Posted by ilamont 1 day ago
He kept it very secret, but somehow people deduced from the writing style that this new author was the King.
Given those precautions if it is just memory or some form of deanonymization that's also cause for concern.
I have seen some poorly considered projections of what the world might look like when this happens. Usually by assuming bad actors will use the abilities and we will be powerless.
Except I don't think that is true.
Imagine if we had a world where nobody had the ability to keep a secret of any sort. Any action that a bad actor might perform would be revealed because they couldn't do it secretly.
You could browse your ex-girlfriend's email, but at the cost of everyone knowing you did it.
I don't really know how humans as a society would react to a situation like that. You don't have to go snooping for muck, so perhaps the inability to do so secretly would mean people go about their lives without snooping.
I could imagine both good and terrible outcomes.
I've done this a few times. A world with 0 privacy would definitely be safe (given benign governance), but also would likely be pretty boring. Crime would become a non-issue as everything about everyone being easily known/knowable by everyone else means the root of any given crime, some desire/need, could be brought to the fore and resolved before it became an actual issue. But also there would no longer be any kind of surprise in anything; everything and everyone would essentially become dull and grey, and humanity isn't about that kind of life experience at all.
quite unrealistic imo, thus we (maybe and hopefully) needn't worry about the bland minority report future you're hypothesizing :)
All governments go bad eventually, so the ability to overthrow is critical to prosperity.
Government's are either overthrown internally (revolt, uprising) or by external parties (invasion). A worldwide everyone-knows-everything would prevent both.
In practice, you've never been anonymous while posting on the internet and AI isn't changing anything on that front. Or rather: if anything, AI can help you become more anonymous than before, since it can be used to hide your identity from stylometry by rewriting your prose before publishing.
Remember how the TrueCrypt project shut down shortly before a join goverment/university paper was released about code stylometry? I guess LLMs will be employed as a defence against that type of thing.
TrueCrypt, “replaced” by VeraCrypt which Internet people will claim is backdoored? I haven’t heard about stylometry paper.
btw w/this idea would want to avoid typing into a comment field directly, since the session recorders would capture it (although that’s a different risk - same as our identifiable behavior patterns with our mouse etc.)
Nobody is forcing you to use these systems. The hackers have always said this moment, or something like it, would come, from beneath their canopies of tin foil. I've posted almost nothing online - not under pseudonyms nor real names - for over a decade. I sat on this HN username for almost 12 years before making a single post - and now HN forms the overwhelming majority of my port 443 footprint, where I state up front that everything is now associated to my real name.
Complete magick is possible when you simply refuse to participate in the things that society has tacitly assumed everybody does.