When the data ends up inevitably in the state’s hands (almost certainly thanks to the AI company they’re contracting), it is 100% part of the surveillance state. Same reason telecom providers and Big Tech generally is part of the surveillance state; they’ll just hand over data, no questions asked, no warrants provided.
Let’s say I run some video cameras on my property, and I decide that I’m going to mail the contents of those hard drives to my police department every day.
That’s not the surveillance state. That’s just me as a private entity snitching.
MIT is not a public university. It’s private property not much different than my house. You’re generally not supposed to be in most of their buildings unless you’re a student, faculty, or staff, just like you’re not supposed to be at my house unless I invite you over.
I will concede, though, that some lines are blurred. E.g., MIT has a police force.
The other point of my original comment is really just that it seems like the most prestigious colleges have faculty and students that complain about stuff that’s really typical at less prestigious universities.
> My high school also had cameras. Isn’t that rather typical?
Security cameras are incredibly typical. Having cameras that record _audio_ are not, and having cameras whose audio and video recordings are handed over to an AI company is _absolutely_ not typical.
Yeah as a non-American I can understand why it might be that way, but I think you should understand that globally this is not normal and is indicative of deep problems
If you're taking cameras in high schools because of school shootings as your baseline of normality, you probably need to calibrate a little differently
Based on the article I really didn’t feel like I could assume that they were really recording audio. I had a hard time believing that MIT was violating state law.
MIT very clearly states that audio isn’t being recorded:
> No. The security cameras do not record audio. Massachusetts law prohibits recording audio without the knowledge of those being recorded. Additionally, we do not use facial recognition technology with our security cameras.
Whether or not the cameras possess microphones is irrelevant.
Many cameras include microphones that the user has no intention of enabling. These are like that, since they're in a state where no-consent audio recording is illegal.
No audio recordings are made or handed over to anyone. Handing video over to a service provider to do things like weapons detection is not uncommon and not inherently a privacy problem. It's done in hospitals today.
Exactly. Their process prioritizes seniority generally, and this is another case. The process is, if the president wants another go, he gets another go; and he sure as heck wanted another go.
“Robotic productivity” is taxed in every country, including China — the profits go to some entity, to some company. With exceptions for the companies that manage to wrestle themselves in paying virtually nothing in taxes, that profit is taxed somewhere down the line. Nothing special about AI productivity, it’s just money.
“Robotic productivity” is taxed in every country, including China
Only by taxing the humans and human-based corporations that ultimately pay for it. On a longer timeline, the robots are going to become full-fledged economic actors in their own right.
It’s both superior engineering-wise and morally. The moral framing is probably more popular with folks that don’t care about engineering superiority, too.
No, we're supposed to hate all passively-surveilling cameras. Except for dumb ones that dump to local storage. Dash-cams are often pretty dumb, so they’re fine; your phone only takes photos when you ask it to, so it’s fine. :)
They definitely shouldn’t. Mozilla has talented engineers, but it’s been catastrophically mismanaged for almost 20 years at this point. Keep Firefox, but let Mozilla finally die.
I’m curious where you start it. I was thinking about it a couple of weeks ago and decided “more than a decade” was safe to say, but I was thinking towards fifteen years, not twenty.
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