To not have children due to the potential threat of AI

[NP101]

I realise this probably makes me sound like a fully paid up member of the tin hat society but I'm increasingly worried about the threat of AI.

It has made me re-evaluate having children as the future looks pretty bleak - I can envisage the internet more or less being unusable in 5 years time and then the subsequent fall out of this - both socially and economically.

I realise I probably would have had similar feelings had I been around in various other points in history and subsequently regretted not having children but this current threat seems even more existential.

I do think things are going to change and I think it's likely to get very very rough before it smooths out again, but I think that will happen and I feel hopeful.

To elaborate on the previous surveillance theme - I read that the UK police already know who is downloading images of child abuse, which everyone would agree should be prosecuted. The problem is that there are so many people doing this that it would be impossible to prosecute them all. There aren't enough police to run even a fraction of these investigations, they wouldn't have time for anything else and there aren't enough jails. So they focus on the worst part of the problem, catching people who make or distribute large amounts of images. It is truly a sickening thought - but a good illustration of why mass surveillance isn't the individual threat that it is often made out to be.

The individual threat isn't that they'll pick you out from the middle of the mass of data they hold, but rather than if they do pick you out in the real world, and they're wrong, they'll be able to do a deep dive on all of your data to find another reason to prosecute you.

Hell, we've seen this in the last few days with the autistic teen they picked up at the behest of the family on safety grounds. One officer in a bad mood, annoyed at having to pick up a drunk teen, and she manufactured a law out of thin air to drag the poor kid out and keep her in jail for 20 hours when she'd done nothing wrong. Oh, and called social services down on them to see if they could hammer the family some more.

Now imagine that, except that the officer in a bad mood has access to the entire family's whole surveillance, online and financial history.