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Notes -
My post was descriptive, not prescriptive.
I absolutely do not endorse increased government surveillance but all that is careening towards inevitability. Around the time of the Snowden leaks, one of the comforting refrains from those worried about surveillance was to note that at least the government lacked the gargantuan computing resources required to monitor everyone (newly minted Utah data center notwithstanding). That coping mechanism seems so quaint in retrospect given the technological strides since.
Despite my aversion to government surveillance, I nevertheless must acknowledge that governments maintain a zeal towards prosecuting acts of terrorism and mass violence which likely serves as some kind of deterrent. A good illustration of this retributive zeal occurs with acts of violence where the perpetrator is too dead to be punished, so the state goes after tangential "accomplices" in its hunt for a scapegoat. This happened with the prosecution (and acquittal) of the Pulse nightclub shooter's wife, the prosecution of the friend who made a straw purchase for the 2019 Dayton shooting (The idiot invited the FBI into his home with weed in plain view and readily admitted to lying on the 4473 form. Also, the shooter had no record that would've barred firearm purchases, so the straw purchase made no difference.), and the ammunition dealer who got 13 months in federal prison after his fingerprints were discovered on unfired rounds from the 2017 Las Vegas shooting.
I'm not saying that I endorse this modern variant of collective punishment, but it is good indicator of how much retributive energy animates the government's actions in these circumstances. Obviously governments have an interest in leveraging increased surveillance into suffocating population control, and this interest would only magnify as costs drop. But even as an anarchist I would be lying if I claimed that the state's only motivation for surveillance is control. However clouded and selectively applied it might be, there's clearly a genuine interest from the state in punishing and preventing bad acts.
No, I get that. My question is whether we should be rooting for the Authorities or the Chaos, in the final analysis. Faced with that choice, my own bias is heavily in favor of the Chaos, but I try to be aware of it and compensate proportionally. This becomes harder when people argue persuasively that the road we're on clearly leads to the iron chains of long-term dystopia. Some people argue that terrible things are coming, but there's nothing to be done about it. Other people argue that there's things we can do to alter the future, but we shouldn't be in a hurry to do so because intervening would be worse. And it has to be one or the other, doesn't it? Either the coming future is worse, or the things needed to forestall it are worse. One must prefer one or the other, must one not?
The question is, is it in our interest to tolerate the continued existence of the current state?
Ok fair, I apologize for misinterpreting your post. The initial hypothetical is about LLMs empowering bad actors' ability to cause immeasurable destruction, and my response to that hypothetical was to consider that in such a world LLMs would also empower governments to establish immeasurable surveillance and policing. Whether or not we "should" do anything to stop that massive accumulation of power is impossible to decisively answer because we're already buried under an avalanche of hypothetical layers. It depends in part whether you agree that LLM-equipped terrorists are a risk worth worrying about in the first place.
I guess the way I'd put it is that it seems a lot more plausible that LLMs or similar can allow an effective panopticon than that they can allow mega-death terrorism, and so the assurance that Mega-death terrorism would probably be prevented by a government panopticon leaves me more worried on balance, not less. What saves us from the government panopticon?
There was an old woman who swallowed a fly...
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