Our global society struggles with lack of policy control, but it should come as no surprise that the masses have no control when the policymakers control the supply chain and practically no one is resource self sufficient. Everyone must do what they can, source what you can from your neighbors, barter for what you produce, Bitcoin for everything else. Build the Bitcoin economy from the ground up. #Bitcoin #homestead

As scholar Brian Klaas puts it, “the cognitive shortcuts we use to survive are mismatched with the complex reality we now navigate.” For some, this threat demands dramatic action, such as replacing some big system we have -- say, capitalism -- with an alternative means of organizing society. For others, it demands throwing out all of modernity to go back to a mythical, simpler golden age: one with more human-scale systems of order and authority, which they imagine was somehow better. And yet others see the cracks in the system but hope that with more data and more tweaks, it can be repaired and our problems will be definitively solved. I find it interesting that large groups of our society are obviously engaged with each of these possible solutions, depending on personal or incentivized predilection.

I’d like to prevent my humanity becoming nothing more than a managed data structure. Is integrated chaos the prophylactic?

AI can write laws that are impossible for humans to understand. There are two kinds of laws: specific laws, like speed limits, and laws that require judgment, like those that address reckless driving. Imagine that we train an AI on lots of street camera footage to recognize reckless driving and that it gets better than humans at identifying the sort of behavior that tends to result in accidents. And because it has real-time access to cameras everywhere, it can spot it everywhere. The AI won’t be able to explain its criteria: It would be a black-box neural net. But we could pass a law defining reckless driving by what that AI says. It would be a law that no human could ever understand. This could happen in all sorts of areas where judgment is part of defining what is illegal. We could delegate many things to the AI because of speed and scale. Market manipulation. Medical malpractice. False advertising. I don’t know if humans will accept this. ~Bruce Schneier

Interesting… In November 2023, Porto Alegre, Brazil became the first city to enact a law that was entirely written by AI. It had to do with water meters. One of the councilmen prompted ChatGPT, and it produced a complete bill. He submitted it to the legislature without telling anyone who wrote it. And the humans passed it without any changes.

Bruce Schneier on Microsoft Recall: 🧐 Because Recall is “default allow” (it relies on a list of things not to record) ... it’s going to vacuum up huge volumes and heretofore unknown types of data, most of which are ephemeral today. The “we can’t avoid saving passwords if they’re not masked” warning Microsoft included is only the tip of that iceberg. There’s an ocean of data that the security ecosystem assumes is “out of reach” because it’s either never stored, or it’s encrypted in transit. All of that goes out the window if the endpoint is just going to...turn around and write it to disk. (And local encryption at rest won’t help much here if the data is queryable in the user’s own authentication context!) This: The fact that Microsoft’s new Recall thing won’t capture DRM content means the engineers do understand the risk of logging everything. They just chose to preference the interests of corporates and money over people, deliberately. This: Microsoft Recall is going to make post-breach impact analysis impossible. Right now IR processes can establish a timeline of data stewardship to identify what information may have been available to an attacker based on the level of access they obtained. It’s not trivial work, but IR folks can do it. Once a system with Recall is compromised, all data that has touched that system is potentially compromised too, and the ML indirection makes it near impossible to confidently identify a blast radius. This: You may be in a position where leaders in your company are hot to turn on Microsoft Copilot Recall. Your best counterargument isn’t threat actors stealing company data. It’s that opposing counsel will request the recall data and demand it not be disabled as part of e-discovery proceedings.

All the news just repeats itself, like some forgotten dream, that we’ve both seen…. ~Hello in There, John Prine