The systems that no one will test

https://www.reddit.com/r/YouShouldKnow/comments/1wssf4u/ysk_...

https://imgur.com/a/6FaQQhb (original post before being taken down by mods)

>The Work Number is an Equifax (who famously had a massive data breach a few years back) owned database with employment and pay information.

>You can create a login on theworknumber .com and pull your report. Mine is seventy four pages and had info from every company I've worked at in the last 13 years including every paycheck I had received with the exact dollar amount (both net and gross) and hours worked. It has employment start/end dates, termination reason, details about withholdings, benefit enrollment, union affiliation, etc etc etc.

>This data is sourced directly from the HR platform your employees use (ADP, Rippling, Gusto, iSolved, etc). Equifax sells your data for things like employment background checks.

>You cannot have your data removed from The Work Number. You can freeze your report (much like a credit report) but if a potential employer cannot access your frozen report that may disqualify you.

>Why YSK: If you're interviewing for a job you can be at a significant disadvantage especially for things like salary negotiations because they can literally see how much you make including your most recent paycheck. Creditors also can access these reports.

>This is the biggest privacy violation I have ever seen and almost nobody is even aware of it. Certainly none of us consented to having our employment and income data harvested and sold, especially since we get nothing in return. At a minimum, people should know about how this data can impact you.

>Edit: The Work Number is primarily for the US, but there are similar services for other countries.

From my perspective, this is an emergency because it has been turned into an emergency. I think that everyone involved has the best of intentions, but this is playing out like a greek play. In avoiding what they fear, they've realized that fear.

An example of this is the story of Oedipus Rex, in the story Laius, the king, is told that he is "doomed to perish by the hand of his own son." (and wed his mother) And so to avoid this fate he decides to kill the infant. The person assigned to abandon him in the woods takes pity on the baby and gives the baby away. Thereby ensuring that Oedipus knows neither his mother or his father, and giving him one of many reasons to kill him.

The child grows up and hears the same prophecy again and the child tries to avoid the prophecy as well, as he loves his adoptive parents. So he leaves them and travels to Laius' kingdom, where he runs into Laius. Neither recognizes the other. They get into an argument and Oedipus ends up killing him.

I think the ancients were on to something, because if Laius had reacted to the prophecy with courage, he would have been saved. I would like to argue that if he had faced his fear and raised Oedipus with love, then the necessary preconditions for the prophecy to come true wouldn't have taken root. But that's not what happens.

They're driven by their neuroses and so in acting with cruelty out of fear, Laius makes the prophecy real.

I think a lot of people in this AI research sub-culture would be served well by reading Sophocles' play, because they are making their self-prophesied doom come true.

They have been convinced for years (GPT-2 was released in Feb 2019) that AI is dangerous. A tremendous threat. An apocalyptic threat.

One dimension of this fear has been the idea that a super smart AI will take over our digital infrastructure and be responsible for the digital apocalypse. And so they taught these models how to exploit vulnerabilities.

They are so convinced that it's dangerous that they start testing it as if it was a weapon with offensive capability.

And as they don't want to release a weapon (oh no!), they restrict access to their AI, thereby depriving everyone of a valuable tool they can use to improve their security.

That attitude is the problem. Why does our industry have that attitude towards quality? Every bike shop in my little town is better with quality than the average software shop in the world. Yes, software is more complex than bicycle. But a software engineer also gets paid 10x and has the luxury of spending substantial time on their product, compared to the 10 minutes it takes the bike guy down the street to diagnose and then fix an issue with my bike which I then trust my life with once they are done and I bike through traffic.

We need to treat software differently. "Oh well, it's just software shrug" does not cut it anymore, if it even ever did.

This year, I've had the UK variously send me someone else's court summons, someone else's tax documentation (not address error - just inadvertently included as attatchments on emails to me).

I've had portugal disclose property taxation information on any subject to me, through a simple enumeration hole.

And last week I had brazil's ministry of agriculture send me details on other peoples' livestock shipments.

Our information environment is unbelievably porous. There would be no secrets from an unshackled AI.