347 | Andrew Guthrie Ferguson on How Your Data Will Be Used Against You

Hello everyone and welcome to the Mindscape podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. As I'm recording this, uh, the week that I'm recording this, one of the many, many things that appeared in the news, things are appearing in the news too quickly for any one of us to keep track these days, but one of them was a bit of a conflict between the US government and Anthropic, the AI company. Because the Defense Department wanted to use AI from Anthropic in some of their applications, and Anthropic wanted certain protections that it wouldn't be used for purposes that they didn't approve of. The Defense Department did not go along and therefore the whole thing fell apart and there was much shouting and cursing back and forth, and who knows how the thing is going to settle out eventually.

But the one thing I wanted to point out was most of the attention was given to the fact that Anthropic didn't want its AIs used in autonomous weaponized drones. That is to say, just, you know, put a killing machine out there and put it in the control of the AI. Anthropic did not like that idea. And anyhow, it's an important debate to have an important consideration.

But there was another thing that they also cared about quite a bit, which was the use of their AI for surveillance. Of course, the AI is not collecting the data, the AI is not out there with a video camera, but as the CEO, Dario Amode, pointed out, once you have AI, The way that you can use surveillance data changes dramatically. It's very easy to imagine that there is a lot of surveillance data, so much that it almost can't be misused because it's just too hard to search through it, at least not without some very, very specific target. Until you have AI, now you can search through this huge data set and basically surveil everyone in the United States without their knowledge in a very effective way.

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