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macNchzyesterday at 6:42 PM1 replyview on HN

All hype and thought experiments about superintelligence and open questions about creativity and learning and IP aside, this is the area that gives me the biggest pause.

We've effectively created a panopticon in recent years—there are cameras absolutely everywhere. Despite that, though, the effort to actually do something with all of those feeds has provided a sort of natural barrier to overreach: it'd be effectively impossible to have people constantly watching all of the millions of camera feeds available in a modern city and flagging things, but AI certainly could.

Right now the compute for that is a barrier, but it would surprise me if we don't see cameras (which currently offer a variety of fairly basic computer vision "AI" alerting features for motion and object detection) coming with free-text prompts to trigger alerts. "Alert me if you see a red Nissan drive past the house.", "Alert me if you see a neighbor letting his dog poop in my yard.", "Alert the police if you see crime taking place [default on, opt out required]."


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nostrademonsyesterday at 7:01 PM

The prompt becomes the bottleneck, along with the precision of the AI. You can only tell it to do what you know how to express. That makes it useless for preventing new and different types of crimes (or dissidents) but fairly effective for preventing the known types of crimes (or dissent) at scale.

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