This is exactly right. It's only creepy if you're creepy.
There is always someone looking to vibe with a positive-energy person they met that night. Sometimes it leads to more and sometimes you just dance all night, give a big hug, and never see each other again.
Your rhetoric is clever, but I see a hole in it. Indefinite detainment is a logical consequence of lacking a right to a speedy trial, but is not identical to it.
I think it is in fact quite apt to say that the right to a speedy trial is to indefinite detainment as the right to privacy is to your information being used against you. Both are material consequences of lacking those rights.
We aren't talking about other rights. We're talking about this one. And THIS particular right is rooted in the fourth, fifth, and ninth amendments but isn't actually found in the constitution as a singular entity and wouldn't be codified until the 1960s. Guess which court case created that right in the first place? Griswold v Connecticut. Guess which one was overturned along with Roe v Wade because there's no explicit mention of a right to privacy in the Constitution? Same one.
The basis for the right which was, in part, ABSOLUTELY rooted in the idea that the because people and governments have a tendency to discriminate against you based on what you believe, then as long as you do not disclose your interests publicly, there should be no basis for discrimination. And why is this discrimination so important when NOT dealing with the government (which are nothing but glorified property protection rackets)?
Economics. Specifically, trade. That thing that mankind has been doing since before we've actually had recorded history? Whether it's bartering or seashells or labor or whatever, it's an essential part of being human, because it's how you get things you need to survive.
Again, we do not assign rights for which we cannot find a real purpose. You cannot be a functioning human being in a society without economic activity, whether you perform it or someone performs it on behalf of you.
Please don't misunderstand me, I'm not against statements of the form "this right is valuable because...". But I don't like this idea that fundamental human rights must have practical justifications.
For example, I like how the Declaration of Independence says "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." There's no attempt to justify them, just a plain statement that "GFY, obviously we have these rights".
As to privacy in particular, I don't think it's a stretch to interpret (4th am) the "right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures" as articulating support for our modern concept of privacy.
Sure, today's corrupt politicized SCOTUS could decide to interpret it otherwise. But it seems naive to think that justification based on fear of discrimination is going to prevent that disreputable politicized SCOTUS from interpreting it to some ends (i.e. outcomes favored by the parties lavishing upon them tangible gifts), no matter how well you argue it.
So, sure, go ahead, argue for our rights on any basis you can find. I hope you succeed.
The ability to violate people's privacy in the time of the Founders was much, much smaller than it is now. The Founders never could have envisioned such an all-encompassing surveillance machine as the one driving the world now. Of course they didn't codify a right to privacy. They didn't have to worry about every single group of people they interacted with to want to vacuum up every single piece of data they can.
Could you expand more on your struggle session idea? I'm aware of the analogy to Mao's China but I'm curious how you'd see it playing out in this setting.
Perhaps I'm being overly contrarian, but from my point of view, I feel that could be a blessing in disguise. For example, in a world where deepfake pornography is ubiquitous, it becomes much harder to tarnish someone's reputation through revenge porn, real or fake. I'm reminded of Syndrome from The Incredibles: "When everyone is super no one will be."
I'm curious about how the economics of human feedback will work out in the long term. I currently work in operations at a data annotation company, and my experience has given me a very pessimistic view of the industry's current state.
The MO for these vendors and the AI companies that buy their data seems to be a race to the bottom in price with little concern for quality. The current industry norm is to outsource the work to developing countries, where the cost of living is more in line with what the annotation agencies are willing to pay. While this isn't necessarily problematic for quality in and of itself, it does seem to make it harder to find candidates with the English skills required to generate high-quality RLHF and SFT training data. Furthermore, the pay offered for coding annotators is not competitive with local pay for software engineers, making it challenging to recruit skilled programmers. A lot of coding annotation is done by beginners and students.
There is certainly a lot of hype surrounding LLMs and their potential to disrupt various industries — even the US DOD has been scoping out the potential use of LLMs to assist military commanders in strategic decisions. However, if we want these LLMs to consistently perform at an expert level, they need expert-level training data. I worry that producing this data at the quality and scale required may be prohibitively expensive, and could cause a major bottleneck in model improvements long-term.
