I looked through your post very quickly (and wrote this very quickly) so I may have missed things, but my main critical thoughts are around the “costs probably outweigh the benefits” argument as I don’t think you have adequately considered the benefits.
Surveillance is really shit, most people would accept that, but perhaps even more shit is the destruction of humanity or humanity entering a really bad persistent state (e.g. AI torturing humans for the rest of time). If we really want to avoid these existential catastrophes a solution that limits free thought may easily be worth it.
You do briefly cover that surveillance could lead to an existential catastrophe in itself, and I’d like to see a more in-depth exploration of this. But even so (and this might sound very weird) there are better and worse existential catastrophes. For example a 1984-type scenario whilst really shit, is probably better than AI torturing us for the rest of time. So I do think some weighing up of risks and their badness is warranted here.
This criticism doesn’t cover your other points e.g. that there may be more effective ways of reducing risks. I actually think there are a lot of valid points here that need more exploration. I’m just saying that I think your CBA is incomplete.
I think this is a good criticism, and despite most of my post arguing that surveillance would probably be bad, I agree that in some cases it could still be worth it. I think my crux is whether the decrease of risk from malicious actors due to surveillance is greater than the increase in totalitarianism and misuse risk (plus general harms to free speech and so on).
It seems like surveillance must be global and very effective to greatly decrease the risk from malicious actors, and furthermore that it’s really hard to reduce misuse risk of global and effective surveillance. I’m sceptical that we could make the risks associated with surveillance sufficiently small to make surveillance an overall less risky option, even supposing the risks surveillance helps decrease are worse than the ones it increases. (I don’t think I share this intuition, but it definitely seems right from a utilitarian perspective). I agree though that in principle, despite increasing other risks, it might be sometimes better to surveil.
I looked through your post very quickly (and wrote this very quickly) so I may have missed things, but my main critical thoughts are around the “costs probably outweigh the benefits” argument as I don’t think you have adequately considered the benefits.
Surveillance is really shit, most people would accept that, but perhaps even more shit is the destruction of humanity or humanity entering a really bad persistent state (e.g. AI torturing humans for the rest of time). If we really want to avoid these existential catastrophes a solution that limits free thought may easily be worth it.
You do briefly cover that surveillance could lead to an existential catastrophe in itself, and I’d like to see a more in-depth exploration of this. But even so (and this might sound very weird) there are better and worse existential catastrophes. For example a 1984-type scenario whilst really shit, is probably better than AI torturing us for the rest of time. So I do think some weighing up of risks and their badness is warranted here.
This criticism doesn’t cover your other points e.g. that there may be more effective ways of reducing risks. I actually think there are a lot of valid points here that need more exploration. I’m just saying that I think your CBA is incomplete.
Hey, thanks for commenting!
I think this is a good criticism, and despite most of my post arguing that surveillance would probably be bad, I agree that in some cases it could still be worth it. I think my crux is whether the decrease of risk from malicious actors due to surveillance is greater than the increase in totalitarianism and misuse risk (plus general harms to free speech and so on).
It seems like surveillance must be global and very effective to greatly decrease the risk from malicious actors, and furthermore that it’s really hard to reduce misuse risk of global and effective surveillance. I’m sceptical that we could make the risks associated with surveillance sufficiently small to make surveillance an overall less risky option, even supposing the risks surveillance helps decrease are worse than the ones it increases. (I don’t think I share this intuition, but it definitely seems right from a utilitarian perspective). I agree though that in principle, despite increasing other risks, it might be sometimes better to surveil.