[pressed for time; please excuse brevity and typos]
I have always felt that one of the most chilling episodes of Black Mirror was called Nosedive. As the Wikipedia summary puts it, “The episode is set in a world where people can rate each other from one to five stars, using their smartphones, for every interaction they have, which can impact their socioeconomic status.” Nobody would want to live in that world.
Axios broke a story this morning that made my blood curdle. The State Department intends to revoke the visas of large numbers of foreigners (in this case largely student protestors) in part based on AI analysis of their social media posts .
A senior official is quoted as saying “it would be negligent for the department that takes national security seriously to ignore publicly available information about [visa] applicants in terms of AI tools. … AI is one of the resources available to the government that’s very different from where we were technologically decades ago.”
Right now the targets are (putative) supporters of Hamas. I despise Hamas. I am loathe to defend anyone who supports them.
But I also fear a world in which the State department can judge anyone, at any time, to be a “threat” to the state, even based on superficial AI analysis, and deport them without due process, using AI as a smoke screen to authoritarian action.
