China using big data to detain people before crime is committed
theglobeandmail.com
theglobeandmail.com
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psycho-Pass
TLDR:
> The story takes place in an authoritarian future dystopia, where omnipresent public sensors continuously scan the mental states of every passing citizen. Collected data on both present mentality and aggregated personality data is used to gauge the probability of that citizen committing a crime, the rating referred to as that citizen's Psycho-Pass.
Bunnie talks about it on his blog here: https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=4297
Here's one where he tears down a flicker flame lamp.
Isn't there large issues in USA colleges with students from China cheating left and right?
It's much easier to copy.
is very reproducible, by USA or anyone. They for decades had 10% GDP growth: BY REDUCING TAXES. Not something popular in California - due to Cali math(CA tax payer does not understand that lower taxes = higher tax revenue )
Have you done your homework on your tax claim? Because it isn't actually guaranteed that lower tax rates will lead to higher tax revenue, it depends on the specifics of the tax regime and proposed cut.
Small or big: cutting taxes provides growth. Including more tax revenue.
When there is both political and economical will, the country will be able to mass-produce again. Right now there is no economic incentive to do so.
Also, it would probably be harder to bootstrap 2020s-era manufacturing infrastructure than it would be to bootstrap 1940s-era infrastructure.
They weren't idle (look into what clothes washing alone used to take), but the war effort certainly shifted priorities and also increased the number of women without domestic responsibilities.
I wonder if that's still possible. The US was an industrial country at the time; they had to convert existing factories to other forms of production (e.g., from cars to bombers). Now, manufacturing is much less prevalent; the US would have to create capacity from scratch.
Also, manufacturing is much less productive than other economic activities - that's why it's done in poorer countries that don't have better options while the US does higher value things (ignoring for this purpose the very important issues of the distribution of those higher returns). I wonder what the blow to the economy would be if the US suddenly had to switch large amounts of resources to manufacturing.
Finally, given that manufacturing is no longer the cutting edge of business, I wonder if it might be easier to build capacity than we think. As an example, t-shirts are mostly made outside the US; I would guess that if there was suddenly a critical need for them, the US could ramp up capacity quickly.
There's the flying geese paradigm (FGP) that theorizes the rapid industrialization of Asia. It theorizes the movement of manufacturing form country to country as well as a process of industrial upgrading.
For example, manufacturing began in London, moved to the US, and eventually someone built a factory in Japan. In all these circumstances in order to stay competitive - they had to move to a country with cheaper labor or manufacture a more advanced product with a bigger profit margin. However their competitors catch up and they need to do the same thing again. Find a better more complex product to manufacture or find a way to manufacture it cheaper overseas.
The US started to lose its manufacturing jobs and thus its middle class starting from the 1950s. Most of these jobs were replaced by the service industry for half the pay. Today the service industry employs the most poor Americans today, your cashiers and waiters, and they are soon to be eliminated.
I've been researching manufacturing because I want to make some toothbrushes. In China, I could make them for less than 25 cents. I'm not sure how much it would cost in the USA, and a lot of my colleagues tell me that most manufacturers won't even call them back because they're so small. China on the other hand doesn't care - they're happy to sell you 1000 toothbrushes for 25 cents each.
I don't know what's better. To manufacture in the USA and not be able to compete on price - one of the biggest factors in a purchase or manufacture them in China and be competitive... Well I guess the answer is simple, if you want to make a business, you need to be profitable. If it's not profitable in the US, then China might be your only answer.
Post-war, America didn't spend a single cent on rebuilding infrastructure lost to bombing, while the other major powers needed a decade of austerity just to get back to where they started. Britain was still repaying the Anglo-American war loan in 2006.
America did an excellent job of scaling up manufacturing capacity during WWII, but the factors that made it such a dominant force were largely accidents of geography.
America didn't spend a single cent on rebuilding infrastructure lost to bombing
America spent a lot in helping rebuild infrastructure elsewhere.
America has had 150 years of peace and stability. The Soviet Union was ravaged by a traumatizing war at home and before that a major civil war and revolution.
"America doesn't like they way you do civilization. We don't like the way you brought 650 million people out of extreme poverty in a generation. If you have to use authoritarian tactics to do that, it's better that they stay poor and addicted to opium. You have to disband now."
"Oh, okay. Sorry America. We recognize the error of our ways. We will stop being China now."
Samsung for example is making the majority of their phones in Vietnam now.
US imports from Vietnam have gone from nothing to $50+ billion per year in 20 years. A 100 fold increase. It's equivalent to 1/4 of their entire economy and it's almost entirely a deficit. We're going to build large regional competitors to China for strategic purposes. Conveniently, they can also buy up US debt with all of those dollars we're pouring into their economy.
Some of this is because China's manufacturing costs have climbed so much, some of it is intentional strategic emphasis (as the TPP was / is meant to be). The US very clearly has shifted its political interest in Vietnam for example.
Even the belief that the rich/powerful mist have some sort of virtue is only one perspective that conveniently allows the US the moral high ground.
No country, no person, no thing is perfect. All evil comes from things that pretend to be and act as if they were. The humans that pretend to or want to be gods inevitably are the one who dehumanize others and so become demons.
But when you argue about a topic that affects the security of the US, there really is no such thing as "moral high ground".
Edited to add:
I believe China holds that true as well when discussing the security of China, considering the number of spies that are in the US.
So all your concerns boil down to us-vs-them tribalism?
I'm not arbitrarily in favor of everything the US does, but on the margin, I am in favor of policies that optimize this country's success.
http://fortune.com/2016/03/31/united-states-manufacturing-ch...
a sufficiently layered net will pick up second and third order consequential effects that are not formally protected by anti-bias laws, but end up effectively mapping onto the sorts of people in categories the laws were intended to protect.
that's the fundamental problem as I see it, and it's necessarily complicated and nuanced.
https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/27/17054740/palantir-predict...
I think the name of the company is highly apt.
The ring was created by Sauron and embedded most of his life-force, and nobody alive at the time of the LotR had enough strength to resist his will.
/s
Personally I think Tom is one of the most important moments of the book, but not as part of the plot; rather, it's fascinating to somebody who considers the LoTR as an archetypal myth, because Tom's identity is intentionally kept mysterious, even when his powers are not.
A fun thought invoked by this, and given Tolkien's intent to create a creation myth for our Earth, is somewhere out there Tom still sits in his forest, waiting, for when the might of the Valar fades. Feels almost Lovecraftian.
"Possible Bubbles of Spacetime Curvature in the South Pacific"
Well, stuff happens; thanks.
Fortunately we have something called Habeas Corpus
Habeas corpus after 9/11 is not what it used to be. ACLU has been fighting several cases of clear violations.
Compare that to China, where your best hope is you know someone in power who can try and put in a good word for you. I couldn't imagine living in a system like that where the juggernaut of gov't power is effectively unstoppable.
The notion of enemy is now in the US criminal law. The President of the United States has now the power to designate either US citizens for foreign citizens as enemy. The way it's defined includes not just combatants, but also "persons who are engaged in conflict against the USA" in general level. Expressing solidarity is enough.
Same for someone who want to purchase large quality of fertilizer for no real needs.
There is just another form of extrajudicial population control. They are using this as a way to justify arbitrarily rounding up people who have long wanted to be free of Chinese rule.
When you look at successful police operations that have prevented terrorism, a lot of it comes down to luck. Someone had an informant who heard someone say something about a bomb.
There just simply aren't enough police in the US to follow-up on every suspicious activity. Particularly now when even mundane activities can be regarded as suspicious.
This is all very fine to want, but it's an entirely different conception of government than the one described in the constitution. It's a government much closer to the one in Russia, or China, or Turkey, or North Korea. While it may be used to, in part, fight crime, the line item that justifies the surveillance state is the ability to invest in a guarantee of power.
Trying to turn the US into this state is just going to lead to abuse of power, abuse of people without voices, and a much more wasteful budget: infrastructure spending by investment in paranoia, with a return of more power by fear. Literally government by terrorism.
While I'm sympathetic to your point, it can be taken too far. Government does provide security to its citizens, and it does that partly by gaining prior intelligence about suspicious activities. Some things should be investigated - if someone posted online about committing murder, in detail and with clear plans, I'd hope law enforcement would check it out.
Under Trump it feels like those same people mostly gave up.
The machine that has been consistently moving these things along for 40-50 years now, transcends the parties. The parties have their marching orders, they largely obey. Politicians come and go. Feinstein for one example, if she gets replaced (which she will eventually, she's 84 years old), the anti-privacy pushers will find a replacement vessel.
Pinning any change here on trump is like blaming the crash on a pilot who took charge after the engines already blew. There is little to no recognition of the abuses of federal government in the government itself, and not for a while.
If any authoritarian power rises, it will be because the democrats are too busy shoveling their shit out of view to put up any real fight. Just look at how blame for a mediocre-at-best platform was shifted to russian propaganda, as if it could have possibly moved the needle more than the hundreds of millions of “legit” propaganda spent by the democrats, as if Bernie Sander's continued popularity doesn't point to a way to strong support in the future that they continue to reject for more unpopular, centrist, neoliberals.
The US State Department, and the entire US government, has for generations made human rights central to US foreign policy. It's believed that people with freedom and opportunity become vibrant trade partners and allies, not enemies in war. Democracies don't start wars against other democracies, as an historical rule.
That historic policy is widely believed to have given the US enormous influence, as people generally feel favorably towards others whose central goal is freedom and opportunity for all.
The current State Dept (including the Secretary of State) and other leading government officials have openly forewarn support for human rights. The Secretary of State said making money is more important (which fits the approach of many in the oil industry, and he was CEO of Exxon). Others deemphasize it for no given reason, and advocate even eliminating the State Dept in favor of military power.
> a continuation of politics that hardly offered Obama straightforward leverage
A lack of straightforward leverage is pretty normal for international relations; it's the sea in which diplomats swim. Almost every great thing that has been accomplished in that field was done in that environment.
Rhetorically; the substance is less consistent.
> Democracies don't start wars against other democracies, as an historical rule.
There is basically no empirical evidence for this popular claim (the relative rarity of democracy-on-democracy war does not require any more than the small proportion of potential historical pairs of nations that consist of two democratic nations to explain it.)
> Rhetorically; the substance is less consistent.
Agreed, but the results are incredible on the scale of human history. Under Pax Americana, look at the amazing spread of liberty and democracy, and of prosperity, to people worldwide.
But yes, more should have been done. Too often the U.S. sacrificed others, on large scales, to narrow interests.
>> Democracies don't start wars against other democracies, as an historical rule.
> There is basically no empirical evidence for this popular claim
It's hard to prove a negative through evidence, but can you cite and exception? And looking at the obverse, progress in international peace and cooperation, have non-democracies ever achieved anything like the EU or NATO? Remember Europe before democracy.
No, it's not, in the usual scientific sense of proof rather than some absolutist one; you show the expected incidence of the inhibitory effect did not exist, and then show that the actual value (either by surveying the whole universe of concern or a random subset) is below that expected value to a degree that makes it improbable that it occurs by chance, while controling for other known sources of variability.
> but can you cite and exception?
Sure, if you use a definition of Democracy that isn't so narrow that the expected number of wars if democracies on both sides isn't far less than one, you will also find lots of actual wars between Democracies. Even if you ignore wars where the only pair of democracies are a separatist group and the unit they are separating from (e.g., the American Revolution), there are plenty (War of 1812, for instance, or more recently some parts of the Yugoslav Wars.)
Wikipedia has more discussion and examples:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_between_democra...
> have non-democracies ever achieved anything like the EU or NATO?
Yes, non-democracies have created both continent-spanning multi-national supergovernments like the EU and wide regional military alliances like NATO.
In fact, they did both long before democracies did.
> if you use a definition of Democracy that isn't so narrow ...
The word has a meaning; these aren't narrow definitions any more than saying 'Manchester United isn't a basketball team' depends on how narrow your definition is of 'basketball'.
At what point precisely did the Westminster system, one of the more common models of modern democracy, become a democracy?
Note that the later you peg and the more narrowly you define “democracy” to justify it, the more you make the case that there have been so few democracies that, given the actual historicsl frequency of interstate wars and the number of nations available at any time, the number of wars expected to have a democracy on either side is expected to be near zero even if democracy in both sides of a dyad does nothing to decrease the probability of war between the countries.
(Also note if you claim it's not a democracy because it had territories unrepresented in the national government despite the form of government being democratic, that has the same effect—and even rules out the modern US as a democracy, as well.)
The facts differ from your claims. All you need to do is look at history, from Woodrow Wilson to FDR to Kennedy to Reagan to Bush Jr to Obama and everyone in between. All embraced these things and acted on them.
The current nationalists want to paint it as idealistic, but in fact it has been the mainstream - and very effective - for generations.
So, do what about Xi exactly? Nothing. There's absolutely nothing Trump or Obama could or would be able to do about Xi's power grab. Obama would have issued a PR about concerns of this or that, and it would have been meaningless in actuality (other than making a small number of people feel slightly better for a minute).
China has been authoritarian-heavy in one form or another for most of the last 300 years or so of modern history. Smacking them on the nose about it isn't going to accomplish much. It'll work about as well as it has with Russia over the prior century.
All of the surrounding nations would agree with your accusation of authoritarian tendencies from China and would eagerly align themselves with each other and the US in order to level the playing field between them and China.
Another thing that could be done is to shame them on the international stage into adopting policies that restrict their ability to pollute, and subsequently slow their growth.
The comment adds no knowledge to the discussion - I'm no wiser after reading it - and is inflammatory, risking further derailment of the discussion. Mostly it communicates the emotional state of the commenter, in regard to this issue, when the comment was written.
There are times and places to do that, but they are very common and we also need the other kind of interaction: A very important problem is how to have substantive, valuable discussion of public affairs, and I'm searching for a solution.
Who are we to change anything about china? Talk about hubris. Considering the horrors and war crimes we committed against china for 150 years, I don't think china is interested on our input.
> After reading about the uigher concentration camps in China
That's as silly as a chinese person saying after reading about the native american "concentrations", they need to take a stand.
> I don’t want to help the government terrorize my friends in China anymore.
Your friends? If the government is "terrorizing" your friends, what are they doing in china?
Get off your high horse. We aren't the world police and we certainly aren't saints. Pretending we are "moral" while destabilizing countries and murdering hundreds of thousands of innocent people is rather hypocritical.
Are you seriously whataboutism events from a few hundred years ago? Wow. Just wow.
People in China cannot speak. We have to speak for them somehow. Here is a snippet from a reddit post from a student in China.
“ It's been 4 days now. I look around, everything looks the same, but I know, it's not the same world anymore. He choose to become a dictator officially maybe means nothing to most foreigners, but as a Chinese born and raised in this land, I know it's just the beginning of a series following "1984" episodes, and maybe even worse: Cultural Revolution 2.0. This may not happend in 10 years, but I live here, we live here, someday, something very bad is gonna happen again, and I can't do anything to stop or evade it.
A lot people around me seems calm and quite. Maybe they already learned to "shut up and having fun while you still can", or, maybe they are just like me: too shocked and depressed to think of anything to comment. I feel so helpless and scaried, it's like, how do I put this? sitting in a biulding which is on fire, you watch the black smokes and red flame coming from the bottom, but you can't find a way out of your room, there isn't any extinguisher in the room neither. All you can do is just sitting in the corner, hugging yourself tight, waiting for that momnent to come, in despair and silence.
sorry my English sucks, I tried my best to write in English. As a native Chinese, I can't stop to feel pessimistic about the future, hell, now I know we are doomed, it'll be easier to suffer if just push me off the building instead of letting me watch it burning for decades.“
“’m studying in a university in China rn and holy fuck I thought I entered an alternate reality, my classmates were all talking and worrying about the issue on the internet few days ago before they were censored out but after that , no one dares to talk about it in the campus , it’s dead silence , I KNOW everyone cares but everyone is just so afraid , this is pretty much a 1984 scenario in real life and I don’t know what else can we do. I guess they have already won in this point . :(”
Try a few decades.
> People in China cannot speak. We have to speak for them somehow.
Goodness.
> Here is a snippet from a reddit post from a student in China.
You mean the website full of russian, chinese, european and american propagandists where you can't take anything seriously? Where anyone can pretend to be anything and lie all day long? Did you write that reddit comment?
> sorry my English sucks
Going through your comment history, your english is fine. I don't know why you are pretending and faking as if your english sucks.
> I tried my best to write in English. As a native Chinese,
I thought native chinese couldn't speak? "People in China cannot speak. We have to speak for them somehow. "
> I can't stop to feel pessimistic about the future, hell, now I know we are doomed, it'll be easier to suffer if just push me off the building instead of letting me watch it burning for decades.
Is this for real? Are you gordon chang?
What would be new would be formal preemptive detention by generic factors. Then again there was news covered by the Guardian on a police black site in Chicago that held thousands of largely black detainees without lawyers.
Agreed, but technology changes everything (otherwise, what are we all doing?). Transporting goods by boat is thousands of years old (or probably more), but modern shipping has a completely different impact than millennia of wooden wind- and human-powered boats.
Surveillance is old; modern data collection and analysis is a whole different animal.
Not only was the drug legal, the premise of bringing people in has nothing to do with the plot and theme of the book.
If it's the latter, however, this is not interesting and there is no reasonable discussion to be had.
This is a loaded research question, of course, because it's studying something that we find abhorrent: Prosecuting people for crimes they haven't actually committed.
Scientifically it's super interesting. Socially and ethically it's a minefield.
Every apprehension under this program is a crime by any definition other than the arbitrary declaration of an illegitimate regime.
It would be absolutely astonishing if the people apprehended were likely to illegally kidnap and hold at least 1 citizen in their basement for at least the length of time that these people are detained.
Thus it can pretty much only increase crime.
It's possible that once enough people who on balance might commit a crime are arrested or impeded, then crime will indeed decrease.
Even if this system works, people who have not committed a crime (yet) are innocent.
Taking an innocent person, and improsoning him against his will is a crime, pretty extreme one.
Even if this system works really well, it's hard to imagine that the crimes it prevents can be more extreme than the crimes it commits.
Every criminal justice system has to balance (1) the risk of convicting the innocent, (2) the risk of letting the true crime-committer commit additional crimes (due to not being caught or caught later), and (3) the risk of being abused. We don’t like pre-crime convictions because we believe risks 1 and 3 outweigh any gains in 2. A culture with a different balance of risks, however, could come to a different but consistent conclusion. I don’t like that conclusion. But it’s at least debatable. Putting political enemies in jail is not.
I don't think so. You could also likely randomly detain people, and the fear you would cause may also reduce crime rates. That doesn't make it right.
This system is causing a chilling effect on creativity, differentiation and individualism. It forces people to hide their real thoughts and live a life of constant pretence/lies. It makes the safe-space (the creative-space) to shrink to the interior of one's head. It destroys the ability of population to protest and thus participate in the political life of the country.
This is probably impossible to know, since totalitarian regimes are known for providing completely fake statistics - and it's usually not like they have one set of numbers (real), but publish another (fake), it's that the whole pipeline is hopelessly corrupt so nobody knows the real numbers. USSR was notoriously plagued by this problem - not only for crime, but also for other things like economical statistics.
probacriminals
Consider the following cases:
Arresting the guy who kidnapped someone.
Arresting the guy in the act of trying to kidnap someone.
Arresting the guy who set out to kidnap someone.
Arresting the guy who is preparing his home to hold a kidnapped victim and is identifying a target.
Arresting the guy who researched how to kidnap someone.
Arresting the guy who has expressed strong interest in kidnapping someone.
Which of these is wrong? I think we would generally agree the last two are, but which of the middle ones do we draw a line at?
When he is A kidnapper who has yet to kidnap?
Of course, if two or more people are involved and only one has a change of heart and stops actively participating (but doesn't take active steps to foil the plan in motion) the one who backed out is still (along with all the others) guilty of conspiracy. And that's true even before anyone gets to the point where they could be individually charged with an attempt, as long as one overt act toward the criminal goal has been done, the whole group is guilty of conspiracy.
And in the US, certain acts are often criminalized specifically when done with the intent to support some other target crime which is not negated by later backing out of the target crime (and in fact allows you to be arrested and convicted when you never got further than the preparatory act.)
Machine learning is still a black box, and politicians don't seem to understand this.
The next step is to let AI do it all. We don't even have to know what is being matched on what, just that Citizen A's "profile" is sufficiently similar to Terrorist B's "profile".
This is how AI takes over the world without requiring sentience.
One of the responsibilities of citizenship is to preserve your liberty against encroachment by State and private actors. Neglecting to consider that is a moral failure, and one I've been guilty of in the past.
I'm not saying that it's necessarily immoral to, say, have a FB account. But it is to have one without considering the implications and acting accordingly.
Not being Stallman or a full-time civil liberties defender, what's a good way for the basic citizen to be more informed, and better evaluate FB-like services?
Yes - but realistically, what do you think State education is _for_?
Primarily, it's to ensure a citizenry that obeys and supports laws. Staying informed is a very distant second, and participation is actively quashed from the get-go. (What proportion of your local school board consists of children?)
As for how to stay informed - learn the basics of the technologies involved, and follow the news feeds of folks with a deep interest in the field. In this case, the EFF is a good start.
But realistically, there's too much for one person to cover. Tech? Sure, perhaps. But then there's medicine, finance, real estate, construction ...
So really, what you're left with is electing representatives who will provide responsible oversight. But realistically, almost all of them are in the pockets of lobbyists at this point.
TBH I'm not sure what the solution is, here.
So perhaps it _isn't_ a moral failure any more, because the scope has grown to the point where most people say "fuck it" and give up.
Anybody got measures of those?
This is like the last chapter of humanity before we stagnate for hundreds of years.
In both cases the government withholds superior strength for itself, regardless of the baseline. The question of "are people willing to risk their life" and "is the government willing to kill in large numbers" seem unchanged.
Plenty of US adversaries have met these odds and held their own. Aside from some targeted campaigns to eradicate individuals, we haven't truly "won" any notable military conflict since 1945.
IEDs tend to level the playing field, but see how far you get trying to build or acquire those today. You'd be among the first wave of dissidents swept up in the ML-aided dragnet looking for purchasers of batteries and fertilizer.
In China they’ve already crushed anything like resistance, disarmed their populace, and gone the full “re-education camp” route for a while.
A violent response would only serve to justify the application of the system, to cut the head off of any leadership structure before it materializes (or just pick off the lone wackos before they cause problems).
- Single party state
- President-for-life
- Full-spectrum surveillance of their own citizens with little to no oversight
- Court system that criminalizes political dissent
- Large "re-education" and "work-based" prison system
- Widespread and automated censorship of media and online discussion in all forms, combined with a willing rewriting of history (e.g., Tiananmen in 1989 has been completely scrubbed, and discussion of it in any form is deleted within minutes)
- "Social score" system that integrates the surveillance system into the legal and bureaucratic systems
- Limited access to external information of any form outside of the Great Firewall
- The money, capability, and the political willingness to implement and expand all of the above as needed
I am hard-pressed right now to imagine any other country that is drifting more quickly to a dystopian surveillance state than China.
What the government can do is something very different. https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/28/opinion/europe-is-spying-...
- Jeff Goldblum as Dr. Ian Malcolm in Jurassic Park
Our intelligence agencies (at least try to) predict terrorist activity and put a stop to it be before anything happens.
http://www.zdnet.com/article/fcc-chairman-browsing-history-f...