What will they think of next?
This type of data collection freaks me out. What are your thoughts.
Beyond tracking, THIS freaks me out even more:
This will enable the U.S. equivalent of the Chinese Communist Party’s social-credit-score system.
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“You’ll own nothing, and you’ll be happy.”
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@roberto: Those traffic filters will help Oxfordshire County Council to implement a social-credit-score system.
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@kirkmahoneyphd Other cities around Europe have implemented various different ways to control private vehicle traffic.
In Athens, Greece, for example, vehicles up to 2.2 tons are only allowed entry to the city center area on alternating days, depending on the last digit of their license plate (odds or evens)
The following are excluded from the restrictions: all electric, hybrid, natural gas and LPG vehicles.
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@urszula, do you know if they also use automatic number plate recognition cameras?
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@roberto I believe that they do.
Greece has been implementing a lot of sketchy policies recently, which violate privacy.
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Things like Oxfordshire’s traffic filters worry me, because they feel like “thin end of the wedge” type stuff to me. Once these schemes are introduced to more and more cities, it becomes normalised and people start to just accept them, which leads to several problems:
- Lots of greedy councils would introduce them unnecessarily, abusing the system to increase revenue. Given the sheer level of wastefulness across UK councils (and corruption in ones such as in the town I live), I would expect them to all follow suit.
- It becomes a tool of excessive social engineering - making it impossibly difficult to use a regular petrol/gasoline or diesel powered car, because it’s not the latest “flavour of the month” that authorities and manufacturers want you to buy (remember when diesel was heavily pushed by governments as being “the future” and “green”? Yet now diesel in particular is vilified most). While we should all strive to reduce our environmental and social impact, positive incentives and market-dynamics can do this for us over a much more comfortable transition period. At present, not everybody can afford an EV even second-hand, and such vehicles do not cater to all sets of needs.
- Such schemes potentially penalise people with mental or physical disabilities, who require their own personal transport. I note that the Oxford scheme only allows drivers a permit for 100 days of the year. I also note that only one car per person is allowed, which causes problems regarding courtesy-cars and classic cars.
- There would not necessarily be sufficient proof or accountability, ensuring that money raised from such schemes is really directed to viable and deserving alternatives as suggested by advocates. There is a risk the money would just go into the council’s general coffers, rather than each £ raised by the scheme translating directly to an extra £ invested in bus services, cycle-renting schemes, etc. Much of the money would go purely towards covering the expenses of running the scheme itself, thereby negating a nontrivial proportion of its supposed benefits.
Even if these schemes aren’t abused to the point that they become part of a stealth social-credit system, they still take power and autonomy away from citizens and give it to potentially-corrupt individuals and institutions, who do not have the citizens’ interests or welfare at heart. In short, they pave the way for social-engineering at the whim of faceless and unaccountable individuals with interests that may not align with yours.
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Has the system in Athens been running for quite a long time now? I’m sure I remember hearing of it when I was in school. At the time, my teacher said people were getting around the scheme by purchasing a cheap old car with the “opposite” type of licence-plate as a second car. Because these old cars were more polluting than most people’s “main” cars, it apparently had no effect on the number of cars/drivers but caused a large increase in pollution!
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As far as I know, yes. It was like this in the late 80s when I was there as a child with my mom. However, back then, they said it was to reduce traffic.
They repealed the rule at some point & then it came back again quite recently.
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Glad that I deleted my adobe account last month. I use Photoscape and Gimp now.
https://www.fastcompany.com/90831386/artists-accuse-adobe-tracking-design-ai
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The new “ChatGPT AI” trend is concerning, and it is a clear result of how virtual life has marginalized the human brain.
First, it is free, meaning you are the AI’s data.
Second, the dangerous sloppiness of humans. For example, you can imagine the professionals we will have who have graduated with AI-writing tools that will write essays, research, etc., for them. We also see other examples from music, literature, and other fields.
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@roberto As the saying goes, “if you’re not paying for the service, YOU ARE the service.”
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@roberto: I watched last week someone use ChatGPT to generate sample computer code in the Python language, and it was quite impressive.
But, someone else has demonstrated that ChatGPT has a strong political / worldview bias built into it that does not match my worldview. So, I have no interest in using it.
I neither want to support the ChatGPT maker’s worldview nor want to let the maker gather what effectively is search data about me (which the maker would be able to do, given that one must have an account to use it).
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So… as things are nowadays… If ChatGPT becomes the nest “big thing”, we will probably see many fake user accounts, with bots that are programmed to express a certain view with the purpose to affect the directions of the ChatGPT output.
Lobbyism on a new level!
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It does. It totally does. Last month, I watched a video where Ben Shapiro was testing it out & it basically contradicted itself constantly. At one point, it seemed that he broke the algorithm. It was pretty funny.
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It was fast.
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@roberto: Thanks for sharing that article! I am not surprised by the score that the lecturer gave, if the ChatGPT folks trained its machine-learning algorithm with 2,000-word pieces on social policy that other lecturers had scored similarly.
He told the the bot to put together a 2,000 word piece on social policy - which it did in 20 minutes.
Pieter then asked a lecturer to mark it and give their assessment - and was stunned when the tutor said they’d have given it a score of 53 - a 2/2.
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