system, but generally it would be unlikely to happen unless you were being otherwise targetted. Whereas google has a lot of users data, which could make it a more attractive target.
If you're a "person of interest", you'll be attacked either way.
If you're just a regular person, like me, you won't likely be targeted. But my chances of getting a collateral damage are much higher in a centralized system: when it's broken into, my data have a chance of being siphoned off along with data of someone less ordinary, who was the target of the attack.
But there's a third case: "normal boring people" become interesting just by being together in a big group, even if no particular "person of interest" is among them.
Just how "home-brew" are we talking here? If there's any web-facing code that you didn't write yourself, whether commercial or open-source or whatever, that's a target for attackers that just scan everything looking for known vulnerable services.
If it is entirely custom, I'm fairly sure there are a few classes of common security errors that can be reasonably well tested for without direct human involvement. Which brings back the threat of attackers just scanning for all available targets.
The odds of someone physically taking my computer and decrypting my data are zero (128-bit encryption for the win!).
The odds of someone electronically breaking into my computer are higher.
The odds of my data being misused or misaccessed at Google are one: it will happen.
When's the last time Google risked itself or business or any tech ceo risked their livelihood for the sake of the greater good? The problem isn't necessarily the knowing everything part, it's who does what with it that's the problem. I can't really think of any company or person with influence in tech that'd be willing to dive onto that bombshell to protect us all.
February of 2001.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Nacchio
The former CEO of Qwest, a massive telco, spent years in prison for insider trading. He says this is because he resisted the NSA's demands to tap Qwest's network and hand over customer data.
A truly user-aligned AI assistant would be great. Ideally in the future these things will not be tied to indirect business models, but rather will be something you buy and all data/services will be under your control.
In the Star Trek world they had no advertising because they were a communist society. Everyone dressed the same or slightly differently based on rank. It's interesting how the new movies play over that.
In Star Trek you couldn't choose your AI. In our world you can. At the start of their development most of them are targeted at selling you stuff - but the industry is young and who knows where it will go.
While there are elements of communism depicted in the Federation as a whole, those are facets of a global post-scarcity society that has somehow evolved beyond the less "progressive" bits of human behavior. I'd argue that the biggest fantasy of Star Trek isn't warp drive, but the notion that humans are somehow less violent than Klingons.
You cannot compare the world's biggest seller of advertisement space with the ST universe. The motivation's aren't aligned: Google/Alphabet want to make sales based on my information.
I agree that I found these oh so clever AI fantasies interesting in my youth, still do to a degree. But I always pictured the data being held inaccessible to humans in general ("Where's my wife right now?") and not in the hands of a golden few with no oversight.
Remember kids: Don't intoxicate yourself with substances we do not condone. :)
The public areas which were under surveillance on Star Trek tended to be only on military ships and star bases. I don't remember seeing much surveillance in public areas on planets. There certainly wasn't the sense that everyone was under surveillance on every street and in every shop, unlike most people in major metropolitan areas on Earth today. Nor was there anything on Star Trek like the ever-present spy satellites that can see in great detail anywhere on Earth today.
For the public areas which could be observed through cameras on Star Trek, the surveillance seemed mild compared to today because of Star Trek's lack of massive computers and artificial intelligence analysing what is seen for anomalies, using facial recognition, constantly recording everything and having those recordings instantly available for playback, sophisticated search, and computer analysis.
The reading and viewing habits of Star Trek denizens weren't recorded and analysed, unlike those of many people on Earth. Their positions weren't tracked wherever they went, unlike those of many people on Earth.
The so-called "24/7 surveillance" of Star Trek was very limited and even quaint compared to what we live under on Earth today.
Plus, most folks think ST is where hippies took over. Center of Federation is in San Francisco...
Incorrect, in the original series, there was a currency ("credits") that was explicitly referenced several times; it was also referenced in at least one, and possibly more, early TNG episodes.
Sometime in the TNG era, Roddenberry laid down an edict that money, including the "credits" that had been repeatedly referenced previously, did not exist in the federation, and so they weren't mentioned again.
I don't think that's really accurate; the Ferengi were portrated as greedy merchants focused on profit starting fairly early in TNG without direct reference to currency (gold -- not the later "gold-pressed latinum" -- was mentioned, IIRC, as an item of interest, but not in any context which implied it was used as currency); I think gold-pressed latinum as introduced as a currency in DS9 because DS9's role as commerce hub was central to the theme of the series, and having currency just made telling stories about that a lot more convenient.
Throughout much of history, gold in standardized sizes was a common form of currency. Gold-pressed latinum in standardized "slips", "strips", "bars", and "bricks" is exactly the same thing.
Star Trek still had merchants who sold various wares. That would not be profitable if nothing was scarce.
They still had planets that lacked necessary medicine, requiring The Enterprise or some other ship to go on mercy missions to deliver the meds.
The Star Trek universe had pleasure planets which had highly desirable things that other planets did not.
There was clearly a shortage of starships and crew, as The Enterprise explored alone and not in a fleet, and couldn't just create a hundred others to help it when it was attacked by some alien enemy.
The Enterprise couldn't even use their on-ship replicators to make themselves some dilithium crystals (fuel) when they ran low.
The Star Trek fantasy is, "Computer, what were the principal historical events on the planet Earth in the year 1987?", and it could totally answer that without sending your entire fucking message history to google for deep AI inspection.
That's part of the Star Trek fantasy. But so is, "Computer, locate Commander Riker" and "Computer, use personal logs and personality profiles from compiled databases to create a personality simulation of Dr. Leah Brahms."
Which is kind of funny, because even if it might be accessed by personal mobile devices, the Star Trek "library computer" AI was never "small and physical, easy for a single person to entirely own and unable to remember more details than a human", it was an aspect of a large server (or networked cluster, the actual architecture is somewhat vague) that was part of a capital ship or base, had access in the server/cluster to a library of very nearly all generally available knowledge and extensive personal information about both its users and about people with little direct connection (and could reach out across a galactic network to access additional remote information sources to handle requests).
"Unfamiliar algorithms run on machines far away" is much more like the source of the "Star Trek dream" than "small and physical, easy for a single person to entirely own and unable to remember more details than a human".
Not just crewmembers: TNG showed some of the broader implications (both useful and creepy) of the convenience-oriented panopticon, e.g., when Geordi used the Enterprise library computer to construct a simulation from data (including personality profiles) of Dr. Leah Brahms, who later meets him (and encounters the simulation.) (S306 "Booby Trap", S416 "Galaxy's Child")
I suspect a huge part of the panopticon culture would be / is being informed that you're being peeped at. 99% of the time someone asking "Computer locate commander Riker" involved commander Riker knowing all about who's looking for him and why and having a substantial conversation with the requester.
I don't recall any plot along the lines of Deanna getting jealous and spamming the computer all night asking where Riker is and he better not be in that cute ensign's bedroom... Because it seems logical the computer would inform him each time and he would eventually tire of the interruption and nature would take its course, WRT his relationship with Deanna.
A better analogy would be technically I could walk up to the company president's office and stalk him, but culturally that is so not going to fly and I would have a lot of explaining to do. Merely using the computer instead of walking there in flesh isn't a major cultural shift.
However, every single "holodeck creeper" plot line involved the simulated attractive real world woman not knowing she's being simulated until the plot reached maximum spaghetti spilling cringe, which is one of the few Trek panopticon situations where people being spied on did NOT know they were being spied on, which seems very un-trek, although it made for some entertaining stories.
An alternative interpretation is I believe over the course of the series every attractive woman on the ship was simulated on the holodeck at least once by at least one lonely guy, and its possible that culturally they just got used to it, although I find that unlikely. People do get conditioned to become used to the weirdest things, so its not out of the realm of possibility. Possibly a culture of what happens in vegas stays in vegas develops and its just the sexism of the TV show that they never showed the women turning the tables on their fellow male crewmen on the holodeck.
ML relies on large data-sets and if anyone tried to release a personal device it simply wouldn't even work, let alone compete with the mass surveillance google/ms/amazon are bringing to bear.
Unless the state-of-the-art in AI suddenly morphs, we seem to be stuck between giving up our privacy or having vaguely intelligent AI.
I personally fall heavily on the privacy side of stuff, but I can see the intellectual and commercial appeal of pretending it doesn't matter in order to get there.
What needs to happen is a company needs to come along and create AI that is trained off of generalized information... some kind of socially accepted public data set... then the trained core is sold as a seed to individuals who then feed it their personal data.
It'll be the equivalent of buying an AI "teenager" and slowly training them to be an "adult".
As sensors become richer and the data becomes more valuable to the ML, consumers are becoming more aware of their privacy.
That means to get to a 'good seam' in the future instead of trawling through trash, you're going to have to convince millions of people their interests won't be affected.
That means in time there is an opportunity for a Google-killer with a different business model not based on using the raw data OR using by the use of intelligent agents. Google goes down because its stakeholders are contingent on getting to the raw data.
Google has a strong incentive to not allow their aggregated user data to leave Google-- the behavioral data Google collects is the reason why Google is valuable; if they start shipping that data off to third parties, suddenly the third parties don't need Google anymore.
(Same with Facebook-- they're not "selling" your data; they're selling the opportunity to target you based on your data, but the data itself is too valuable to Facebook to sell.)
Except the government who gets unfettered access. Not into conspiracy theories but Im definitely not a fan of this (and it goes for all social media and technology companies)
Does you have a source for that?
Yep. They all do it.
[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/05/technology/subpoenas-and-g...
Can you provide a link to your claim or it is just your opinion because there is no proof of that?
[1] http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/special/politics/prism-...
1. That information were secret (you and service/device/implant) but not a whole company and its third party interests.
2. It wasn't making money for a third party after the initial purchase price for the device, service, etc.
So, better, but nowhere near "on the device only".
Cite?
First party report of reviewing recordings: https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/2wzmmr/everythi...
News article with more investigation and citings: http://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2015/03/12/strangers-apple-...
Siri Privacy Policy excerpts:
When you use Siri the things you say will be recorded and sent to Apple to process your requests. Your device will also send Apple other information, such as your name and nickname; the names, nicknames, and relationships (e.g., “my dad”) found in your contacts, song names in your collection, the names of your photo albums, and the names of apps installed on your device (collectively, your “User Data”)
[...]
By using Siri, you agree and consent to Apple’s and its subsidiaries’ and agents’ transmission, collection, maintenance, processing, and use of this information, including your voice input and User Data
But does it? Does it have to know your birthday? (leave alone the fact that bdays are somehow part of a superkey for your identity).
Why should it know my residence, my spouse, or my CC# (with Apple's TouchID maybe it won't need to)?
Google's concept of AI is too creepy for me. It can be useful without being creepy. They're not even trying to make it less creepy.
Overlay on this the subtext that NSA and other tla's are monitoring all this (leave alone other countries). While I may trust Google, I don't trust them to not be forced to collude with the government.
How could it be otherwise?