The Economist has been publishing since 1843. As such, one could be forgiven for expecting an article entitled "Is The Economist Always Wrong?" to engage meaningfully with the track record of either the publication or the field with which it shares its name in any meaningful way. Alas.
> To assess our record with something approaching neutrality, we took the 7,000 or so leaders The Economist has published this millennium and fed them into GPT-5.5, an artificial-intelligence model.
"This millennium" is 26 years old. This millennium is still getting charged extra for renting a car. This millennium never saw the Soviet Union. This millennium never used a payphone, doesn't know what a collect call is, and doesn't know why you might need to make one.
This millennium is also entirely, utterly, absolutely defined by the short-sighted ideas of the economist.
To share with a community of like-minded individuals, many of whom found it interesting enough to both upvote and comment?
You understand the rest of us do actually exist, right? That we’re, you know, real people with thoughts and opinions and feelings, right? This isn’t pinboard or something.
There are two things you absolutely must understand if you're going into biology as an engineer:
1. Everything, and I mean everything, is stochastic. There is nothing in biology that is a guaranteed "if X then Y," there's nothing in biology that is a guaranteed "X is used for Y," "X is only used for Y," or "only X is used for Y." Even stuff that seems like it _should_ be that way isn't. RNA folds into useful shapes, the codon table varies between organisms, enzymes will target and modify multiple substrates, and metabolic pathways can and will run in both directions depending on the circumstances. Understand this, internalize this.
2. Biology is a physics problem, not an informatics problem. There's no API boundaries between different "layers," because everything is molecules jostling against other molecules. This means things like the geographic distribution of molecules within a cell can and will have serious effects on gene expression and biological processes. What's more, that "no API boundaries" extends to the cellular level - the "cell wall" is a thing cells use both sides of, bacteria regularly swap genes and genetic material, and metabolic pathways will pass between unrelated organisms.
Basically, everything we've ever done to turn engineering into a tractable problem does not exist in nature. Nature grabs whatever happens to be right at hand and shoves it into use. Consequently, it is _devilishly_ complicated to model, because every simplifying assumption you want to make has exceptions that stack to "your model works perfectly exactly once on a Tuesday at 3pm, but only if the humidity is over 72%." This is also why you'll notice your lab biologists are the kind of superstitious that would make a pagan soothsayer say "oh come on, it's not _that_ bad."
It's an awesome, amazing field, and there's huge contributions you can make as an engineer, but step one is shut the hell up and listen to the scientists, and step two is to learn that every time you hear "X does Y," your next questions should be "under what circumstances?" "how often?" "when doesn't it?" and "what happens then?"
The trick to being a good hacker is acquiring a sufficient supply of useless information, such that when that information is suddenly not useless, you have it at hand.
Which is to say, it's your job to figure out what the cool applications are.
No, you’re right, we have not seen a case specifically of state surveillance specifically using a smart speaker yet.
Re: phones - yes, they’re a strictly higher ROI target, which is why they’re regularly targeted by state-level adversaries, who also seem to enjoy using every other tool and opportunity available to them to surveil and collect data on whoever they’re considering this week’s bete noire, including both warranted data requests from phone manufacturers, service providers, and cell networks, buying data from commercial brokers when that doesn’t work, or just outright hacking whoever they’re interested in.
But no, you’re strictly correct that to the best of my knowledge we do not currently have specific evidence that state level adversaries have leveraged the notably piss-poor security standards and data protections on IOT equipment containing multiple microphones capable of collecting room-level audio and separating out that audio into individual actors to surveil persons of interest, so, no need to worry.
> in many corners, "don't manually write code" is being joined by "don't manually read code" as an attractive principle.
I'm pretty sure I know where the failure case on that one is. The reason we're still manually reading code is to catch the failures and edge cases that the LLM fails to; not reading the code doesn't magically make the code good.
> I would say that cameras are protecting the honest worker as much as they help the homeowner.
The cameras are a means of rigidly enforcing the rules, to a degree that traffic on the way back from lunch becomes something that threatens one’s employment. You and I bend the rules a thousand times a day in ways big and small because the world does not accommodate rigid rules and that’s fine; the workers under panopticon surveillance are not afforded the same grace we are to navigate the circumstances where the rules and reality conflict.
> No one forces them.
Their landlord forces them. A tight labor market forces them. Time pressure forces them. Bills force them. Hunger forces them. Our entire system forces them.
I don’t quite understand how after twenty five years of the modern internet and every single consequent revelation about state surveillance you’re still at a point where you can look at a corporate-owned camera or microphone and say, “my priors suggest this isn’t being used for state surveillance and/or won’t be in the future, I’m gonna need evidence it is before I consider the consequences of that.”
Trust involves risk - someone has to be willing to risk having their trust violated. The problem in modern western society is that we’ve decided we’re unwilling to take that risk, and therefore we’ve begun imposing what’s effectively a panopticon state on those with less power than us, with the consequence that the kinds of things we with power get away with fine - driving over the speed limit, being a couple minutes late to get a task done, getting sick or injured - cascade into severe circumstances by the cold logic of the system we’ve built to make ourselves feel better (job loss, money paying fines instead of food or medicine, etc).
The answer to this is if you don’t trust your domestic worker to not steal from you, either hire one you do or go do your own damn domestic work, and if the company you’re paying to provide a service doesn’t trust their own workers enough to not keep them under constant surveillance, go find one that does. The panopticon is a cheap answer that lets us pretend we don’t need to put the work in to manage our own lives while leveraging the power of the state to subjugate everyone further down the socioeconomic ladder from us.