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Comment by uejfiweun | Hacker News Reader

I read this a number of years ago and it's been churning in my mind ever since. While I do think Bostrom is definitely onto something here in terms of dangers of technology, his proposed solution of heavy surveillance via a "high tech panopticon" is seeming worse and worse to me every year. Primarily because recent years have made me pretty much certain that idiotic activists would attempt to control this system to achieve their own ends. It would start out monitoring people for signs of developing some killer virus or WMD or something, and within 10 years it will have been hijacked into a system that monitors and punishes people for "problematic" speech and whatnot. Of course, it's the activists who get to decide what exactly constitutes a "problem".

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I think it’s fascinating that so many Internet users really think “activists” are the true threat to freedom, when in reality activists have had relatively little influence outside of the Internets. What would actually happen is that someone would use this to enshrine their own political power, targeting the political opposition. They would pass laws to target vulnerable racial minority groups and gay people, perhaps even prohibiting teachers from teaching children about them, most likely using threats to “children and family” and “grooming and pedophilia” as their boogie man. This is what’s happened in Russia and several increasingly authoritarian nations, absolutely zero of which are run by irate Twitterati who care about “problematic speech” in the sense that I suspect HN readers understand the term. The surveillance aspects are also happening in western nations, and it’s rarely activists pushing these narratives.

I bring this up because somehow people act like oppressive government is some kind of science-fiction future that (conveniently) will be brought about by people they disagree with, despite the fact that those people don’t have much of a track record of achieving it. Meanwhile oppressive governments exist today and almost always follow a well-trodden path that we can study and avoid, if we stopped fantasizing about imaginary threats.

OP is imagining a far more likely Brave New World where the majority of society demands totalitarian obedience through coercive control, because its good for you and the stability and safety of society.

You don't think the people that drove the October and Cultural revolutions could be termed 'activists'?

And it is folly to believe that because things developed a certain way in, say, Russia, they will develop the same where circumstances differ. For example, despite your dismissal of activists' influence, Scotland criminalized expressions of 'hate', even within private homes [1,2], and there are innumerable anti-discrimination laws in the US, that arguably conflict with the constitution's free association provision. Couple a law such as the Scottish hate crime bill with panopticon surveillance, and the results are chilling.

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-scotland-politics-56364...

[2] https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/hate-crime-bill-hate-talk...

Activist gives the vision of someone mostly working within a system to change it even if they have more radical sympathies. I’d just consider the aforementioned events done by “revolutionaries”.

I think by the time you get to Lenin and (shudder) Stalin, you have reached something qualitatively different from what HN posters today think of as "activists". The Bolsheviks were not "intellectual activists gone wild." Rather they were the opportunists who took over in the place of activists only after a traditionalist regime had killed or imprisoned the less-effective intellectual activists, many of whom were analogous to the sort you see online today. And although the rhetoric of a Stalinist regime appears left wing, its actions follow pretty much the same playbook as every modern authoritarian regime: persecuting ethnic and religious minorities, policing democratic dissent, railing about external threats as a means to suppress internal political opposition, etc.

No true Scotsman would ever persecute a minority or crack down on dissent!

I think there is also a danger in saying "that man has a thick brogue, and therefore I suspect that they will engage in genocide like Angus McMillan." It's better to look at the patterns of behavior that lead to people (and groups) engaging in terrible behavior. Despite the panic I see on HN, I see are relatively few examples of people springing from "liberal speech policing [like e.g., what we see today on Reddit and Twitter]" to authoritarian rule, without lots of important intervening steps. Yet there are lots of real authoritarian governments in the world today whose path can be studied, in case you want to look for more real-world evidence of how the process typically happens.

I mean, you don't seem to suggest the cultural revolution wasn't real, or the persecution of Uighers today isn't very real and both of those movements were/are very focused on careful control of speech, which was also true under the USSR and even Russia today (despite significant differences in party line and government).

The line between speech control and authoritarian rule is not very large. Hungary which is currently diaplaying some authoritarian streaks is also engaging in speech and press control.

It sounds like you are confusing authoritarian with a partisan concept. Both leftists and rightists can engage in authoritarianism and often go through speech control on the way there.

>the persecution of Uighers today isn't very real and both of those movements

The Uyghur situation is an example of a classic pattern: single-race ethnic supremacy doctrine leading to ethnic cleansing. If I were concerned about this re-occurring in my own society, I would look for which political parties in those countries were advocating for similar policies, and make sure I did everything to thwart their ambitions. I don't think "people demanding you use their preferred pronouns on Twitter" would top my list of threats, but I suppose opinions differ.

Again: what I see here is people confusing the trappings of existing authoritarianism (authoritarian governments do indeed control speech) with the actual root causes, which are usually much more fundamental and rarely look anything like "activists being too mouthy on Twitter."

> single-race ethnic supremacy doctrine leading to ethnic cleansing

You do not understand the Uigher situation.

> Yet there are lots of real authoritarian governments in the world today whose path can be studied, in case you want to look for more real-world evidence of how the process typically happens.

Hitler started with redefining every day language and influencing/gaining control over youth groups as soon as he had power.

I think the challenge for me is that people equate “activists” to “marxists” to everything that Stalin ever did. Everything boils down to a simple model and if you don’t think people who call for censorship on Twitter are all that big of a deal, you are somehow naive to the coming communist threat.

The October and cultural revolutions weren’t even that similar to each other. One was a power grab by one “activist” revolutionary group away from another, during a period where the state had collapsed and there was a general power vacuum. The other occurred well after the “activists” had taken power and represented a general ideological move by a dictatorial regime.

I agree. It seems both naive and ironic that we'd be capable of fighting fire with fire - which is what the man is proposing. I can't think of a single institution that hasn't self-corrupted. Governments, religions, NGOs, and et cetera; there isn't a single entity manned and driven by men that hasn't turned itself into shit, and such an apparatus would do just that, with outsized implications. Scratch the activist boogeyman, anybody operating this would be the moral authority and there is no individual or institution comprised of men that has ever inspired confidence enough to rightly espouse the view that either a holistic surveillance apparatus or global government would be any better.

This guy is so naive it isn't even funny though, total charlatan. Can't wait to finish dissecting this shit.

>>> I can't think of a single institution that hasn't self-corrupted.

This is a very cheap take, and undermines the unbelievable amount of function that institutions play, despite corruption. The self-corrupting institutions that you speak of are what drive modern society. To reject them altogether, that is naive.

Institutions are also destined to corrupt, see Quigley's work. This is why they die, to give room for new.

>>> ...a single entity manned and driven by men that hasn't turned itself into shit...

Again, another general take that is not flexible enough to consider the context of Bostrom here. What Bostrom is suggesting is an extremely severe scenario in which there is no other choice other than to place our bets on a centralized authority. I think general distrust of authority and institutions can make one read this article in a bent way, but let's pose it this way; what is an alternative solution to the easy-nukes scenario? If one writes an article on the same topic, how would you frame the solution?

>>> ...the view that either a holistic surveillance apparatus or global government would be any better.

Centralized systems have done a lot better than decentralized systems in many cases. See many attempts being made in crypto space. They run case by case. It takes tremendous amount of smart design to make decentralized systems work. Sometimes centralized systems are more flexible than decentralized systems.

Laissez-faire, power to the people, and all that is great and people (of the world) should tend towards that. This is what I appreciate about America, and their steadfast approach to these values. But that is a general take. Religiosity towards these values can be a great detriment to epistemic flexibility.

If this reads as if I am arguing for centralized systems over decentralized systems, I am not. Note I put in a lot of conditionals, like "sometimes" and "case by case". There are situations where centralized systems are better, and where decentralized systems are better. As humanity improves, we will replace centralized portions of the world with decentralized counterparts. But as it stands, centralization is really useful under certain conditions. Could you really decentralize the army? (Maybe in a few hundred years)

All this is to say, we need centralization sometimes, and the situation that Bostrom is suggesting here is that sometimes.

> This is a very cheap take, and undermines the unbelievable amount of function that institutions play

Like what?

Just ask yourself how many institutions it took to enable you to post that comment, then you can extrapolate from there.

I think you’ve gotten things a little confused. A governmental “high tech panopticon” already exists, and it’s used to target activists.

... and Canada freezing the truckers bank accounts was a great example.

I think that this doesn't actually try to "propose" anything, but is rather a thought experiment of what would need to happen to prevent our eventual doom (and that something being so unachievable as to be impossible to implement)

It seems to me then that the real problem is not constructing a surveillance system, but designing a trustworthy surveillance system in the first place.

If power corrupts, and that seems to be the general case, then absolute power corrupts absolutely. Any broad system is ripe for abuse without checks, checks can only exist with a weak enough system.

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