I don't understand this take. There is no real way in which a private person can make law enforcement "more expensive". The government can always find means as long as it is supported by a sufficiently big fraction of its people.
Sure, they won't go out and arrest all one million, but from an individual perspective it's basically security by obscurity.
Once that's the case, otherwise legal activities (e.g. protesting, or making political statements) run the risk of making you a target. Law enforcement can then punish you for your legal activity by selectively enforcing this other law.
The resulting situation is one where everyone knows to some extent "you better shut up if you know what's good for you", and puts a chilling effect on otherwise legal forms of civic engagement.
You might point out that there are already laws on the books that let them do this, but I'm sure they wouldn't mind another.
On PickiPedia (bluegrass wiki - pickipedia.xyz), we've developed a mediawiki extension / middleware that works as an MCP server, and causes all of the contributions from the AI in question to appear as partially grayed out, with a "verify" button. A human can then verify and either confirm the provided source or supply their own.
It started as a fork of a mediawiki MCP server.
It works pretty nicely.
Of course it's only viable in situations where the operator of the LLM is willing to comply / be transparent about that use. So it doesn't address the bulk of the problem on WikiPedia.
I had a need to describe all musicians as having the nickname / stage name "rambutan", and I was surprised to find that no mediawiki extension existed for this purpose. I hope this is useful to others.
A society in which ubiquitous, diversely-owned and operated, unlicensed drones watch the every move of police and criminals - even though that means they watch the every move of the rest of us as well - is a society in which I want to live.
The outcome of who can lawfully create and deploy eyes in the sky is the ultimate decider of the matter of who watches the watchers.
We could start health insurance companies that monitor everyone's gait and how often they exercise vs eat fast food to adjust prices. Or credit monitoring companies that watch how often you attend the casino vs. work. Or boyfriend monitoring to check for cheaters.
Ironically, last year i decided to relearn piano after some 40 years. Learned one piece (a pretty good one, fortunately) and a once a day play triggered it. So. It's more like once every 2-3 weeks now, not long enough to forget, but long enough to keep the thumb feeling all right.
It seems to me that the growth of professional police as an institution which bears increased responsibility for public safety, along with an ever-growing set of tools that can be used to defer responsibility (see: it's not murder if it's done with a stun gun, regardless of how predictable these deaths are), are actually precisely the same issue.
Let's stop allowing the state to hide behind tooling, and all be approximately equally responsible for public safety.
If what you mean is, "texts upon which the singular violence of the state is legitimately imposed", then a simple solution (and I believe, on sufficiently long time scales, the happily inevitable one) is to abolish police.
I can't fathom, in an age where we have ubiquitous cameras as eyewitnesses, instant communications capability to declare emergencies and request aid from nearby humans, that we need an exclusivity entity whose job it is to advance safety in our communities. It's so, so, so much more trouble that it's worth.
(Feels like we have this same discussion over and over on HN.)
reply