Perhaps but I think technophiles are much less likely to commit serious crimes in furtherance of their preferences.
Many doomers believe that AI is likely to kill everyone ("prove fatal to humanity" to quote your HN bio), maybe even destroy the universe. Under some doomer philosophy any crime-- up to and including mass murder with nuclear weapons as advocated by some of the leading doomer figures-- would be justifiable if it were effective to prevent such dire outcomes.
There are of course technophiles who believe restricting AI will result in preventable deaths (e.g. from delaying lifesaving technological innovations) or as a result of abuses arising consolidating power onto authoritarian entities who are permitted full use of AI-- and I suppose I'd count myself among both those classes.
But most people don't view causing a death and failing to prevent a death as morally equivalent. There is also another asymmetry: Doomer philosophy requires stopping other people, while a pro innovation path can be pursued on your own, simply taking care to avoid being stopped by others. The former requires espionage/sabotage, assuming that plain persuasion is unsuccessful, while the latter benefits more from staying away from anything that could bring unwelcome attention.
This also has relevance to the term "cult" -- there are a lot of pro-innovation people out there but there isn't much organization to it, because there doesn't need to be. Trying to use force to stop people against their will requires organizing people to impose upon others. And doing useful stuff is its own reward and doesn't require brainwashing to believe big-brained-brainfarts like "solving problems and doing useful stuff is actually bad".
Of course, all my blather would go out the window if we were talking about say-- exfiltrating their model weights, or the design of their inference chip as these would be things that would be useful for increasing access to AI rather than limiting it.
Rust (like C) gives the programmer more control over computer cycles and memory than Ruby, Python and JVM languages do, which some might be describing as a "performance advantage".
Russia wants to keep Kaliningrad mainly because they want to keep on being able to access the world ocean from St Petersburg (and the nearby port of Ust-Luga) and Kaliningrad helps with that.
(Controlling Denmark would help tremendously, too, which is why Moscow once asked Berlin for Denmark during or right before WWII as a response to Berlin's asking Moscow for its consent for Berlin to take control of Romania or some such.)
And yes, I believe that continuing to be able to access the world ocean from St Petersburg has helped Russia in its war with Ukraine.
BTW, "China ends up in either nominal or practical control of almost all of [Russia]" strikes me as so unlikely as to not be worth thinking about.
What I mean is that in post-USSR collapse, Ukraine ended up with a lot of warheads pointing into different directions.
So did Russia, of course.
It did not help Ukraine with independence (and the warheads were gone very fast), nor did it help Russia retain control of Ukraine.
So I'd say in the hypothetical of Russia falling apart into chunks, Kaliningrad having the nukes won't be a decisive factor in where Kaliningrad ends up.
And I hope that if it doesn't end up as a part of what's left of Russia, whoever gets it won't send the nukes back like Ukraine did.
> BTW, "China ends up in either nominal or practical control of almost all of [Russia]" strikes me as so unlikely as to not be worth thinking about.
Who does, then? There doesn't seem to be any internal power in position to gracefully take power when Putin inevitably proves mortal; whatever the power scramble looks like, it's going to take external funding (and thus external obligations) to secure it, which leaves whoever's providing that funding in effective control. And even if the US and/or Europe decide to try to buy one horse, China clearly is willing and able to buy a whole lot of them; just statistically they probably end up with it, no?
Russians decided that the tsar would be overthrown in 1917, that the Bolsheviks would take power, that Lenin would be replace by Stalin, Krushchev, . . . , Yeltsin, Putin.
The US, Britain, France and Japan actually invaded Russia (circa 1918) to try to influence the outcome of a transition of power without success.
None of the transitions I described depended on which leader or which faction had funding from outside Russia. I expect Russian self-determination to continue. Nationalism is a very potent force in most countries, Russians seem more nationalistic than average, and the Russian ethnicity is firm in control of the country, which increases stability and nationalism.
Just because Russia has declined in influence relative to the great powers doesn't mean it will break up or stop exercising self-determination.
> I expect Russian self-determination to continue.
I’d say that this is how every country should be. Unfortunately, there is no self-determination in Russia. Yeah, most people do support Putin, though it’s not as overwhelming as they would like you to believe, so they rig the elections. The problem is there’s no real alternative. There like four parties, only one of which does something other than show up and vote for whatever bullshit new law they’re trying to pass, and they’ve invented some new ones recently, which I believe are also all puppets with different branding.
There is also nationalism, of course, feeded by a metric shit ton of propaganda. Will it help keep Russia from breaking up? I don’t know. As a Russian, it’s not up to me, and honestly, I don’t really care about the borders at all. My nationalism does not extend to the state terrorizing my people.
IMO there is alternative, just repressed for now by extreme state apparatus measures to remove it from the public eye. I see it as a situation similar to Eastern European red bloc countries right before 1989, where communists have seemingly successfully repressed all the dissent, until the Velvet Revolution brought up many different parties that took power.
By "self-determination", I didn't mean democracy. I meant Putin's successor will be determined mostly by Russians, not Chinese people, Americans or Central or Western Europeans.
Opposing remote attestation in full generality is the wrong place to draw the line IMHO. Too many useful capabilities rely on attestation.
For example, would you really want to live in a world in which photographs are no longer considered evidence of anything because any photo might be AI generated? When a citizen standing on his apartment's balcony used his camcorder to record police beating Rodney King in 1991, it started a national movement against police brutality. So, you're OK with a world where there can be no national conversation sparked by any recording because as far as anyone knows, the recording could've been faked by AI? Remote attestation by the camera is the only way I have been able to think of to avoid that world.
For another example, banking and finance started relying on attestation in 1997 with the availability of the IBM 4758 PCI Cryptographic Coprocessor and have come to rely heavily on it.
How will remote attestation prove that you were actually standing on the balcony pointing the camera, and not recording some slop you generated? The analog hole is a real problem.
Don't worry, photographs were being faked before Lee Harvey Oswald.
The optical data will be cryptographically bound to the state of the autofocus mechanism and to the output of a LiDAR scanner.
We know it is practical to have a LiDAR scanner in the same assembly as an image sensor because the rear camera bump of the iPhone Pro has a LiDAR scanner.
The technology need not be 100% tamper-proof to have a large effect on society: there is a huge difference in persuasiveness between the claim that anyone could have created a particular video by submitting to an AI some starting videos and images and some prompts and the claim that anyone with years of training and experience in cutting-edge microelectronics could have bought 500 iPhones and used very expensive equipment to create 499 ruined iPhones and one iPhone that can be used to create false attestations of recordings -- particularly because in a high profile instance such as a repeat of the Rodney King beating, Apple engineering would tend to be very interested in examining the device used to make the recording.
> We know it is practical to have a LiDAR scanner in the same assembly as an image sensor because the rear camera bump of the iPhone Pro has a LiDAR scanner alongside the optical lenses.
The iPhone Pro starts at $1199.
Moreover, LiDAR is essentially a laser that emits at a particular wavelength and a camera that detects that wavelength, so it could be fooled by pointing it at a screen that emits at the same wavelength, which in turn could be an ordinary screen with something in front of it that converts light at a wavelength it emits to the one the LiDAR sensor is expecting.
And that's if you insist on using light. The LiDAR sensor itself is an analog piece of hardware that converts the light into an electrical signal, so if you substitute its electrical output as the input to the signing hardware then it signs whatever you want and never knows the difference.
The hardest part about this is probably creating a credible depth map of a generated 2D image, which is the part that doesn't require signatures or attestation.
> The technology need not be 100% tamper-proof to affect society: there is a huge difference in persuasiveness between the claim that anyone could have created a particular video by submitting to an AI some starting videos and images and a few prompts and the claim that anyone with years of technical training and experience could have bought 500 iPhones and used very expensive equipment to create 499 ruined iPhones and one iPhone that Apple's engineers have not detected yet that can be used to create falsely attested recordings.
Until one of the people with the capacity to do it sets up a website where anyone can submit an image and have it signed.
Moreover, isn't "most people can't do this but some people still can" actually worse? It's a system for providing undue credibility to the forgeries from the people who can do it.
Without even making most legitimate images more credible, since most phone cameras don't have fancy LiDAR hardware.
The camcorder used to record the Rodney King beating also probably cost at least $1199. LiDAR will spread to cheaper smartphones if enough consumers start to value it, and many (maybe most) consumers will do if it becomes necessary for the consumer to retain the ability to make recordings that can be used as evidence.
>it could be fooled by pointing it at a screen that emits at the same wavelength
LiDAR emits a pulse, then times how long it takes to get a pulse back, so your exploit got a lot more technically complicated since of course these pulses travel at the speed of light.
>substitute its electrical output as the input to the signing hardware
The LiDAR scanner is part of an integrated circuit (IC) that encrypt the data from the LiDAR scanner. To get at the unencrypted data, you would have to uncap the IC and use a scanning electron microscope or such.
How do I know so much about iPhone hardware? I don't, except I know that Apple is widely believed to be the world's leader in hardware security, so I strongly suspect that every single data path in a recent iPhone is encrypted before it leaves any IC.
>Until one of the people with the capacity to do it sets up a website where anyone can submit an image and have it signed.
The web server behind the site would have to be connected to a compromized iPhone Pro. As soon as Apple becomes aware of the web site, they will disable that iPhone Pro. Specifically, they will be able to determine its ID number (term?) from the attestation, and I'm pretty sure they already have the ability to disable an iPhone by ID number.
>Moreover, isn't "most people can't do this but some people still can" actually worse?
If Apple cares and is willing to expend the necessary engineering resources, then anyone (other the Apple itself) who makes any sort of notable or economically important or culturally important use of their ability to create a false attestation will retain the ability for only a brief time.
The last time a public jailbreak was released for modern iPhone hardware running the actively signed, latest iOS version was in May 2020, which is over six years ago. It is possible that someone will publish a jailbreak in the future, but the lifespan of that jailbreak will probably be only a few days. I expect Apple could exert a level of control over "camera remote attestation" similar to the level of control it has already achieved over which OSes (and which apps) can run on its iPhones. In general, these "technical regimes" are designed to make it easy for the engineering organization to recover from exploits as soon as the organization becomes aware of the exploit.
Again: do you really want photographic evidence to stop being useful in almost every situation (e.g., in court)? If not, then what is your alternative to "technical regimes" reliant on remote attestation similar to the regime I just described?
> I know that Apple is widely believed to be the world's leader in hardware security
That's a pretty rich qualification. "I know" suggests you can prove it, but you have to qualify it with "believed" because you can't. You can't cite anyone that audited Apple's source code, or ask a knowledgeable stakeholder for a credible architectural understanding. You haven't written an exploit, or reverse-engineered one.
It's purely faith. You're making an argument "you know" based on the loyal assumption that Apple's marketing is correct. You could be citing security theater muppets for all you know, but apparently your argument isn't contingent on veracity or transparency.
> Again: do you really want photographic evidence to stop being useful in almost every situation (e.g., in court)?
Yes? Do you really want a purity spiral where people that get abused, subjected to police brutality or sexually assaulted are discredited because they're too poor for a LIDAR camera? I would lobby day and night for this two-tiered evidence system to be reversed because it would force the miscarriage of justice as a marketing gimmeck for iPhone technology. It's not a scalable, holistic, trustworthy, accessible, or safe option for anyone, let alone Americans. There is not a single company in the United States that can implement a system like this protected from domestic or foreign adversaries.
Truly, go fuck yourself if you genuinely think this false dichotomy is the only worthy perspective.
> LiDAR might spread to all smartphones if its starts to become important to society.
You expect $50 phones to have LiDAR hardware?
> LiDAR emits a pulse, then times how long it takes to get a pulse back, so your exploit got a lot more technically complicated since of course these pulses travel at the speed of light.
That's assuming you're trying to detect the pulse rather than sending back photons with particular timing from when you expect it to come. Notice that you can also try more than once and only publish the image where you got the timing right.
You also have the advantage because you can have something which is directly in front of the sensor but is sending back photons later than that because you're pretending to be something which is further away.
> The LiDAR scanner is part of an integrated circuit (IC) that encrypt the data from the LiDAR scanner. To get at the unencrypted data, you would have to uncap the IC and use a scanning electron microscope or such.
With the right equipment you can affect electrical signals within an IC without disassembling it.
Or you can disassemble it. It doesn't have to be easy when only one person has to do it.
> The web server behind the site would be connected to a compromized iPhone Pro. As soon as Apple becomes aware of the web site, they will disable the iPhone. Specifically, they will be able to determine ID number (term?) of the iPhone from the attestation data, and I'm pretty sure they already have the ability to disable an iPhone by ID number.
So they set up an apparatus where they can put any such a phone, buy them in bulk and resell them immediately after use for the same price they paid. Then most are never detected and even if a few of them are, Apple is only disabling the phone of the innocent third party buyer, likely outside of the return window, and thereby negatively impacting the resale value of their own brand.
Also, your premise was that this would be in every phone and then they're not buying late model iPhones, they're getting e-waste phones with dead batteries or cracked screens by the pallet for ~free to use once on their way to the scrapper.
> The last time a public jailbreak was released for modern iPhone hardware running the actively signed, latest iOS version was in May 2020, which is over six years ago. It is possible that someone will publish a jailbreak in the future, but the lifespan of that jailbreak will probably be only a few days.
You're assuming they publish their methods for Apple to patch instead of setting up the service to sign images without documenting exactly how they do it.
And also that every phone OEM cares to that extent, which they obviously don't.
What many people dislike about government in the US and in the EU is that the unelected bureaucrats tend make hiring and promotion decisions based on ideology with the result that each generation of career bureaucrats is more ideologically homogeneous and more extreme in its commitment to whichever ideology is best at spreading, which in the US and EU over the last 95 years has been Leftism.
Elections are a powerful check on this process because there isn't a similar mechanism at work in the general population of voters (or at least the mechanism is much weaker in its effects).
Also we can start to see why actors who oppose Leftism or who oppose ideological hegemonies in general sometimes want decisions to be made out of self-interest: even most zealous ideologues are more motivated by self-interest than they are by advancing ideologies. I.e., allowing decision makers to act out of self-interest is one tool in the toolbox for opposing ideological hegemony.
But the Amish are different because of a religion not shared by most German immigrants.
This difference in religion has a huge effect. We know that because the average Amish person is much farther away in culture from the average German living in Germany than the average non-German-ancestry American is.
Through good planning, France weathered the supply shock around Russian natural gas better than most of Europe.
No military dares to fuck with France.
Life in France for the average person is good. Many want to move there. Many want to visit.
France functions better than I would have thought possible of a country so attracted to Leftism and 'direct political action'.
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