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ChristianKl comments on Research interests I don't currently have time to develop alone - Less Wrong Discussion
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Comments (57)
Indivdual autonomy is a complicated thing. You could say that an individual who is allowed to wear always recording Google Glass has more autonomy than a individual who's forbidden from using that technology in that way.
It worth analysing the effect of technology in detail instead of falling to automatic reactions.
No, I don't think it's particularly complicated.
An individual who is allowed doesn't have much autonomy.
I think you're confusing autonomy with some mix of data, power, and control.
I don't believe I'm "falling to automatic reactions" (though I wouldn't, would I? :-D)
It certainly doesn't sound like it.
It looks to me like you're just arguing with the words Christian's using rather then engaging with the substance of what he's trying to say.
I must confess to being unable to see substance.
I think the point is that in order to resist mass surveillance, you need to restrict the individual right to record what they see fit.
Mass surveillance is surveillance of the masses, not surveillance by the masses.
It's what NSA does, not what a bunch of Google geeks in Palo Alto do.
And the individual right to record what they see fit is subject to restrictions, of course. We can discuss what these restrictions might or should be, but that's not what I was talking about.
If the masses are surveilling than you also have surveillance of the masses.
Mass surveillance -- of the masses -- is a reality right now and has been for many years.
Surveillance by the masses is a possibility that may or may not happen in the future in the form that we don't know and can only speculate about.
Surveillance by the masses makes surveillance of the masses trivially easy.
Only if the masses conveniently store all their audio and video records in locations that you can easily and cheaply access.
Which they/we currently do. Generally, accessing recording and data is easy compared with recording it in the first place.
If I would live in a country where it's legal I would nowadays record sound around me 24/7 and safe it for my personal archive.
I however live in a country where I'm not allowed because laws indicate that would violate the rights of other people.
Do you argue that those laws don't reduce my autonomy at all?
Autonomy is generally defined as "the capacity of a rational individual to make an informed, un-coerced decision." (Wikipedia) (emphasis mine)
The laws which limit your right to record the sound around you limit your freedom in the same way the laws which limit your right to kill, rape, or rob other people limit your freedom.
Is that a yes or a no?
It's a no -- these laws do not reduce your autonomy in a significant way.
If you want to split hairs, technically speaking any restriction of any kind reduces your autonomy, but that doesn't sound like a useful direction for a discussion.
Do you think that UK style gap order laws that prevent defamation do reduce the autonomy of journalists?
Would you consider a government that forbids me from running an ad that tells people to smoke to reduce my autonomy?
Do you consider a government that forbids me to perform medicine without license to reduce my autonomy?
It's been already mentioned in this thread, but I'll repeat and expand a bit.
Autonomy is predominantly a negative right -- a right to be free from interference and coercion. Freedom is both a negative and a positive right -- not only it's a right to be free from restrictions, but it's also a right to have the capability to do something.
Moreover, although there is no sharp boundary, autonomy mostly refers to the freedom of your mind. It's a freedom from coercion in making choices. Freedom itself concerns itself more with the ability to act in the "external" physical world. They are connected, of course.
Given this distinction, your questions are about freedom, not about autonomy.
And yes, of course all and any kind of laws reduce your freedom. So what? I don't think there are many full-blown anarchists here.
Now that makes it sound like only things like mind control and enforcing thought crimes can be restrictions of autonomy. Being under surveillance doesn't interfere with someone's ability to make rational decisions.
That a copout. How about just answering the question as posed? A clear yes/no to the question would still help to be more clear about your position.
The extend to which I can safe information to have it accessible in the future is very near to freedom of mind.
Take someone with a hearing aid. Do you really consider that hearing aid to be irrelevant to someone freedom of mind? In a feature in which computer costs and storage get really cheap you could expect a hearing aid to safe audio of the enviroment to get better at distinguishing speech in a particular moment from other sounds.
How does surveiling your communication reduces your freedom of mind or autonomy when a secret gap order that disallows you from talking about something doesn't reduce your freedom of mind or autonomy?
I believe a yes/no answer will mislead you further, but be my guest: I am not sure what "gap order laws" are, but for libel/defamation laws the answer is no. The answer is no for the second and the third questions as well.
No, I don't think so. Frankly the claim that the ability to record other people's activities is a matter of the freedom of your mind looks ridiculous to me.
Yes, I do.
I don't understand this distinction you're trying to make between autonomy and freedom. Also, you haven't explained how mass surveillance interferes with individual autonomy, which is a pretty crucial part of an argument that mass surveillance is evil because you value individual autonomy.
Autonomy is mostly a negative right -- it's a right to be free from interference and coercion.
Freedom is both a negative and a positive right -- it's the lack of restrictions (negative) but it's also the capability to do things (positive).
Do you think your behavior would change if you knew that every moment of your life was observed and recorded by government agents?
Or, simpler, have you read 1984?
Can we avoid mentioning 1984 in surveillance discussions? I've encountered many anti-surveillance arguments that eventually boiled down to "1984 is scary". But 1984 was a work of fiction, and as far as predictions go, it was wrong all over the place.
I want to be able to phrase good anti-surveillance arguments that people will find just as valid as if 1984 had never been written.
The point of mentioning 1984 isn't to use it as a study or a forecast. The point is reaction to the world depicted in it: most people find totalitarian, total-surveillance societies undesirable, disturbing, and basically evil.
1984 is also useful as a well-known reference. If someone says "I have nothing to hide, I don't need privacy" you can ask him whether he'd be fine with the levels of surveillance depicted in 1984. He might say "yes, I don't care", he might say "no, that's too much", he might say "only in a democratic society", etc.
But would you be fine with Bentham's Panopticon, for example? Are examples of Soviet Russia, Eastern Germany, etc. OK?
In that case, anything that a government (or any other external agent) does to decrease someone's freedom also decreases their autonomy, unless you want to redefine "interference" too. If you take away my capability to do things, you are interfering with me. Based on the examples you provided, it sounds to me like the difference between autonomy and freedom is that "autonomy" is an applause light, so limits to freedom that you approve of aren't limits to autonomy, but limits to freedom that you don't approve of are.
No. All the laws that I regularly break are laws that enough people regularly break that the police would very quickly give up even pretending to enforce them. Things that aren't illegal but I wouldn't want known would rarely end up exposed even if the surveillance system did not have well-designed protections for the surveyed, simply because the government agents involved wouldn't have time to keep track of and exploit everyone's embarrassing secrets.
No, but I know what you are referring to. This is not an inevitable consequence of surveillance.
Selective enforcement of laws can be a huge problem. If for some reason a local cop decides he doesn't like you, having all your crimes recorded in advance will make retaliation much easier.
Full transparency mitigates selective enforcement - if you can always point out the similar crimes other people are doing, selective enforcement becomes untenable in any semi-democratic society.
That is empirically not true -- well, unless you don't consider the US to be a "semi-democratic society".
This is true. If the surveillance system does not come with well-designed protections for those being watched, then problems like that can happen. Having a thorough surveillance system would make it possible to protect people from things like that, though of course that doesn't mean it will actually happen. I'm not actually confident that increased surveillance would be a good thing; I was just arguing that "individual autonomy is good; therefore surveillance is bad," is not a coherent argument.