This is a silly comparison. Terrorist can kill 30 people in one attack or even break down a whole building with a bomb. When did 30 people choke by one piece of food?
And we don't have another 911 may because of mass surveillance. Shall we try removing the surveillance to see whether terrorist attack increases?
We don't have another 911 because it was a tactic that could work exactly once. No pilot/crew/passengers would stand idly by and hope things work out in another plane hijacking because they expect they're dead either way.
Maybe spending untold billions of dollars on a mass surveillance state that cows the population into authoritarian submission is a phyrric response to the threat of terrorism.
Terrorism which is exacerbated by our own shadowy geopolitical agendas...
And it's ludicrous to say "We shall have a mass surveillance system or mass terrorism!", as if security theater revealed the actual effectiveness of such actions!
Do you love giving Leviathan the sword it stabs you with, the whip that scourages you, and the mouth which mocks your humanity?
"cows the population into authoritarian submission" ? I don't see this happening at all. There have been countless protests against the Trump administration, and the main stream media has being criticizing the Trump administration every single day. Please give me an example supports your projection.
So it's worth it to you to spend 100's of billions to stop 30 hypothetical deaths? Ok. You're allowed to have that opinion. I'll vote against it every chance I get.
Your assumption that AI should be compared to average human driver is simply wrong. There are all sorts of human drivers, some of them drive under influence, some have slow reaction, some have terrible cars. Why should AI be compared to any of those?
When we use automatic vehicle, we assume it to be a reliable driver, not a random person who could be a bad driver.
So please stop comparing to average human drivers.
It should probably be compared to the median driver.
Also, software gives the possobility that the same shitty driver can drive millions of cars at the same time. One bad commit might cause a disaster. Millions of human drivers wont be possesed by the devil at the same time causing havoc. Imagine all Toyotas turning full left at the same time.
It's a bs comparison. The Chinese government surveillance is purely for dictatorship, and they do put political opponents and human rights lawyers in jail at a massive scale. The NSA surveillance is mostly for legitimate security reasons and is under restrict scrutiny.
China does it to protect their people from people that want to undermine and dismantle the party
This is true! This is exactly what we want to happen! These are security reasons from their perspective
Can you see how that is not so different? In the US we are as oblivious to the exact nature and motives of security threats too, and tolerate our border and surveillance agencies to preempt an unspecified threat. The mere existence of scrutiny doesnt make the systems that different.
I disagree that it's similar. It's one thing to perform surveillance on individuals where you have strong reasons to suspect they will engage in terrorist acts (meaning making plans to kill lots of people) and quite another to do so because someone disagrees with you being in power. I'm sure there's an overlap of people who do both but that's not the group I'm talking about and I'm also sure NSA/US authorities abuse their powers (hence why we constantly have to fight against power/survaillence creep) to monitor people that are simply political enemies but that doesn't negate the difference between the 2 situations (ie just because the US may engage in that type of behavior doesn't excuse the behavior China engages in). I grew up in an Eastern European communist dictatorship and I know what it means to be afraid to talk against the party and its leader. I'm now an immigrant to the US (so arguably no as many rights as a citizen) and in no way is there the same type of censorship and oppression.
Put it another way, where do you draw the line in terms of how the government is allowed to behave in regards to its citizens since you can pretty much excuse any abusive behavior under the reasoning of "security reasons"?
If the US government started doing this, there definitely will be lawsuit and most probably the government will be defeated in the court. But in China, things do not work this way. The supreme court of China must follow the demand of the communist party, see: https://www.ft.com/content/60dddd46-dc74-11e6-9d7c-be108f1c1...
It's just pathetic to see this kind of whataboutism keeps coming up on this website. The US and China have very different political systems, the former is democratic republic, the later is authoritarian. It is not a close comparison.
> That's not what she said, she said "Trump situation", and by situation, one would assume, the massive abuse of social platforms to spread false and misleading data about Clinton, which we know from scientific studies, that false stories were reshared far more by Trump supporters than vice versa, and that a non-trivial chunk of these fake gifs came from overseas.
1) Can you please cite those "scientific studies"?
2) Even if what you said is true. I am not sure how much it has anything to do with Google. Most of influences happened on Facebook or other social media platforms. How can Google prevent things from happening again on Facebook?
That was certainly the most vague and easily re-interpreted statement she made. Hoping for fuller context of the conversation so we can get some better understanding of her intended use.
No. It's also not fair to raise taxes (on rich and middle class) to pay college for poor kids.
It is fine to have certain amount of transfer from the rich and middle class to the poor to pay for basic things, but pay for college should not be part of it. College is not crucial for living a good life.
I would agree with proposal to support pay for vocational / professional training. But college? No.
The fact of whether an official "consciously lying to people" is extremely hard to know, because it is a measure of someone's status of mind in the past. The real world is much more complicated than what you could imagine.
Good points. Clearly there are gray areas. But sometimes it would be possible to prove lying. Just like it is possible to prove some marketing is fraudulent.
But a chalkboard eraser just smears the chalk around. Even with a decently clean eraser, after a few write/erase cycles you can barely see anything because there's so little contrast. Dry eraser marker goes on vivid and sharp every time, and with a high-quality whiteboard will wipe right off cleanly.
When I TA'ed in Germany, every classroom had a sink, a sponge and a squeegee, so you actually cleaned the board every time instead of smearing it. It was great.
> Our economy is exploding, and our current problems are far more social, so maybe we should be listening to the sociologists and put the economy on the back burner for right now?
You seem to have misunderstanding about economics and sociology. It seems you think (I am guessing) economists only care about economy growth, and sociologists know how to make social improvement. This thought appears also embedded in other comments.
It is wrong in many levels:
1) economists care about social improvement in general, not just in economics indies. However, many times economics indies are the best measure of general social improvement.
2) sociology is not supposed to be a discipline about making social improvement, before it's taking over by far left scholars.
3) sociologists usually do not know how to make social improvement in general. sociologists seem to understand the problem facing specific group of people, and they seem to know specific methods to make specific improvement, but they usually do not know how to make social improvement in general, because their social change program also never include cost analysis, and also never address side effects, unintended consequences, etc. They may know how to improve the life of a few people, but all their analyses do not care what cost to the rest of the world.
And we don't have another 911 may because of mass surveillance. Shall we try removing the surveillance to see whether terrorist attack increases?