• Risks Digest 31.50 (2/2)

    From RISKS List Owner@21:1/5 to All on Thu Dec 12 13:40:04 2019
    [continued from previous message]

    From: Amos Shapir <amos083@gmail.com>
    Subject: Re: What happens if your mind lives for ever on the Internet?
    (RISKS-31.49)

    "In 20 years time people will *still* be predicting that in 20 years time
    we would have machines as intelligent as humans!"

    That's because in this context, "human intelligence" is a moving target.
    Until the 1960's, looking up a name and number in a phone book was
    considered a task of human intelligence; until the 1990's, it required human intelligence to plan a travel route using a map and traffic reports; even driving a car was considered a task requiring some form of human
    intelligence until quite recently.

    The point is, at any point in time, what is considered "human intelligence" would always be defined as "what machines cannot do now". Any task which AI achieves, is naturally taken off the list of what AI is supposed to do
    if/when finally machines become "as intelligent as human".

    So the answer to the question "When will AI reach human intelligence?", for
    a visitor of the early 20th century (actually, anyone over 50 years old) is "they already have"; for a current observer, as Martin Ward notes, it will always be "twenty years from now".

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    Date: Tue, 10 Dec 2019 12:17:06 -0500 (EST)
    From: Kelly Bert Manning <bo774@freenet.carleton.ca>
    Subject: Re: DMVs profit by selling PII

    I have seen Seattle TV stations saying that Washington state mails an
    automated notice to the registered owner every time that vehicle
    registration data is provided to a third party. That would make disclosure
    more transparent than bulk transfer of data without notice and would give voters what they need to influence legislators, or not if they feel that it
    is no big deal.

    In the late 1980s I discovered that the British Columbia Assessment
    Authority was peddling the names of every home in BC, along with the names
    of the 2 previous owners, with zero legislative or regulatory authority. The only authority in the Assessment Act for 3rd party disclosure was when a
    charge against the property existed, and expired when the lien or mortgage
    was paid off.

    I complained to the BC Ombudsman, as it was called then. They produced a report:
    https://www.bcombudsperson.ca/documents/access-information-and-privacy

    The Social Credit (~USA Republican) was in power and drafted Bill 12 to increase Public Sector Privacy Protection, but got voted out of power and withered away to nonexistence after reporters used BC Online to retrieve details about SoCred BC Premier Vander Zalm still being a corporate board member and about land dealings of the company. I was the Technical Architect for the dial up (1988) version of BC Online, but my employer found me other work when I raised Privacy concerns while putting the Technical Proof of Concept demo together. BC Online exploded to over 10,000 paying customers by the end of the first year of operation. Banks, Realtors, car & boat dealers, lawyers, News Rooms. It was all public record data, but much easier to retrieve 24x7 with a computer than by checking paper files in a land office
    in person during government office hours. It also dealt with concerns such
    as pages being removed during inspection by the public.

    The NDP (~ UK Labour) watered down Bill 12 to draft Bill 50, which was proclaimed as BC's Freedom of Information and Privacy Act. It has a black letter law prohibition on extracting PII for soliciting, yet the BC
    Assessment Authority kept peddling PII on optical disks, which Realtors used for sending junk mail. The arrival of personally addressed real estate solicitations at our non published home address continued until it went to a full scale inquiry. I was invited to make a submission to the Inquiry. My
    name appears in the Thanks next to David Loukidelis, who later became BC's second Information and Privacy Commissioner. https://www.oipc.bc.ca/investigation-reports/1258

    Shortly the BC Assessment Authority Director who had been stone walling my concerns for a decade disappeared from the BC Public Service. Perhaps his
    last meeting with his boss went something like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0r_L5Z7yLTU

    He applied to the BC Cabinet for an Applies Despite exemption to the FOIPP
    Act, but was turned down and kept on peddling PII. Did he not understand the
    N or the O? That was a pity. It is better when you can be persuasive and
    change thinking. Settling for only changing who is doing a job, or simply
    their behaviour, is a last resort.

    A Victoria BC municipal web interface showing the owner name and assessed
    value of every Victoria property, no questions asked, was quickly shut down
    by an OIPC BC Order.

    That was not the end of the arrival of personally addressed solicitations
    using prohibited extracts from BC government records at our non published address, but that is another story.

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    Date: Mon, 14 Jan 2019 11:11:11 -0800
    From: RISKS-request@csl.sri.com
    Subject: Abridged info on RISKS (comp.risks)

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    End of RISKS-FORUM Digest 31.50
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