I'm not a fan of expanding surveillance but the alternative of unmonitored transit seems worse.

Going to shoot up a place? Take your guns on a waymo. It won't complain. Guy wants to take an obviously distressed and co-erced girl to an abandoned lot? No complaints. Person with obvious head injury and slurring speech wants to go home instead of the hospital? Sure. Person has heart attack and passes out in back? We'll just drive your limp body 45 minutes in traffic to your destination.

These are just a few situations any human driver would obviously react to. And a modicum of detection and human review could solve in an autonomous vehicle.

This is a problem that autonomous vehicles created. Why should we not complain that its solution is worse than non-autonomous travel, given it carries risk that doesn't exist today? Does Waymo benefit society enough to carry the tradeoffs?

And what surveillance or other risks does this introduce outside of the cabin, and why should society allow that? What is the definition of modicum of detection, and who is drawing that line?

> Does Waymo benefit society enough to carry the tradeoffs?

It absolutely does 1000x. You can also just not use it.

They snap me crossing the street almost daily, nothing I can do about since sometimes they take me by surprise.

What?

I meant catch me crossing and take photos, scans, etc.

>its solution is worse than non-autonomous travel

Citation needed. Assaults and abuse against public transit and taxi drivers is a common workplace hazard. Why are we subjecting humans to that? Why are we ok expecting them to decide if a gun is fake or not and call the police?

>Does Waymo benefit society enough to carry the tradeoffs?

Absolutely.

>>Does Waymo benefit society enough to carry the tradeoffs?

>Absolutely.

Citation needed.

Why stop at Waymo? The entirety of your digital activity happens on private property. You should have no expectation of privacy, and your attempts at privacy should mark you as a higher risk subject. We should algorithmically police your digital life in case you start showing signs of anti-social behavior. I don't want to wait until you get your gun into a Waymo to have the cops handle you. I want you to be caught much earlier. This will make the world much safer.

There are other ways to solve safety issues, but they are harder and more expensive - civic education and a government invested in incentivizing a productive life, better law enforcement training, freely available mental health services etc.

Fortunately the Fourth Amendment has mostly established the answer for us already.

No? The Fourth Amendment only grants you protections that apply to government action. The police are allowed to accept evidence gathered voluntarily by private citizens or corporations.

Maybe we shouldn't put the whole burden of world justice on Waymo, this allowing it a complete invasion of the privacy of both the people who use it and those who don't? Guy takes a drugged up girl on the train, should we hold the train responsible for the outcome also?

Are you aware of BART Police or MTA Police? All trains have conductors who monitor passenger behavior and enforce rules/laws.

That's the key question: whose laws are Waymo enforcing? ICE and Flock's extra-constitutional policies? City ordinances? A future eco-radical government's laws?

How about things taking place outside the car?

Can Waymo mount a robotic machine gun next to the LIDAR and snipe suspected terrorists? Release tear gas? Self destruct, killing several nuns to protect s CEO?

Btw ghost guns are not all instantly illegal.

Yes? I am pretty sure they don't do algorithmic policing. Fwiw, they probably don't do any policing, but that is a different subject.

I am not against monitoring for safety - I am against deploying a sophisticated network of automated monitoring that covers all digital and soon physical aspects of my life for my "safety" by for profit companies.

I don’t think a train conductor would normally intervene if they saw someone escorting an intoxicated person.

Unfortunately taking someone somewhere to rob or assault them doesn’t look that different from taking a drunk friend to a safe place.

Public trains are covered in camera surveillance and that footage is very often used in conjunction with tracking down and prosecuting criminals. You should have no expectation of privacy on a public train.

I agree we should also add live facial recognition to train stations.

No expectation of privacy in public does not mean we should eliminate privacy from public areas or allow our government to engage in mass surveillance.

I think the risks are different on a train, which is far more public than the inside of a taxi. There are more likely to be other people and/or an operator to intervene.

Those are bad examples of things where a computer should make a judgement call.

> Going to shoot up a place? Take your guns on a waymo. It won't complain.

I take my kid to go skeet shooting. You’d call the police on us for having legal guns? What about my pocket knife?

> Guy wants to take an obviously distressed and co-erced girl to an abandoned lot? No complaints.

My wife is scared by someone on the sidewalk. We’re riding to where we parked our car for the evening. There’s a scared woman with me as we commute to our vehicle. BART wouldn’t call the cops on me.

> Person with obvious head injury and slurring speech wants to go home instead of the hospital? Sure.

What’s “obvious” here? I have drinks with friends and bump my head on a cabinet, and now I’m bleeding like a stuck pig. I’m not remotely about to die. Dammit, Waymo, I just want to go home and shower and let me wife laugh at me while she tapes me up.

> Person has heart attack and passes out in back? We'll just drive your limp body 45 minutes in traffic to your destination.

Person’s exhausted after work and wants to nap on the way home. They look identical to the dead guy. BART lets you nap.

If we had ubiquitous taxi and subway police, maybe they’d spent 5 seconds assessing each situation and move on. In no other real-life situation do we expect empty subways or taxi drivers to call the cops and investigate every possible bad scenario, nor should we.

But it's a reduction of privacy compared to private vehicles. If the goal is to convert all transportation infrastructure into surveilled transportation then that is a loss in privacy for the general public.

That is acceptable (and even desirable) for these people.

Only the few who can afford luxury deserve privacy.

You can raise that argument when they actually prevent you from owning your own vehicle.

No, the argument should be raised before that happens. You want to prevent undesirable things from happening, not try to claw them back after they happened.

It looks quite foolish to me to never plan ahead and predict undesirable future events and then trying to prevent them ahead of time.

"Sorry, we can't fulfill your request for transportation to the protest for private ownership, but we can offer a free ride to the Colosseum" ;)

I meant to imply that it's ridiculous because no one is trying to make that happen...

I don't think their primary intent is to create a surveillance state (though google might like having yet another data source...), I think companies are trying to make it happen to capture transportation market share, regulators will want to make it happen to drive down traffic fatalities and insurers will incentivize it because human drivers are more costly. And once the difference in how they can be regulated is clear there'll be additional incentives to discourage private transportation.

> Person with obvious head injury and slurring speech wants to go home instead of the hospital? Sure.

When I was a teenager working in a taxi office some guy came in slurring and covered in blood. I phoned him an ambulance and after 15 minutes of waiting he got up and walked out despite my protests. How should I have reacted?

Those are made up problems because 90% of the time people drive their own vehicle or are with a willing participant. We don't have cameras watching us in normal cars.

That's a good yardstick. Would a reasonable human driver call (or want to call) the cops? If yes, it's reasonable for Waymo to do the same

> alternative of unmonitored transit seems worse

Almost all private cars are unmonitored (in this respect).

"Unmonitored transit" like the way almost every human being in the history of the world has moved from one place to another? Please.

Goodness thanks for taking a terrible article and getting to the point.

That's the pickle isn't it? AI solved it with human help. But it's standing on their shoulders. Neither AI nor the humans got it alone.

Humanity is better having solved this issue. But which humans were credited and benefited is the issue.

I agree (and so does Buckmaster based on his written statement) that we are better having solved this.

But I disagree that which humans were credited is the heart of the issue in this particular controversy. The question is what do you need to bring to the table for a result like this. A pre-release frontier model trained on the open literature and $15 million of inference? Or all that plus a year of the experts finding the path to the solution for the model to run with?

I think it makes a huge difference in terms of what we think the future of mathematical research will be like, and whether we should still encourage students to go into this field, which was the original topic of this thread

The world is pretty pissed at the u.s. and seeking sovereign models and ai. Richest or not if the companies are wise they will try a bit not to piss off the entire rest of the world. At this point many countries are willing to cut off the u.s. even if they take a short or medium term hit.

This is a succinct summary of most the the profession of software engineering. Just replace AI with "programmers".

Anyone remember the gpt-3 era where adding "this is important to my job" and "if this is wrong someone dies" to prompts made a measurable improvement in accuracy and reduced hallucinations?

The answer is genuinely yours

And that changes the game. Again.

Worth sitting with.

a caveat worth mentioning:

Crispr gene editing is an amazing and terrifying technology. We have the capability to edit people in permenant ways which could be passed to all future generations with unknown side effects and consequences.

I believe now we only have a shaky agreement by researchers and countries to "promise" not to do this due to the unforeseen dangers to humanity.

The hardcore ai folks still assemble their instructions in prompts for best speed and control of the underlying model.

I don't consider meta too big to fail. If they go out of business the world can move on with minor disruption and inconvenience.

> If they go out of business the world can move on with

substantial improvement to quality of life. Goals: build a company such that people don't think the world would be better off if you don't exist.