Comment on Anthropic says it ‘cannot in good conscience’ allow Pentagon to remove AI checks
scarabic@lemmy.world 1 week agoBetter to be skeptical about everyone here, and there are certainly no heroes.
However it should be obvious that a country’s department of war surveilling its own citizens is a completely inappropriate overreach. They exist to protect the country from outside threats. You’re casting it as some kind of discrimination, and claiming it would be more moral to treat everyone the same, but that seems willfully obtuse to me. Calling it a “special carve out” for a country to protect its own citizens… come on. Obviously since you are not an American it does nothing for you but you are working way too hard to spin that up into a sin.
revolutionaryvole@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Obviously a country spying on its citizens is unacceptable overreach, I never claimed otherwise. And if my own government was conducting mass surveillance on me I would be particularly furious at the betrayal. But I would also not support it conducting surveillance on foreigners either. That is the “sin” Anthropic is guilty of, in my eyes.
Mass surveillance is simply immoral. It is targeting innocent people who have not even been accused of any crime and robbing them of their right to privacy. It is also giving states absolute leverage to harm, blackmail or manipulate anyone they want at will.
The argument that it is all done in the name of protecting its own citizens also falls flat in this case, as that is exactly the same excuse used for mass domestic surveillance - everyone loses their privacy, but the good, law-abiding citizens are protected from the criminal elements who would threaten them. “If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear”.
Let’s not kid ourselves, this is not about protecting anyone. They plan to spy not only on their “enemies” but also on their closest allies, as they have in the past. This is about gaining power. And states in general already have far too much power over individuals.
Kowtowing to the Department of War and offering to sell them an AI for mass surveillance is not OK, even if it truly were to limit itself to the common, genteel use case of spying on foreign people.
scarabic@lemmy.world 1 week ago
I’m hardly going to defend the Pentagon, but to say a country should not even have an intelligence operation whatsoever, that this isn’t elementary to protecting its citizenry, is beyond naive and unrealistic.
revolutionaryvole@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Well yeah, that’s true, but I didn’t say that, did I? Not even remotely.
We are specifically talking about mass surveillance. I will let you reflect on the implications of an intelligence apparatus with the ability to have a Claude-level AI scanning every piece of information on the internet by yourself.
scarabic@lemmy.world 6 days ago
I’m not trying to pin you here, just explain why it did indeed sound an awful lot like you were saying that. Conducting no surveillance is pretty much not having any intelligence operations. Are they supposed to wait by the phone for tips? This is where I was coming from. You didn’t use the word “mass” then. If you tell me you meant something different, I believe you, but this is how I got you wrong.