Exactly. For example, spreadsheets were often used day to day but the accountants kept the actual books as books and had the final word. That changed over time, only after spreadsheets proved out (and got the bugs out).

Also, humans stayed in the loop. Sure there were occasional funnies like a medical database claiming a few male patients had a history of pregnancy, but humans were in the loop and cited those as obvious errors. There were still backup paper records to fall back on.

But a lot of people when they hear someone say "it's nowhere near ready for prime time" will claim the person is saying "It'll never work".

Back in the day when the "Board of Education" was an actual wooden board.

If they really wanted to serve the user, it would understand "Hey Google, lockdown now" and would power off and require a PIN to restart.

Long press doesn't do anything so low level anymore, it just signals the management processor in the radio that it should force the application processor off. The management processor keeps running.

The power button on the phone really is just a suggestion. To actually power off the whole phone you have to remove the battery (if possible) or let it run down to zero.

This is what happens when you give an AI agency.

You've got questions, we've got cellphones.

In a real sense, the back end recognition that Flock does is exactly stalking on a massive scale.

It's not a matter of not being seen or even not being photographed every now and then. That level of privacy is not available in public.

But even in public, until Flock and it's ilk came along, we had the privacy of being just a face in the crowd. The people who saw you on main street were different from the people that saw you on 2nd street, were different from the people who saw you leaving your home. There was no database and no recognition software to stitch all of the sightings together to form a coherent record of your movements.

It's that tracking and recording that people object to.

That's a pretty shallow(thought admittedly depressingly popular) analysis of the situation.

Being in public does leave you with no particular defensible expectations of not being observed, and possibly even remembered for a time, by assorted passers by; and typically also permits more direct tailing of people for observation purposes(subject to some, often slightly vague, threshold at which having PIs or paparazzi hunting someone remains a problem even in public; as we saw here where the police took the notion seriously enough to show up but not to do anything in particular).

What it has historically never meant, for technical reasons, was pervasive coverage and longterm retention. Which is certainly increasingly feasible with only moderate levels of investment; but is absolutely a novel development for what 'public' and 'no expectation of privacy' meant.

It's like defending the installation of a massive network of sprinklers because "you have no expectation of staying dry when you go outside; haven't you heard of rain?" Sure, nobody the weather to be sunny all the time, any more than they expect everyone to avert their eyes in public; but they would correctly consider the installation of irrigation equipment on every lamppost to be an intrusion on their ability to stay dry despite the fact that the sky has never extended them a constitutionally protected right to no rain.

This. Madoff didn't get in trouble until he started fleecing people who were richer than he was. Then it became an issue.

Pity the poor Europeans, crying out without the bot slop occupying the top half of the results. I wonder what Google is going to do to ensure that the 'degraded' results aren't universally preferred to the alternative?

Had he done those things, you would have heard me complain.

I simply don't remember being hassled to show anyone my vaxination card.

At the same time, improving technology has biisted productivity. Social Security will be fine for a long time if it captures some of that enhanced productivity rather than letting the 1% put it all in their pockets.