Surveillance states, autonomous cars, and doomposting about AI as usual | The Express Tribune
Key Takeaways
- ICE plans to hire contractors for extensive social media surveillance to gather leads for deportation raids.
- The author views the expansion of digital surveillance by government agencies and companies like Meta as a dangerous erosion of personal privacy.
- Autonomous vehicle testing is occurring extensively in the sparsely populated Chinese city of Ordos, raising questions about real-world applicability.
- A study shows a rapid and sustained increase in the use of AI tools for drafting corporate and governmental content.
- The proliferation of AI-generated text in the digital space is happening quickly, potentially leading to a future dominated by non-human content.
The first section details plans by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to establish a multi-year surveillance program using private contractors to monitor social media platforms like Facebook and TikTok for deportation leads, which the author frames as an alarming trend toward a surveillance state mirroring global privacy invasions exemplified by Meta's new AI policies. The second part shifts focus to Ordos, China, where self-driving car companies are utilizing the city's low population density, resulting from a 2012 property crash, to safely test autonomous vehicles, although this environment lacks the complexity of densely populated urban settings. Finally, the article highlights a study showing a rapid increase in the use of AI tools by corporations, governments, and news publications to draft content, with AI-generated text climbing significantly throughout 2023, leading to concerns that the digital space will soon be overwhelmingly filled with non-human generated content.
